Lloyd Court - and Lloyd

The two parts of this title have little to do with one another, other than their being significant artifacts from my career as a Safety Boy. The first is a street, usually written as “Lloyd Ct.,” but henceforth to be pronounced by you, dear reader, as “Lloyd Coit” (I’ll explain why later on). The second is a pseudonym for a boy who deserves to not have his real name associated with the sad story I intend to tell.

To begin, let’s talk about Safety Boys and their counterparts, the Service Squad Girls. I’m not sure either of these still exists in today’s public schools, but throughout the 50s and 60s they were important instruments of school decorum. Service Squad Girls had various duties. First, they sold ice cream, bringing a tray of cups and bars on a stick to each table, making you raise your hand before accepting your nickel. They patrolled the lunchroom watching for misbehavior. Before you could leave your seat you needed to raise your hand, and if the SS Girl determined you had sufficiently cleaned your place, she would formally announce, “You may go.” The Girls also stood guard at the slop counter where the kids who bought a hot lunch would leave their trays. Finally, on rainy days when there was no lunchtime recess, there’d be Girl watching over every 1st through 3rd grade class, allowing their teachers to eat their lunches in peace.

But Safety Boys got the glory jobs; patrolling the playground, school buses, and street corners, and every winter morning they’d get hot chocolate. And while the Girls got to wear modest little armbands, the Boys were issued amazingly cool looking white belts with an even cooler looking shoulder strap. It was a combination that struck fear into most kids, at least the younger, more innocent ones. Plus – and this was big – Safety Boys got to “report” kids; that is, sort of like “arrest” them and get them in trouble with whichever 6th grade teacher was heading up the Safety Patrol that year. SS girls could report you, of course, but I don’t remember it ever happening.

Once as a 2nd grader, I got reported for fighting on the playground (I don’t even remember who I was fighting with). We were taken to Mr. Gabriel, the scariest teacher at Oxford School. He held us against the lockers with his huge arms. Despite his height, he managed to get about two inches away from our faces. Then softly, slowly, but oh so sternly he warned us, “No more fighting. And I don’t ever want to see either of you like this again.” I nearly wet my pants.

Three years later, a bunch of us 5th grade boys were chosen for I guess what you’d call limited duty or “auxiliary” Safety Boys. Boys without belts. We’d get to patrol a nearby street corner at lunch. And this is how I ended up on Lloyd Court, “the dangerous corner.” Though not a very long street, Lloyd Ct. connected Coburn Avenue with U.S. 24, Telegraph Road, a multilane divided highway running from Detroit all the way to Kansas City. A quarter mile to the north, Telegraph intersected with U.S. 12, Michigan Avenue, which ran from Detroit all the way to the Pacific Ocean! The intersection was a marvelous concrete cloverleaf; the only spot in the country where two even numbered U.S. highways, one being double the other, crossed each other. Each day, thousands of cars and trucks passed in four directions, on their way to who knows where.

How disappointing it was for me, then, to discover that seldom if ever did any cars travel down Lloyd Ct. It became known as “the dangerous corner” only because of Jeff Biggers’ sharp sense of sarcastic irony. He even came up with this little song about it, which I will gladly sing for you on request.

“Lloyd Coit, the dangerous corner!
Lloyd Coit, the dangerous corner!”

The day would come, however, when “Lloyd Coit” indeed became a very dangerous corner; albeit in an approximate, vaguely indirect sort of way.

It was a sunny spring day. I had nearly finished crossing all the kids heading home to lunch; which is to say I had crossed the one little girl and one little boy who walked home that way. Having accomplished another busy day’s work, I headed back toward the school. But for some reason, a moment or two later, I turned looked back over my shoulder at the deceptively quiet intersection and saw something so strange, so troubling, that I would barely be able to eat my second helping of meatloaf before later reporting it to the Safety Patrol teacher supervisor, Mr. Kotyk.

(Editor’s note: Roger doesn’t exactly remember whether or not he ate his lunch before reporting what you’re about to read. But he did think it was funny to imagine that he had.)

The boy who every day crossed Lloyd Ct. and headed left for home had been picked up by a black car. Or dark green maybe. Anyway, he’d gotten into a car and I’d never seen him do this before. So I told Mrs. Berry, who sent me to tell Mr. Kotyk, who apparently called the police. An hour or so later, Mr. Kodyk came to Mrs. Berry’s classroom, called me out to the hall, and gave me the news I dreaded to hear.

“It was his father. His father picked him up to take him to lunch.”

“Oh…good,” I said, trying to hide my disappointment.

“But it was good that you reported it,” Mr. Kodyk said in a somber respectful voice, and I headed back to class. Of course I had told all my pals about what I’d seen, including Jeff Biggers and Johnny Kotlarczyk, who as soon as they had a chance began singing, “Lloyd Coit, the dangerous corner!”

And that’s the story of Lloyd Court. Looks like there’s not enough time tonight to tell the other story, the story of Lloyd, a boy who all you who were there at the time know was not really named “Lloyd,” but whose name I must change because it’s simply the decent thing to do.

Next time: The Further Adventures of Roger of the Safety Patrol: The Lloyd Story.

I Don't Want to Set the Room on Fire

Like most guys, I’ve always loved playing with fire and blowing things up. Fireworks and gunpowder; I learned how to make my own. But despite this, neither of the fires in Mr. Kodyk’s classroom were my fault.

The first incident happened during Mr. Kotyk’s soap making assignment. I have no idea why we were making soap. Were we studying pioneers? Who knows? For several days he reminded us to bring in “some lye, grease or fat, and some kind of small container.” Amazingly, on the appointed day I actually remembered to bring it all in. I mean, why not? There was no homework involved. We’d get to kill an hour or so making an oily soapy mess.

So, my mom bought some lye, gave me some bacon fat, and a container, all of which I carried in a bag to school. We began around mid-morning. Mr. Kotyk had set two or three hot plates in the back of the room, and though I can’t remember exactly, the procedure must have involved heating and mixing fat and lye, then pouring the mixture into our small containers. Mr. Kotyk supervised everything, pouring hot molten soap into students’ containers one by one. All went well until he poured mine, when two problems intersected in sudden exothermic fashion.

1. Mr. Kotyk either didn’t know, or else never considered that some kid’s container might be a turkey pie tin.

2. Lye, aluminum, and warm liquid really don’t play well together.

Ok, so a moment or two after Mr. Kotyk pours my bacon soap mixture into my turkey pie pan, smoke begins billowing up from the counter. The pan is dissolving, kids are yelling, and Mr. Kotyk is cursing. He grabbed the burning pie tin with a pair of pliers and headed out of the room, down the stairs, and out the door. I know this because we all followed him.

After lunch, Mr. Kotyk announced our grades one by one. “H” meant “hi,” “S” meant “so so,” and “L” meant “loser.” So it was like, “Hanson, H; Kotlarczyk, H; Lakomy, S; … Shouse, L,” and he said it with that sardonic grin he was so good at. It didn’t seem fair and I said so.

“Well you darn near started the room on fire!” he bellowed, and I was caught without reply.

I got even with him, however, when I did it again.

It was the volcano project. Very simple. Just make a model volcano. I made a beauty out of paper mache, with simulated flowing lava made from red candle wax. At the top I installed a small metal cup to hold some kind of flammable chemical. But now where would I get such a thing? Where could I find some kind of powder that would shoot sparks out the top of my paper mache and wax volcano?

There was just one place to go. The Shaders’ house. A teacher and counsellor at one of the local high schools, Mr. Shader was a like a walking encyclopedia of science, nature, and history. During the summer, Mr. Shader worked as the Town Crier at the Henry Ford Museum. Antique rifles covered the walls of his basement den, along with an old crank style telephone. The adjacent laundry room was filled with interesting chemicals and other science stuff, so, I figured Mr. Shader might have just what I needed.

“Copper sulfate might work,” Mr. Shader suggested, and he gave me a not-so-small vial of the stuff, which I took to school on the appointed day along with a book of matches. When it came time to show off our volcanoes, I told Mr. Kotyk that mine could erupt.
“Really?” he said with a genuine glint of childlike curiosity.

“Sure,” I said, “but I have to light it.”

In today’s American school, this would all be impossible. Aside from streaming video, “erupting” of any kind would never be tolerated and God forbid anyone suggesting “lighting” anything. But Mr. Kotyk, I guess was thinking to himself, “what could possibly go wrong?”

Having obviously forgotten the soap incident, he gave the go-ahead. It took one match to set off the powder at the top of the cone. Sizzling blue sparks and yellow flame began spewing out and the whole class was going “ahh” and “ooh” and then we all realized that the whole volcano was starting to burn. I guess wax covered paper mache burns pretty well once it gets going. Whoda thought?

As he lunged across the room, Mr. Kotyk did some of that, oh, whaddya call it, “almost swearing.” You know, like “gonna fran san, whatta little muffa bung dongit!” He grabbed the burning mass by the plywood board it sat on, headed out the door, down the stairs, out through the kindergarten hallway doors, and onto the playground blacktop. I know this because we all followed him.

I liked Mr. Kotyk, but I’m not sure whether or not he liked me. On the last day of school he signed me an autograph. I still have it. It reads, “To the world’s biggest clown. Mr. Kotyk.”

Coming soon: Other reasons why Mr. Kotyk might have thought I was a clown. Problems with the Safety Patrol. A sad love story.

Sixth Grade, Michelle, Jade East, Everything

Sixth grade. The awkward grade. I had a terrible crush on Michelle, but watched her turn from fratgirl to greaser chick over a period of months. In fact, all the girls turned weird. They used to be so easy to get along with. Now, in the corner of my eye, they almost seemed to be snickering at me. No matter how much Jade East I splashed on my unshowered face each morning, I could never make any progress with Michelle. In fact, as time went by, she grew more and more distant. What could explain such behavior?

· Was it our sixth grade teacher Mr. Kotyk’s fascinating approach to pupil control?
· Was it because I was accused of unethical Safety Patrol behavior?
· That I nearly set the classroom on fire twice?

I overheard someone on TV say that girls matured sooner than boys. Impossible! I was totally mature! I wore white khakis and a no-collar shirt, the kind that buttoned from the chest up. I was able to describe everything that happened on Man from Uncle from the previous Friday night. I was reasonably good at 4-square. Oh, sure, I was a Boy Scout, but I seldom wore my uniform to school. In what possible way did I lack the maturity needed to get Michelle, or any suitable girl for that matter, to “like” me?

Maybe it was my shoddy approach to “learning.”

I was a “smart” kid in that I knew a lot of stuff. But, as I’ve said earlier, I seldom did homework or viewed it as any sort of imperative upon my valuable time. If the homework seemed interesting and did not cut into my street football or favorite TV show time, there was a reasonable probability that I would complete some of it. Scratch “reasonable.” Say “some.”

Perhaps the most amazing example of this was when our vocal music teacher, Mrs. Edwards, assigned us to make some kind of musical instrument. But I already had a guitar, a trumpet, and a piano at home and I really saw no reason to make some kind of dorky second rate noise maker. Oh yeah, I could have put beans in an oatmeal box and covered it with construction paper, but why? For a while, I considered making a sort of guitar out of cigar box and I went so far as to cut a hole in the lid.

That hole-in-top cigar box sat on a shelf at home for about a month, the length of time Mrs. Edwards had given us to complete this important assignment. Essentially, I had forgotten about the whole thing. The night before it was due, I realized that this was the night before it was due.

I took the cigar box to school the next day and to music class that afternoon. Mrs. Edwards asked each student to show off his/her product. When it was my turn, I stood up and demonstrated what a loud noise the box made when I slammed it, and I had the balls to add, “It wouldn’t make such a loud noise if I hadn’t cut a hole in the lid!”

I could almost see squiggly comic book lines of aggravation shooting from the head of this friendly, funny, sweet, and very talented teacher. “Roger,” she said in her deepest, most serious tone, “I’m very disappointed in you.” Fortunately, I think – I hope – this was the only time I upset her so.

On the other hand, my sixth grade teacher, Mr. Kotyk – I disappointed him lots of times. But given his sarcastic familiarity with the ways of 12-year old boys, he really might not have given a shit. Mr. Kotyk was funny and friendly, not like kindly Mrs. Edwards, but in a Greek, Polish, Romanian, Turkish, Son of Popeye, part-time bar tender at the local Elks Club sort of way. He was a tough old cuss who could pat you on the back one moment and give you a quick pop in the chops the next. I tended to get more pops than pats.

Example: Mr. Kotyk hated “long hair on boys,” meaning any hair he could see or pinch. When he wanted me to get a haircut, he didn’t make a request. He’d just yank the hank o’ hair above my ear and say something like, “If I can still do that on Monday, you’d better hope I’m not here!”

Example: My desk was usually a mess, filled with stuffed and bulging books and papers. Kotyk had a simple solution. He’d drag it out in the hall, dump it all over the place, and make me clean it up. Actually, I kind of enjoyed this. The peacefulness of the hallway made up for the brief moment of humiliation.

But now here’s the grand example of Mr. Kotyk’s unique approach to pupil control, an example that I still speak about with tremendous admiration to my Penn State education students. Allow me to set the scene.

It’s about 2:00. We’re supposed to be copying sentences from our language book, learning to write, “Pass the potatoes to me” instead of “Shoot me the potatoes.” The book had an illustration of a cowboy shooting his pal for having use the incorrect phrase. They don’t write ‘em like that anymore. Anyhow, it was always at this lazy boring afternoon moment when Mr. Kotyk would leave the room.

We didn’t know where he went. Maybe he went to the bathroom, maybe to make a phone call, maybe to sell insurance. Sometimes two minutes, sometimes twenty. Sometimes we’d sort of carry on with our work, but most of the time we’d start screwin’ around. Imagine a classroom as an engine and disruption as a flywheel. It takes some effort to get the initial gear moving. But when you get it going just right, all the other gears start to spin.

For example: Somebody’d say to Jeff Biggers, “do your Man from Uncle!” and he’d rearrange the parts of his pen, hold it up to his mouth, and say “open channel D!” Then all the boys would be take their pens apart and pretend to be Napoleon Solo or Illya Kuryakin. Somebody’d make a fart noise or actually let one. Colleen Collins or Ruth Umstead would fall off her chair and the room would explode into sweet mayhem. Once again, however, we were doomed.

From out of nowhere, Mr. Kotyk would burst in and announce, “All the talkers come to the front of the room!” Because this would cause dead silence, one might think that we’d all be smart enough to just sit there and quietly go back to work. Yet inevitably, one or two of the good Catholic kids would slowly rise and walk to the front. That was bad enough, but then one of them – often my pal Johnny Kotlarczyk – would turn back to me and admonish, “Shouse! You were talking too!” Kotyk’s sardonic grin would hit me like a tractor beam. "C'mon up here, Shouse!"

So, what was in store for us? Long chalkboard pointer in hand, Kotyk stood at the head of the line. One by one he’d order the boys to bend over and the girls to extend their hand (except that one time when he was so pissed at Colleen Collins that he made her bend over too). Some days there’d be three or four kids up there. But on a really good day, there might be 20 or more and only three or four left in their seats. This was classic Kotyk. If he was having a good day, there’d be a wisecrack, a whack, and a smile for each kid. If not, it would be just one wicked whack.

The entire ceremony was highly functional. First, it allowed Mr. Kotyk to kill 15 or 20 minutes of class time. Second, it must have seemed to him like a reasonable way to teach a room full of kids to behave themselves even when the teacher was out of the room. Today’s teachers and school administrators whine and moan weird stuff like, “oh, the teacher must never leave the room!” which, of course, I find absurd. Obviously, a sixth grade teacher must sometimes leave the room, if only to help students develop habits of self control.

Finally, the ceremony was a way of establishing a sense of classroom justice; for there were days when some of us did keep doing our work, while others had tried hard to get the damn flywheel spinning. If you were one of the mature, responsible kids, you felt a great sense of satisfaction to watch the festivities at the front of the room.

Mr. Kotyk demonstrated what I would call the artful use of corporal punishment, the pros and cons of which we can debate another day. One more thing—this wasn’t the only way Mr. Kotyk “killed time” in the afternoon. On nice spring days he’d take us out for an extra long recess to play softball. He’d pitch. It was good for all our souls.

Coming soon: Fire in the classroom; Safety Boy scandals; The Story of John and Barbara.

Devil's Night

I guess I’ve been talking about Devil’s Night so much that the words to follow will seem anticlimactic. It’s not so much that I have some amazing story to tell about a particular Devil’s Night; I just want to explain how amazing it is to even have a Devil’s Night and why it’s such a shame we don’t seem to have one anymore.

You first have to understand that Halloween was not always a night of simple trick or treating. And to that end I highly recommend all readers to watch the movie, Meet Me in St. Louis. Among the many fascinating scenes of turn-of-the-last-century-life depicted in the film is one involving Halloween night. The kids in this middle class neighborhood have built a massive bonfire in the center of the street. They’re dragging all the wood they can find – old furniture, buggy parts, tree branches, whatever – into that flaming mess. Dressed in hobo clothes and masks, they talk over which kids will “take” which houses, and by “take” they mean “kill,” and by “kill” they mean…well, I don’t want to give it away. But the cool thing is that the adults in the neighborhood all seem to accept the fact that these young kids should be out building fires, ringing doorbells, and “killing” people after dark.

I’m not sure if I remember my first Halloween, though I do vaguely remember dressing up in a Mighty Mouse costume at age three. The following year I was a devil, but I think it was all hobos each and every year after that. My brother, our pals, and I would go out for what seemed like hours until we filled up a pillow case full of candy. Not crappy little snack sized Milky Ways, but the big ones (I think they cost a nickel back then). And there were homemade popcorn balls, cupcakes, even miniature loaves of Silver Cup Bread. We’d try to hit the “fancy” houses or the ones where we thought famous people lived. For example, quarterback Milt Plum’s house (his candy turned out to be nothing special) or WKNR disc jockey Swingin’ Sweeny (he handed out old 45 records). Then there was the year when neighborhood punk Jimmy Yeagley handed out Ex-Lax….

But though my Halloweens were great fun, we always talked about Devil’s Night and how “next year for sure” we would all go out the night before Halloween to soap windows, ring doorbells, and pull the flaming bag o’ crap on the front porch trick on Roy Meyer’s dad. But somehow we just never got around to it; that is, until that one year, I think it was 1966.

I’m pretty sure that Jeff Biggers, John Kotlarczyk, and I must have been daring each other all week that we wouldn’t be able to go out on Devil’s night. Jeff would razz Johnny, “you’re mommy and daddy won’t let you!” Johnny would insist on betting five dollars that they would, then quickly withdraw the offer. I wasn’t sure if my parents would let me go or not. I just assumed I’d walk out the door after dinner with a bar of soap and two rolls of toilet paper under my coat, hop the back fence, and blend into the dusky darkness.

That’s what I did. And as I did, my mom just gave me one of those looks that all at once said, ok, be careful, behave yourself.

After meeting Johnny in the little traffic island right in front of his house, we cut through Schwartz’s yard and headed to the “staging area” – the field. Jeff was there along with a few other guys (I don’t think any girls went out on Devil’s Night). After standing around wondering what to do next, we spotted Johnny Mason walking toward us from Michigan Avenue carrying two large grocery bags. Johnny was Charley Mason’s younger brother. Just to recap, Charley leaned psycho, Johnny leaned socio. Johnny was the kind of guy who’d play like a puppy one minute, then snap like a cat the next. I recall one day him sitting in front of me in junior high math class. He had tied several short pieces of black string together so that each of the residual tied ends stuck out about an inch. Turning to me, and while holding the entire two foot long string tautly with both hands, he cackled in a creepy witch-like voice, “Nice fresh barbedwire!”

So anyway, Johnny Mason walks up to us with these two large bags, sets them down on the dirt, starts pulling stuff out, and in a sing-song voice says, “Here’s one for you, and one for you, and one for….” They were cartons of eggs.

This next bit I’m still a bit ashamed about. After passing out what must have been a dozen cartons of eggs, Johnny Mason says, “now gentlemen, on to Nearman’s!” Recapping once again, Beth Nearman was a smart, friendly, precocious girl who, for reasons known only to the gods of cruel little boys, was frequently targeted. Alas, amidst the boy mob electric night excitement, we all agreed and followed.

It’s one thing to soap a few car windows and TP an occasional house. But when we got to Beth’s house it was like a junior version of one of those movie scenes where the crowd surrounds the jailhouse. Instead of torches and rope, we had eggs and Charmin. I threw several eggs at Nearman’s roof. I think Johnny Kotlarczyk, perhaps struck by the total wrongness of it all, decided not to throw any. I threw a roll of toilet paper. If done properly, it unrolls and “tents” the roof. My first effort failed, then someone showed me how to do it correctly, and the next one sailed over the house. Police cars were spotted in the distance. Dropping the rest of our eggs, Kotlarczyk and I ran two blocks back to his house. Standing beneath the crabapple trees that grew on the small traffic island, we caught our breath.

Down the street we could see what strikes me now as dozens of guys moving hither and yon. We heard the sounds and smelled the smoke of cherry bombs in the distance. For a 12 year old Roger, it was all hell breaking loose – and yet he was drawn to it.

But I snapped out of it as two things happened. First, Jeff Biggers comes running up and in his typical deadpan style says, “uh… [Charley] Mason and Yeagley are out with BB guns.” Jesus. The psycho and the punk, together, like an embryonic version of In Cold Blood’s Perry and Dick. Next, as I fathomed this bit of info, a police car rolled slowly past the traffic island. Under the streetlight, with his window down, the cop gave us a look much different than the one my mom had given me when I’d slipped out the back door. It was time to flee.

So I hear you ask, "How can this kind of activity have any kind of value whatsoever?" All I can say is that it was real life youth drama, the sort from which kids develop experience, independence, and a sense of moral agency. We learned how bad we could be and why it's usually better to be good. Yet, soaking in a nightful of risky freedom and figuring out for ourselves what to do with it, we felt the power and joy of disobedience. Where today can young people gather this knowledge?

Coming Soon: Mr. Kodyk and some Oxford summarizing.

The Turning of Mrs. Shay

What year did Hogan’s Heroes first air? The reason I ask is because it’s around that time that our dear Oxford School librarian, Mrs. Shay, began to turn against me.

Look. We all know that books are wonderful. As some thoughtful person once said, “a book is like a story in words crammed between two colorful pieces of cardboard!” But for pre-teen boys in the 1960s, two other things were even more wonderful; real life and TV. “Real life” consisted of everything I did outside of home and classroom – bikes, firecrackers, the Rouge, Motorcycle Hill, baseball in the field, football in the street, games of “dogpile,” or “tackle the guy with the ball” played across acres of neighbors’ yards. We’d stay out every night until the streetlights came on, sometimes a little later. “Real life” was what happened when one of your buddies started telling you about sex beyond the earshot of grownups.

Then there was TV. The mid-60s gave us The Outer Limits, The Addams Family, The Man From Uncle, Time Tunnel, Get Smart, Combat, McHale’s Navy, and maybe a dozen other shows that captured the imaginations of millions of young boys, including the aforementioned Hogan’s Heroes.

That was our world. Why would any of us want to read books?

Oh, sure, I read stuff; comic books, Mad Magazine, Saturday Evening Post, The Detroit News, and from time to time “normal” books about stuff that really fascinated me. Books like Frank Edwards’ Stranger than Science or Mac Davis’ Sports Shorts: Astonishing, Strange, but True. But for anyone to plop some “classic” book down in front of me was like a Baby Ruth in the swimming pool—a good thing, but in the wrong place at the wrong time guaranteed to repel me.

Prior to fifth grade (the year our teacher told us where we could all go), the relationship between Mrs. Shay and me was as sweet as puppies and cookies. I impressed her with my reading ability, and she impressed me with her willingness to leave me alone to work independently in the library. But from the fall of 1964 until I left Oxford in June of 1966, a combination of events and interactions began to transform our mutual perceptions.

First, there was “advanced reading” class. A handful of presumably gifted students from each of the three fifth grade (and, later, sixth grade) classes were selected to take our reading instruction in the library with Mrs. Shay. At first this seemed wonderful, because I expected that as she had done in the past, Mrs. Shay would allow us to read books of our choice. Instead, she assigned us all to read – was it Call of the Wild? –a very good book, but at the time one that I had absolutely no interest in reading. This was followed up by two other Baby-Ruth-in-the-pool books, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea and Captains Courageous. I understand that kids sometimes need to be “forced” to read particular books. But Mrs. Shay’s approach to this was not to persuade or encourage, but to launch accusations of indolence against all those failing to show enthusiastic obedience. “Stop watching the ‘idiot box’ and pick up your book!” she would nag. I stubbornly resisted reading any of the books she assigned, which, of course, lowered my grade, increased her disdain, and eventually prompted her to threaten my exile from the class.

Second, there was a sixth grade creative writing contest, which for some time Mrs. Shay had badgered me to enter. Like a lot of boys, I had no interest in writing a story of any kind. I was a smart kid. I knew a lot of stuff. I was a talkative expert in astronomy, current events, geography, and maybe a few other things. From this Mrs. Shay apparently inferred that I could write stories. A week before the deadline, I began poorly crafting a story based on the Hogan’s Heroes TV show. For those of you who don’t know, Hogan’s Heroes was a show about American WWII prisoners of war in a German POW camp who ran a sophisticated espionage operation right under the noses of their Nazi guards. My awful knock off was replete with ridiculous references to Nazis, Chinese camp guards, and hand crank telephones in every prison barracks. It was truly terrible, messily written, and downright embarrassing—Mrs. Shay told me this in no uncertain terms. “You should only write about things you know about!” she bleated. Well of course! But since I wasn’t inspired to write about astronomy, current events, or geography, I wrote something inspired by my favorite TV show.

Finally, there was the awful charge of plagiarism she leveled against me. Specifically, around the late winter of 1966 she accused me of copying an assignment from another student. She did so, not by taking me aside and asking me if I had done so, but by spewing angry red ink accusations all over the paper itself. It needs to be said, of course, that my work was entirely my own. She had asked us to give examples of clichés and slang in speech and writing. I knew a bunch. We did part of the assignment in class and I would say some of them out loud to my table mates before I wrote them down. One of them, a sweet little girl above reproach, apparently borrowed some of my answers. Hence Mrs. Shay’s angry red ink accusation.

After that I seldom spoke to Mrs. Shay again. I saw her years later while I was working as a substitute teacher at Bryant Junior High School. She came over to my room to complain about my noisy class. I introduced myself and tried to spark kind memories of me within her and let bygones be bygones (ha! Now there’s a cliché!). She gave me a cold stare and returned to her room across the hall.

School librarians: ask them about a book, and they’ll tell you how books are made. Then they’ll accuse you of plagiarism.

No, that’s not fair. A couple years later I would meet Mrs. Haniford, the Adams Junior High School librarian, who always let us read whatever we wanted—even Detroit’s seditious, profanity-laced underground newspaper, the Fifth Estate. I bet she could have gotten me to read Call of the Wild!

Coming soon: Devil’s Night (oh sure), Mr. Kodyk, and goodbye to Oxford.

A Few More Stories about my Neighborhood

It seems I've forgotten a few salient points. Or, maybe I wrote about them and have simply forgotten that I did so. Either way, here we go.

It's important to reiterate how much freedom I felt I had as a kid. Oh, sure, I whined to my parents about how they never let me do stuff, but, in fact, they let me do an awful lot. Even at an early age I could get on my bike and be gone for hours. Or walk. We'd walk or ride east on Michigan Avenue to Pat's Party Store. Pat's little store had comic books, ice cream, candy, Coke, Sunny Boy Pumpkin Seeds, and even rotisserie chickens. There were Pixie Stix, baseball cards, string licorice, and, oh man, I could go on and on. You could take a dime to Pat's Party story, buy a Coke for eight cents and a box of Sunny Boy Pumpkin Seeds for two cents. Take 'em outside, sit on the stoop, and you had yourself a sweet summer day.

When I was really little, maybe three or four, my sister Mike walked me even further, all the way to Wilson's Dairy Bar (which later became Gabe's Party Store--the "party store" is a Detroit area thing; a small shop that sells pop, beer, snacks, etc.). We walked all the way to Wilsons and bumped into a punk by the name of Jimmy Yeagley. I didn't know him that well, but I guess my sister did because she kept me away from him. Jimmy Yeagley was about four years older than me, which would have made him about eight at the time (my sister Mike was 11 or 12) and had just been kicked out of Wilson's Dairy Bar. The woman working inside Wilson's literally pushed him out the door shouting something like, "don't you come in here for water! You go home and get your own water!"

I say Jimmy was a punk, which means he was a bully who would instantly back down as soon as any kid his size stood up to him. But the one time I tried to stand up to him when I was about 8 9 years old, he starting spitting on me and spit on me almost all the way from the little island where Whittier met Riverdale to my back fence. Part of me believes in forgiveness, but part of me hopes he's very unhappy now.

As an aside, for a long time when I was little, I kept having a nightmare about my sister and I walking along Michigan Avenue. She would say, "C'mon Roger! Let's go to the movies!" The Dearborn Theater was across Michigan Avenue from Wilson's/Gabe's, right where Michigan Avenue intersected Telegraph Road (the great intersection of highways US 12 and US 24--I love US highways). Anyhow, in the dream I would say, "No, Michael, no!" because I knew that between our house and Telegraph Road, Michigan Avenue was a bridge that crossed a terrible river, terrible because its water would turn you to stone. And because I'd had the dream before, I knew that my sister would fall into the river and suffer that fate.

So, I'd beg her, "No, Michael, no!" But "C'mon Roger!" she'd insist. We'd cross the bridge, you know the rest.

But I digress. (Oh, Mike actually did take me to my first movie at the Dearborn--it was The Shaggy Dog.)

Later on, when I was maybe eight, my brother and I began bringing fireworks back from Alabama. My grandma lived in Lillian, just across Perdido Bay from Florida. While down there, we'd get dad to stop at various roadside stands and stock up on Dixie Boys, Texas Twisters, Buzz Bombs, Cherry Bombs, and whatever else we could afford. Gradually, our neighborhood friends would give us money to buy fireworks for them and we'd bring 'em back and deliver 'em for no profit of any kind. From summer to fall we'd shoot off fireworks with no more concern than for shooting a basketball.

One day, Dennis Korloff (I'm not sure that's how to spell his last name) and I were lighting some Dixie Boys behind his garage, tossing them into the alley behind Amy Joy Donuts. Imagine--having the gall -- no, actually it was a sense of innocence -- to light firecrackers within a stone's throw of the police cars parked there! As we lit the eighth or tenth firecracker, I noticed a guy in a uniform walking slowly toward us. You won' t believe this, but my first thought was, "that's odd! What's a forest ranger doing here?"

I quickly realized my error. The officer made us empty our pockets and told us to go home. I don't remember if I told my parents, but they must have looked at my face and wormed the information out of me. My dad laughed and my mom tisked. I'm sure that by evening I was lighting bottle rockets.

Ok, enough for now. No wait, very quickly, three things that happened at the Shader's house.

1. I once stayed in the Shader's basement watching TV so long that nearly all of them had left the house and my mom had to come in and get me.

2. One summer day standing in the Shader's yard when I was maybe 7, Jerry Shader suddenly shouts, "let's have a water fight!" I excitedly ran home to change into my bathing suit, then ran back to the Shader's yard. All the Shader kids looked at me and laughed, "Roger! Where's your bathing suit?" I had forgotten to put it on and was standing there in my underwear.

3. They had a rooster. I walked over there one day and it met me in their front yard. It pecked my foot and I backed up. It pecked me again and I started running home. The damned rooster chased me all the way home. Big Tom Shader witnessed all this, laughed his head off, and told everyone in the neighborhood.

Oh, the Shader stories!

Next time: For sure Devil's Night. For sure Mrs. Shay. I know, I know, I keep promising...

Bill, Bobcat Blood, and Bus Trips to Hudsons

I just learned that one of my friends from the old neighborhood passed away in 2001. Bill Wargo lived on the corner of Whittier Place and Riverdale Drive, sort of across the fence from John Kotlarczyk, who, of course, lived across my back fence. I can’t remember when I first met Bill, but when I did, it probably had something to do with bobcat blood.

Bill told me that you had to drink bobcat blood before you could become a Cub Scout. He would know, since he was a year older than me and his dad was the pack leader.

I was dying to join the Cub Scouts. My brother had been one before he moved on to the Boy Scouts. I had all his Cub Scout books-Wolf, Bear, Lion-and had been scouring through them for months before my 8th birthday. I was in kid heaven thinking of all the badges I could earn.

Bobcat was the lowest Cub Scout rank. It was a cool little bronze medal, and when you got it, Bill’s dad pinned it on you in front of the whole pack and all the parents on the stage in the Kentucky Fried Chicken smelling basement of Cherry Hill United Presbyterian Church. But first you had to drink bobcat blood. I did, and it tasted like tomato juice with hot sauce.

They put me in Den 6 and once a week, Bill and I would walk over to Steve Bingham’s house. Steve was a trip, the likes of which space will not permit me to explain, and I sort of mean that in a good way. Anyhow, we’d do all the Cub Scout stuff (make clove apples, fried marble jewelry, macaroni ashtrays, etc.) then get juice and cookies. Six months later, Bill’s mom became Den Mother. It was at a Den meeting at Bill’s house in October, 1962 when I learned the Ford Rotunda burned down. There would be no field trip.

About a year and a half later, Bill did something that changed the way I look at this world, the way I look at schools, kids, and even my job as an education professor at Penn State. Well, ok, I exaggerate a little, but as Christopher Robin once said, “bear with me.”

It was early summer, 1964, and Bill calls me up and asks, “do you want to ride the bus to Hudson’s tomorrow?” J. L. Hudson’s was the biggest department store in Detroit—twelve stories of everything and twelve miles from the corner of Michigan Avenue and Gulley Road. I really never thought my parents would let me go—a ten and eleven year old kid riding the bus alone and spending the day roaming downtown Detroit—but they did.

Bill and I caught the Wayne bus at about 8:00 AM and rode it all the way to the last stop at Adams Street. Bill must have done this before because he knew that our first stop would be at the nearby Quickie Cafeteria for donuts and—I’m pretty sure—coffee, the first time I ever bought coffee anywhere. The bus cost 40 cents, the donut and coffee maybe another 20.

From there we walked over to Hudson’s. What a beautiful building! Huge revolving doors pulled us into a vast shopping space as large as a train station; elevators with uniformed men and women asking for your floor, sliding a brass lever to shut a massive brass cage of a door. Bill said we should get off at the mezzanine. What the hell was that? Bill said it was like the second floor, but that there was also another second floor, which was the real second floor. Yeah, it all made sense.

I only remember two things I really wanted to shop for. One was stamps. Hudson’s had a great little philately department tucked away, almost hidden, between two sections of the building. The other thing I really wanted was a copy of the new Jan and Dean single, Dead Man’s Curve b/w New Girl in School. For those of you under 40, a “single” was a 45 rpm record, a thin vinyl disk with a big hole in the middle that you played on something called a “phonograph,” or perhaps a “stereo.” The abbreviation “b/w” – I have no idea, maybe “backed with.” Who knows?

I think Hudson’s record department was on the fifth floor. You could ask to listen to the record before you bought it and there were phonographs and headphones at various stations around the shop. I really wanted Dead Man’s Curve, a song most of you have heard about a drag race tragedy, which contains the spoken line, “well, the last thing I remember, doc, I started to swerve….” But alas, they were totally sold out. Bummer.

It was lunch time and Bill knew where to go. He said we could eat in the famous J. L. Hudson restaurant, but he knew something even better. We left Hudson’s, walked north on Woodward Avenue, and after a block or so turned right. “This is it,” Bill said, “The Flaming Embers.”

The Flaming Embers was a cafeteria style steakhouse about half the size of your local Denny’s. For a buck forty-nine you got a sirloin steak, salad, baked potato, Texas toast, and a drink. As the name implies, they cooked your steak to order over an open fire. It was the first time I ever ordered steak. I don’t think I even liked steak that much back then, but when you’re a kid on your own, twelve miles from home, everything you pay for yourself tastes furtively delicious.

Not long after that, we took the bus back home and you must be wondering why this was such a landmark experience for me. Can’t you tell? Have you not yet figured out the meaning of the Four Trees?

One summer day about six or seven years ago, my daughter, Eva Mei, and her friend Louise were sitting around our front porch like two bored little girls, because that’s what they were, seven and eight, with nothing to do. I asked, “why don’t you walk over to Wal-Mart?” They gave me a look signifying that (A) they hadn’t understood me or (B) I was crazy. I continued. “It’s not that far and you can take my cell phone. Just be sure to cross Atherton at the light.”

Wal-Mart was maybe a mile away and I was sure they could handle it. But they just kept looking at me like I was making some kind of sick twisted joke. Finally, Louise said, “I don’t think my parents will let me cross Atherton.” Well, you know, when you’re a parent, and your kid’s friend says something like that you can’t push back too much. So, I backed off a bit and told them the story of my trips to Detroit with Bill.

What’s that? You say times have changed? I say they haven’t. Only parents and kids have changed.

Coming soon: I’ve got to talk about Devil’s Night, Mrs. Shay, Sixth Grade, and English Leather.

A Place we could All Go

It’s fifth grade, the wild and wiggly grade. Boys are getting horny and they don’t even know why. Girls know why but keep the secret masked in giggly whispers. Every fifth grade class is a crazytown underground of bubbling pre-teen steam. And it takes a careful hand on the controls to keep the whole thing from blowing up. Our fifth grade teacher, Mrs. Berry, managed fairly well most of the time. But then there was that one day.

First a little bit about Mrs. Berry. If she wasn’t our teacher, most of boys would have said she was a beautiful blond. A couple of years before we got into her class she had married Mr. Berry, the playground guy who I mentioned earlier organized those massive football games at recess. Most of the time she was pretty nice and a pretty good teacher. But it usually didn’t take long for us to get her all pissed off. Her cheeks would puff up, she’d give an icy glare, and speak in a low slow rolling voice of doom.

It was 1964. Goldwater vs. Johnson. I don’t even remember who I voted for in our mock election. But I remember Mrs. Berry writing something amusing on the chalkboard: BaAuH2o; which you chemical historians out there should recognize as the losing candidate’s name. Mrs. Berry also made us memorize the names of all the states and their capitals. I loved it. I got a 100% on the test, though I’m sure some of those places are gone now or have moved elsewhere.

Anyhow, the following events took place probably in the early spring of 1965. I’m really not sure, but it’s been early spring here for the last several weeks and everyone is sick, tired, and depressed. So, I’m just inferring it must have been like that then, too.

It seemed like a dark day. We’d had a number of tornado and nuclear war drills in the recent weeks. Mrs. Berry’s room was in the basement of Oxford, just down the hall from the boiler room. Whenever we had a drill we’d head to the hall and students would line up and lean their arms and heads against the lockers. Then another line of students would lean their arms and heads against them. If you were lucky, and if you were a boy, you got to lean against Rosanne, Wendy, or Barbara. If it was a real storm or a real nuclear attack, we’d stay out in the hall for up to an hour until the tornados or missiles passed over into Canada or Ohio.

We’d just had one of these drills and had gone back into the classroom. Mrs. Berry was trying to settle us down. Right about then our principal, Mrs. Cotter, popped into the room, said hello, and motioned Mrs. Berry to the hall. I really don’t know how the fracas started. Usually what would happen was that Sam would make some crack about Colleen. She’d tell Sam to shut up. He’d say “make me” and start with that stupid bully snickering laugh. Someone would throw something. Jeff would start up with his Louis Armstrong impersonation. Some girl would start writing on the chalkboard. Like steam blowing a hole in the floor, the room would burst into noise and nonsense.

After about ten minutes of this, Mrs. Berry walked in slowly with her guns drawn, glaring at us like a modern day female Lucas McCain. There was sudden silence. I don’t remember all the words she said next. They had something to do with how rude and childish we were, how much we had embarrassed her, and how ashamed we should be. EV-ery OTH-er SYL-lable was EM-phasized like when Captain Kirk kicked the Klingon off the cliff in Search for Spock and said, “I have had e-NOUGH of YOU!”

She really had had enough of us. She said a bunch more words, then paused, then glared harder, and finally said, “and you can all go to hell.” Then she walked out of the room.

Within moments we were sort of in hell, if hell means weeping and gnashing of teeth. I mean, several girls did begin to cry. Sam snickered and a teary-eyed Colleen told him to shut up. Johnny Kotlarczyk, my good Catholic pal, was telling everyone how bad they had been. I just kind of sat there stunned and wondering how long it would be before Mrs. Berry was fired.

Strange thing was, nearly every kid in the room seemed to think we had deserved Mrs. Berry’s harsh words. After about five minutes she came back into the room and quietly sat at her desk. Three or four girls walked up to her, put their arms around her, and sobbed, “we’re so sorry Mrs. Berry!” A couple of boys said the same thing, and soon there was a line of kids up there wanting to give her a hug. Not me. I liked her, but I didn’t love her.

Mrs. Berry was not fired and no one ever spoke of this again.

Coming soon: My Friend Bill, Devils Night, Mrs. Shay Turns against me, and Starting the Room on Fire.

The Narrative Place Holder Chapter

It’s not that I don’t have a lot more to say. It’s just that it’s hard to organize it all into neat little chapter units with clever little titles. But the important thing is to keep writing, right?

Oxford was a “traditional” school. We did mostly book work, but with a lot of loosely structured “enrichment” type activity, some of which is quite rare in today’s schools. For example, beginning around 3rd grade, we’d get “book report” assignments—but we were allowed to pick any book we wanted. Teachers would march us to the library and basically turn us loose for 45 minutes to find some interesting book. We got a lot of “project” work—making African masks out of paper-mache or a llama out of wire and cotton batten. Once Mrs. Powers had us growing bacteria on petri dishes filled with unflavored gelatin. Up to that point, I had never heard of unflavored gelatin, and the very idea amused me more than the ugly spores we grew.

We had ample art and music at Oxford, each one at least twice a week. Mrs. Edwards became our music teacher after 3rd grade (replacing kindly old Mrs. Hood). At least once a year she’d bring in her huge orchestra quality xylophone and play for us amazingly—holding 3 or 4 beaters in each hand. I can’t remember our art teacher’s name, but she was truly an “art teacher” with all the flamboyance one might imagine.

Our teachers gave us a good deal of “free time” during the day. Often that was so we could finish our leftover work from the day, but if we had already done it or most of it, we could read or take a sheet of manila paper and draw to our hearts’ content. Sam, Tim, and Bob were the best of the boy artists, filling their paper with beautiful drawings of tanks, war planes, soldiers, and dinosaurs. I could barely begin to match their work, but by trying I learned a lot about 3-D drawing and perspective. Today, it’s unlikely that many, if any, teachers would give students this kind of free time.

So, while Oxford teachers tended toward traditional modes of instruction, they must have also realized that they just couldn’t fill up a whole day or week with all that crap. This is why I claim today that Oxford, with all its old ways, offered students a lot more “free space” than most schools today. I’ve already mentioned the snowball area, the massive amounts of recess, and the four trees. Did I mention how those with enough courage were allowed to climb to the top of the monkey bars and stand freely into the air? Wendy Doll (her real name) did once fall to the ground, and did break her back. Her friend Cassie Sweet (her real name) ran to get the teacher. We watched out our classroom window as an ambulance took her away. Some of the girls cried. But Wendy was back in school 6 weeks later.

A few years ago, when she was in 2nd grade, my daughter came home and reported that it had been decided at her fancy, frilly, trendy school that students could no longer play tag at recess. Wait—they couldn’t even call it “recess.” Since the state had determined that “recess” could not be considered “instructional time,” schools across the state were now calling it “directed play.” God, what a terribly chilling name! Anyhow, my daughter said that the reason for the tag ban was something like, “there are so many trees! So many roots! Someone will surely trip over them!” I told my daughter that she would never get in trouble with me for breaking that rule and that if enough kids did so, the rule would eventually fade away.

“Yeah,” she replied. “That’s sort of what we’re doing.”

A few years back in a town far away, an 11 year-old girl was suspended for persisting in doing cartwheels on the playground even after her principal had decided to ban them. At the time I said “bravo” to the girl and “bravo” to all boys and girls who break silly rules. Just a few days ago I read where a middle school principal had ordered all students to henceforth refrain from touching each other in any way. I like to think that were I a student there, I’d organize a massive group hand shake the very next day. See? You’ve got me started. Got me drifting away from Oxford School and writing about the need for every child to be taught or somehow learn a healthy disrespect for authority. See the film Rabbit Proof Fence and you’ll further understand why this is so critical. Why is it so neglected today?

One last soapbox remark before putting this chapter to bed. Though I fear I’ll sound like Grandpa Simpson, today’s young kids are missing three things we had plenty of: freedom, space, and informal interaction. They lack it at home and they lack it at school. Parents and teachers are apparently afraid to let their children roam free. But I put it to you—if youngsters seldom get to experience freedom, won’t they fail to appreciate it as adults?

Coming Soon: Mrs. Shay, Hell, Devil's Night, Classroom Fires, Corporal Punishment, and More!

The Punch in the Jaw

Jeff Biggers showed up in Mrs. Powers’ fourth grade class at the start of the 1963-1964 school year. He was a bus rider, along with me, John Kotlarczyk, Beth Nierman, and a slew of other kids. Bus riders were the minority at Oxford School. We all lived west of Telegraph Rd. and north of Michigan Ave. Later, we’d be known as “cake eaters,” referring to the fact that some of our dads were professional or white collar workers. Some of us had books in our homes, even magazine subscriptions. Some of us even had encyclopedias, the kind you bought one volume at a time from A&P.

The kids who lived southeast of the US 24-US 12 intersection constituted the majority of Oxford kids. Later on we’d call them greasers, referring to the hair and high Cuban heel shoes some of them wore. For all we knew, some of them had A&P encyclopedias too. Anyhow, Jeff Biggers, though he could often be a jerk, was one of the funniest kids I ever knew. You’d see some stupid TV commercial one day, and the next you’d hear Jeff doing a hilarious word for word parody. So one day you see the toy ad where the kid is on the walkie talkie saying, “Hello headquarters? Just wrecked my truck!” And the following day Jeff would be like, “Hello headquarters? Just wrecked my pants!” I once heard him parody an entire episode of Johnny Quest. He was South Park 30 years ahead of its time.

The one time I ran away from home, I ended up at Jeff’s house. It was probably the summer between 4th and 5th grade. There had been some kind of horseplay going on in my basement involving my brother, sister, and my sister’s boyfriend. A lamp got broke and it wasn’t entirely my fault. But I got sent to my room. Pissed, I snuck out the back door, hopped the back fence, and suddenly realizing I had nowhere to go, ran two blocks over to Jeff’s. It was past dusk. I just showed up at his side door and yelled “Je-e-eff,” stretching out to three sing-song syllables the way we always called on each other. He let me in and we sat in his basement watching Johnny Quest.

After half an hour I realized I might be in trouble. I said “seeya” and began slowly walking home, down Fairway Dr. and around the corner on to Cambridge St. As I walked past Beth Nierman’s house, a station wagon slowly approached and I quickly recognized my mom and dad in the front seat. I stood there like a porch jockey. They parked, and my dad got out, came around, opened the back door, and kicked my ass in such a way as to clearly signify that I was to get in the back seat.

That may have been the last time my dad ever used physical punishment on me. There was one other time later on that he wanted to. I don’t remember what I did, probably mouthed off to him, as was my wont, and he chased me down into the basement. I knew what was coming and I didn’t want it. I saw a large mailing tube, grabbed it as if it were a battering ram, and pointed it right at my dad. He stopped suddenly and almost laughed. I mean, it was just a mailing tube that he could easily have snatched away before lowering the boom. I guess that was the moment he realized I was too big to spank.

Now, I’m gonna get back to Jeff in a moment. But first, I need to explain a little more about fighting and why it was so hard for me. When I first started having to fight at school, my dad took great pains to try to teach me the value and technique of self defense. He’d show me how to punch six ways to Saturday. My mom, too, would implore me to defend myself and never to let anyone push me around. But my problem was that I couldn’t bear the idea of hitting anyone in the face. I had punched a couple of skinny kids in the stomach before, but found the stomach punch to be of little use when up against a kid of real heft.

So, I took a lot of bruising from Sam and one or two other stocky kids who used to push me around. But the day came when Jeff and a couple of older guys started giving me a lot of crap. Jeff, the funniest kid I ever met, turned his full range of smart ass sarcasm on me. It continued for the entire next day of school until we finally decided to settle matters behind my garage at 4:00. I might take a lot of crap from some kids, but I figured I couldn’t live with myself if I kept taking it from Jeff. So, I went straight home after school and caught my dad just as he was about to leave for his afternoon shift at Ford’s.

I leveled with him. “Dad, I don’t like to fight. I don’t like to hit. And Jeff’s my friend.”

“Rog,” he said, “there’ve been a lot of guys who said they were my friend, but….”

My dad was never afraid to fight. I saw him in action a few times, at a gas station, the bowling alley, Tiger Stadium. He told amazing stories about some of the fights he had when he was young. He was always standing up for his rights. “Stand up for your rights!” he’d tell me.

“Rog, there was this one time at the bowling alley when a guy who said he was my friend started saying bad stuff about me. Friend or not, I met him outside and popped him one!”

He continued. “Here’s what you do. When he comes over, you follow him out behind the garage. And just as he’s turning around, you lay one on his jaw.”

It sounded so simple. Why had I never thought of this?

About 10 minutes later, Jeff came to the back door. He had a smirk on his face as we walked to the back of the yard. Behind the garage, he still had the smirk as he turned around, and just as he did, my fist hit him square in the jaw. It felt really good. Jeff was clearly annoyed by this. I guess he never expected it. We boxed around for a few more minutes until my dad came back and broke it up.

The next day at school, Jeff was all, “he sucker punched me!” But no one really paid any attention. What mattered to me was the sense of justice I felt having popped him one. Never fear; Jeff and I stayed pretty much pals after that.

The last punch I threw was in 1987 at the age of 33. It was self defense. If I had to, I could do it again.

Next time: Devil’s Night

Mrs. Powers and JFK

I’ve been meaning to write about the day President Kennedy got shot. But first, I’ll tell you about Mrs. Powers, my fourth grade teacher.

Mrs. Powers was probably in her 40s. Remember, no boy kid can ever tell how old his woman teacher is, I mean unless she’s clearly hot and in her 20s. Mrs. Powers was a sturdy looking woman, probably a smoker, with a stern Scottish face. She could probably drink her dates under the table, if she weren’t married. I have no idea if she drank or not, but she just looked like she’d be “not bad, once she got going.”

But she was usually quite stern with us, only rarely showing a slightly softer side. She used writing as punishment. Whenever I pissed her off enough, she’d make me write 50 times (100, if she was really po’d), “I will not bother my neighbor.” That may not seem like a lot, but it was. Once I even used carbon paper. She must have realized this, but didn’t seem to mind.

Once she caught Jeff Biggers reading Ian Flemming’s Thunderball, one of the the James Bond novels. Biggers wasn’t really “reading” it, he was just looking for the parts involving breasts. Anyhow, Mrs. Powers sees the book, walks over and snatches from Biggers, literally pinches it by the corner as if it were a filthy tissue, then takes it over and drops it in the trash. “That’s a nasty book!” she exclaimed, drawing out the word “nasty” like a sheep saying “baaaaaah.”

Jeff Biggers, by the way, was one of the funniest kids I ever knew. I once punched him really hard in the jaw. I wonder what he’s doing now.

Anyway, back to the Kennedy assassination. Let me first say that on the evening of November 22, 1963, I went to a football game with my Cub Scout troop. I know that sounds strange, but it was the Annual Detroit High School Friendship Game at Tiger Stadium, which pit together the best public and Catholic school football teams. They didn’t cancel it because, someone said, JFK wouldn’t have wanted them to. I mention this now because later it will seem anticlimactic.

Sometime in the early on that Friday afternoon, Mrs. Powers left the room for about 5 minutes. Of course we all started goofing off. But when she came back, instead of shouting at us, she just stood in the front of the room and said, “Class, I need to make an announcement. The President has been shot.”

We all got quiet. Roseanne Raidel and a couple other girls started crying. Boys started asking questions. “How? Where? Did the Russians do it?” Mrs. Powers answered calmly. “In his car, in Dallas Texas, we don’t know.”

After a few minutes of this, Mrs. Powers said, “We’ll all go over to the library. Mrs. Shay will tell us more about this.” Mrs. Shay was the librarian, who I used to like, until she turned against me.

We walked down the hall to the library. We sat in small groups; four or five little circles of little library chairs. My group was near the window. I sat across from Roseanne Raidel, a girl I always liked. She had stopped crying, but was holding it back. Mrs. Shay, who had not yet turned against me, pulled her big chair over to our group, sat down, and asked, “Does anyone have anything they want to say?”

Like a lot of families, the Shouses had a copy of Vaughn Meader’s LP record, The First Family. This was an album of funny sketches poking fun at JFK, Jackie Kennedy, and various other political figures of the time. Most kids who listened to The First Family gradually gathered the ability to do a bad JFK impersonation, and I was no different. So when Mrs. Shay asked, “Does anyone have anything to say?” I replied that I thought that if President Kennedy could talk to us, he would say (and this was in my best bad JFK voice), “Let us proceed with vigah!” (“Vigah” as in “vigor,” a word Kennedy seemed often to use.)

Mrs. Shay smiled (this was not what turned her against me). But Roseanne Raidel’s face soured as she said, “Roger, I don’t think that’s funny at all!” I hadn’t really meant it to be funny. I was just trying to cheer people up, as if a presidential assassination was like losing a dollar.

They might have let us out of school early that day, I can’t remember. We rode the bus home. I got off at the usual corner and ran home to tell my mom the news. I sped around the corner at the back of the house and up to the back door. I pulled it open and started to exclaim, “Mom! The President was…..” Before I could finish the sentence, I looked up and saw my mom sobbing. I’d never seen that before. I’d never seen my mom cry.

Coming soon: Why did I punch Jeff in the jaw?

In the Field

Before getting back to the Oxford School saga, I’d like to write a few words about The Field. The Field, in its original configuration, lay at the NE corner of Michigan Avenue and Gulley Road. In the early days, you could walk south down Gulley, past the March house, and there you were. The first thing you saw was a pile of rock, which we called “The Rock Pile.” Actually, it was a pile of broken concrete and brick, construction debris left over from when our houses were built.

Right next to The Rock Pile was a big pile of grass clippings. Each time my dad would cut the lawn, using one of those push mowers with a “catcher,” he’d dump the clippings from the catcher into a wheel barrow and I’d follow him down the sidewalk toward The Field. He’d dump the clippings, pick me up, set me down in the wheel barrow, and give me a bouncy ride back home.

When I was old enough to walk down to The Field myself (maybe 4 years old), I’d climb up on The Rock Pile and make gunpowder. Tommy March (we called him “Little Tom”) showed me how to do this. You take a brick and chip it against a slab of concrete until you get a nice orange-red powder. “Gun powder.” Years later I learned how to make real gun powder in my garage, but this ersatz version was fine for a four-year-old.

East of The Rock Pile was a massive billboard, one of those three-panel jobs built on a steel frame that we could climb. Most of us would just climb up a little way, staying below the signs themselves. But one day Bobby March climbed really high, all the way up to the signs. He was up there waving and laughing and having a ball when suddenly a Dearborn Police car pulled up. I don’t think I’d ever seen a police car pull up before. The cop made Bobby climb down. I don’t remember if he took Bobby home, but if he did, I know for sure that Bobby’s mom beat him with a broom.

Right below the billboard to the east was our ball diamond. Most of The Field was wild in the summer with tall grass and weeds. But the city would cut just enough grass for us to play ball. We had a big old plywood sheet that leaned against the billboard and blocked pitches from going under the structure. The ground was worn bare at home, the pitcher’s mound, and at each base. Some days we had enough kids to have four or five on a team. We fashioned our own rules so that we could play with any number—even with just two on a team; “right field is out,” “pitcher’s hands is out,” and “imaginary man on first.”

One day my sister Mike (just like the book!) came down to play. She was 11 or 12, older than most of the boys, and they made a little fun of her when she stepped up to bat. That is, until she hammered a ball almost all the way to Cambridge Street.

When not playing ball or fighting over ball, we did other stuff in The Field. We once dug out a network of long ditches, covered them with boards and sod, then crawled around inside as if it was a big cave. Bobby, Little Tom, and Linda March were way into this for several days. But then Mrs. March discovered what we were doing and, as she often did, decided to take fun out in the desert and kill it. Bobby, Little Tom, and Linda appeared at the dig site one evening and announced that their mother told them it was too dangerous, no one could play there anymore, and we had to quit. Jerry and “Big Tom” Shader, the other kids, and I had a different notion and we kept on digging and playing cave. No one died.

One fall day Roy Meyer, Craig Kotlarczyk (Johnny’s brother), and I discovered that a heavy rusty steel front side panel from an old car had been dumped around home plate. Craig lifted it at one side to see what was under it. I stood there looking. Then Craig dropped it. The rusty edge slammed down on my ankle. I cried my way back home. Once again, I was “rushed to Oakwood” for stitches.

Besides the cop who busted Bobby March, and the one who busted Dennis Korloff and me for shooting of firecrackers, I don’t remember ever seeing a grown up in The Field. The Field was kid territory, a place to dig holes, play ball, and make up our own rules. Once, I discovered a hand-sized rock, split into three layers, with big shell fossils in between each layer. I kept that rock for many years until it disappeared.

One summer evening, six years old, I wandered alone from my house to The Field. I turned left into the abandoned alley that ran along its northern edge. There was a tall hedgerow on my left. Just ahead was an opening that led into Sissy Wine’s back yard. Sissy Wines was real old, at least a couple years older than my sister Mike. I turned into the opening and waved. Then I heard a scream, the whoosh of an arrow, and the “pfwt” sound it made as it hit the target just a few feet away from my head. The next thing I knew Sissy Wines was stomping toward me, bow in hand, yelling at me for almost getting killed. She marched me home, spanking me every step with her bow.

Over time, The Field changed. First they put up an Amy Joy Do-nut shop and that was fine; we still had plenty of room to play ball. But when I was in ninth grade, they put up a Burger King right next to Amy Joy. That pretty much killed baseball for all but the littlest kids, but I got to eat a lot of Whoppers. The final blow came a few years later when they put up a Long John Silver’s Fish & Chips. The Field was gone, buried beneath tar and cement.

I still dream about The Field. Standing on its edges in a grey dusk or middle of the night, seeing strange hamburger shops, parking lots filled with cars, but no one inside. I dream about being on the far end of The Field. Covered with water and mud, I struggle across it to get home.

After I wake up, I lie there wondering where kids today can find a field like mine.

There's gonna be a War

Third grade was one of the worst grades ever. Mrs. Kauch had this neat trick of grabbing a kid and throwing him under her desk. Sometimes she’d pinch your cheeks with her lobster claw, sometimes she’d grab your earlobe. But you always ended up under her desk. Mrs. Kauch was a 50-something lady who looked like Maggie in the Bringing up Father comic strip. Some days she had a longer fuse than others, but if you lit the short one, watch out brother.

Most of the time, Mrs. Kauch just seemed perplexed and annoyed at our class. No doubt we were trouble. We ranged from dopey bad to precocious bad, and we usually gave Mrs. Kauch the full range all at the same time. Take Beth Ann, for example. Beth Ann lived in my neighborhood, about a block east of Johnny Kotlarczyk. Like me, she had a tendency toward smart mouth. One time in first grade, we goofed around after school, singing in the hallway, taking our time getting to the bus stop. I have no real idea why, but we were singing that old song, “Love and marriage, love and marriage, go together like a horse and carriage.” And the next thing we knew we’d missed the bus. My mom was called and probably she had to borrow a car to come pick us up. In other words, she was not pleased.

Anyhow, Mrs. Kauch usually ran out of gas about 15 minutes before dismissal. So she’d ask if anyone wanted to sing a song. Beth would always volunteer and sing some damn dumb song she’d learned. We hated it, but at least we didn’t have to work. So one day she starts singing “Oh Boy, that’s where my Money Goes,” which I think was a song about a prostitute. But without any explicit lyrics, Mrs. Kauch could only sit there and listen to the umpteen verses Beth had learned.

One of the coolest things to ever happen to me at Oxford happened in Mrs. Kauch’s class. Mrs. Shay, the librarian who would later turn against me, announced some speech contest around the topic of “the wonderful world of books” or some similar librarian lingo. Kids were supposed to prepare a five minute speech on this, and they’d choose one finalist from each class. My chief competitor in Mrs. Kauch’s class was everyone’s would-be sweetheart, Barbara Hanson. At the first practice session, there was little doubt she had the best speech. I was becoming more and more a lazy ass kid in school, with little interest in doing anything I wasn’t interested in.

But a funny thing happened the night before our final try-out. I found an old Archie comic book with a 3-page thing about why reading Archie Comics was better than watching TV. It had about 4 or 5 good gags, and all I had to do was change “Archie Comics” to “books” and I was all set. I cracked up everyone in the room, got picked to represent our class, and made Barbara Hanson cry. No, that’s not true. Barbara was always a good kid and a good sport. The next day I delivered the talk on the auditorium stage in front of all the kids in grades K-3. They howled and howled. Even Mrs. Shay laughed. I won the contest and won a book—a first edition copy of Henry and the Clubhouse, by Beverly Cleary.

One sunny October morning, I walked into Mrs. Kauch’s class and saw the boys gathered around Ronnie Baronowski, a real emotional kid with a good sense of humor, a big mouth, and a thin skin. Anyhow, as I walked over to where they were jawing near the windows, I could hear Baronowski claiming, “We’re gonna have a war with Russia! There’s gonna be a war!”

Now, I knew there was something going on in the world because the night before I’d sat watching TV with my parents and noticed a lot of news bulletins about Kennedy, Cuba, and missiles. I was a pretty “news aware” kid for my age, and would always be so. But if there was really “gonna be a war,” I knew my parents would have told me. So I told Baronowski he was crazy. Suddenly he and some of the other guys turned on me.

“You don’t think there’s gonna be a war?” demanded Baronowski.

Sam chimed in, “Ha! Shouse doesn’t think there’s gonna be a war! What an idiot!”

Well, as we all know, there was no war. But I did end up having to fight Sam again. I just never learned to keep my mouth shut.

Coming soon: Why fourth grade was a little better; learning the F-word; Nov. 22, 1963.

The Dumb Kid

It’s pretty clear that except for playground fights and other wildness, my middle years at Oxford were a little boring. Mrs. Rattigan was a swell second grade teacher who never slapped me or anything. She did get really mad at me one day when I basically didn’t do a damn thing all day. Why not? It was kind of weird.

I’d come in that day feeling fine. I sat down in my usual seat. Mrs. Rattigan had written like 30 sentences on the board and was explaining what we were supposed to do. It was at that moment my brain just went blank. The only thing I remember Mrs. Rattigan saying was, “did everybody get that? Good! Start your work.”

Ok, so I had no idea what I was supposed to do. I just sat a while and goofed around with my desk, my pencil, and the people sitting around me. The one thing I refused to do was ask anyone what I was supposed to do with those 30 sentences. So after an hour, there I was with a blank sheet of paper in front of me and a scowl that had been baking and hardening for about 45 minutes.

By lunch time, everyone but me had moved on to math. After lunch, my paper still blank, Mrs. Rattigan walked up to my desk, bent over and whispered menacingly, “Roger. If you didn’t have to catch the bus, I would keep you after school.” After all that time, how could I tell her I just didn’t know what to do?

I continued to just sit there, hoping I could just drag it out until 3:00. I know. It makes no sense. Only to a dumb kid. Mrs. Rattigan had moved my seat to keep me quiet. She sat me next to Janet Murphy, a nice girl who everyone liked. She must have figured out my problem because she shook her head and just said, “Just copy the sentences! Isn’t that easy?”

All I had to do was copy the sentences off the board. It was like handwriting practice or something. Jeeze, I don’t know. All I knew – and remember well now-was that it was a hard, hard dumb day for a dumb kid.

Stories to come: The Cuban Missile Crisis. The Kennedy Assassination. James Bond. The Teacher who Told us we could All Go To Hell.

Finding New Enemies (a Ginn Basic Reader)

I got taught how to fight at Oxford School. I mean, I didn’t really learn how, I just got taught to. Kids need to be taught how to fight. They don’t all need to learn how – it’ll suffice if a good number do. But all kids need to be taught about it. Some kids need to be taught to fight more, others to fight less. And the best situation occurs when they teach each other.

I was a kid who needed to fight more. It was either that, or learn to keep my mouth shut around the kids who needed to fight less. I was often a real smart aleck, and smart alecks don’t like each other. A bigger more aggressive one will typically pound on a weaker one, unless that one is short and funny, in which case he will become the bigger ones sidekick. That wasn’t me.

All this fighting business started around the second grade in Mrs. Rattigan’s class. I don’t remember exactly how I got on Sam’s bad side, though I remember the first time he shoved me down and dared me to do anything about it. Sam was a thick boy in both senses of the word. Some of my worst days at Oxford were those days when I knew I’d have to fight Sam. I always lost. But each punch stayed with me and made me long for that day when I would, in my dad’s words, defend myself. Eventually I did. I didn’t win every fight, but I won some good ones, including my last one, on a dark Georgetown side street at the age of 33.

More about that later. I didn’t mean to dwell on the fighting business.

Mrs. Rattigan was a nice lady, probably in her late 20s or early 30s. But second grade boys see all their female teachers as old women, maybe because second grade boys bring can turn the sweetest flower of a 30-something girl into a yowling growling grouch.

But Mrs. Rattigan read to us a lot. She read us Little Annie Rooney and Angleworms on Toast. She seemed to like me most of the time. When our cat had kittens, she came to our house and took one home. She gave us free time in class to talk or draw (something most of my Oxford teachers did, and something that few teachers do today).

One sunny spring day, Mrs. Rattigan knew that a lot of us guys were thinking about baseball. She asked us to figure out how many players were on a baseball team. The “fellas” and I were trying to figure this out when she suddenly says, “well, why don’t you all go to the library and find a book on baseball?”

Being allowed to go to the school library was like having a “get out of jail free” card. For me, most of the time, the school library was an oasis. I loved the smell of the books, the feel of the magazines in their heavy clear plastic binders, the World Almanac with all its longest rivers and biggest cities. I loved that library for a long time—until the time came that the kind old (30-something) librarian, Mrs. Shay, turned against me.

Once at the library, we found out how many players were on a baseball team. Not from a book, but by asking some fifth grader who happened to be hanging out there. Mrs. Shay had asked him to help us find a book on baseball, but he just puffed his lips and said, “well I can just tell ya about it!”
So we played baseball (softball, actually) just about every day at recess. We’d choose up sides by doing that thing where you put your fists on the handle end of the bat and top fist wins unless one kid pinches the top with his fingers and you can’t kick it out of his grip. We let some girls play. Barbara Hanson could play anytime even though she wasn’t good because she was cute and Johnny Kotlarczyk had a huge crush on her (which lasted until the last day of our last year at Oxford).

But no one really wanted to let Ruth play. Ruth was pretty good at hitting the ball. But she was what you’d call a handsome girl (i.e., “ugly”) with a Delaware accent so strong it sounded like a speech impediment. Ruth was always nice to everyone, and I hated how the guys made fun of her.

“You love Ruth!” they’d taunt whichever kid was on everyone’s shit list that day.

One day Sam didn’t want her play. Neither did Ronnie Baronowski. Hell, I really didn’t want her to play either, but I couldn’t stand all these jerks telling her she couldn’t. So I picked her on my team and insisted that the others let her play.

“You love her!” Sam mocked me with one of those sugary sweet sing-songy voices, sort of the way Bluto would talk to Olive when he was first trying to pick her up, before he revealed his true psychotic nature.

Ruth smashed the damned ball nearly all the way to the monkey bars—a home run. Now she did love me. I was toast for the rest of the day.

The Battle at Katy's Hill

Back to the frontier. The Mason’s lived on Whitier Place, the same street as Johnny Kotlarczyk, but across the street, further north, and nearer the golf course. There were a bunch of Mason kids, Charlie, a younger brother Johnny, another younger brother Jason (who would one day burn down their garage), and a little girl we seldom saw. I never saw any Mr. Mason. Don’t know if there was one. I remember Mrs. Mason as a woman with a permanent frown (think "Margaret Hamilton") who seemed to always be either shrieking at her kids or any parent who dared to challenge their behavior. Johnny Mason was a likable and funny kid, but everyone suspected that scratching him too deep would reveal his psycho mode. As will be revealed later, he was a key figure in our yearly Devil’s Night escapades.

But Charley was way twisted. Like a hyena, he’d linger at a distance from the rest of us kids, waiting for a stray. When he found one he’d act so quickly that no adult could stop him. He’d have a knife, a piece of barbed wire, or sometimes just his fists. Then we’d hear the screaming cry of a victim trying to make his way back home, with Charley nowhere to be seen. This didn’t happen every day or every week, but probably at least once or twice a year. The strange thing was that once you learned to stand up to Charley, he’d back off with a crazed grin. I remember Johnny Kotlarczyk shouting lots of times, “Get out of here, Mason!” He’d heard his mom and dad say it enough times.

The day eventually came when Charley Mason was murdered in Jackson State Prison. Johnny Kotlarczyk told me this a few years back when I spoke to him after the death of his father. I was not surprised, but somewhat satisfied to learn of this. I told Johnny that the last time I had seen Charley was one cold day at the bus stop at Outer Drive and Michigan Avenue. I was coming home late from high school. He was standing at the corner. I wasn’t afraid, maybe I should have been. We exchanged looks of brief recognition, a few words maybe. A moment later, a late model car pulled up driven by a really creepy dangerous looking fellow. Charley took off with him.

Roll the tape back eight or nine years. It’s winter time after a big snowfall. Kotlarczyk (by then we were all calling each other by our last names), one of the March kids, and I headed with our saucers to Katy’s Hill. Katy lived at the edge of our subdivision, nearly as far as you could go before passing over to the next. We called it Katy’s Hill because it was her hill, descending from her back door down to the golf course. Next to the smoothly flowing Katy’s Hill was a drop off, sort of a cliff, about 20 feet high.

We spotted Charley on the way to Katy’s Hill. He didn’t seem particularly threatening that day, but it was hard to tell with Charley. As he came closer, someone packed a snowball and beaned him with it. Then there was another. We all either hated him, feared him, or both. More snowballs. He started running away from us toward Katy’s. We ran too, and as we got nearer to the hill snowballs changed to rocks. Closer to the hill, closer to the cliff, I was swept by a feeling that this was our day of great revenge.

He had nowhere to run. He was screaming at us, “Cut it out, you fuckers!” As if duty-bound, we maintained our attack. Our dads had told us all stories about “The Bulge” and “Pork Chop Hill.” Each rock had meaning. Charley fell over the cliff. He managed to pick himself up and run toward the river. I never saw him again until that time at the bus stop.

I guess it sounds cruel. But if you asked me, even now, to describe what happened that day at Katy’s Hill, my answer would be “justice.”

Early Risky Behavior

I don't mean to say that I was always safe and secure in the strip between the Marches and the Shaders. I remember a summer evening when a bunch of us, my brother Steve, my sister Mike, and Tom and Jerry, the older Shader boys, were playing in our front yard. I think I was four.

I was waiting for my mom and dad to come outside, for they'd told me we’d be going to Kresge’s soon. Kresge’s (pronounced “Krez' gee’s) was the dime store. With its toys, soda fountain, live animals (turtles, parakeets, and goldfish), and its “Ring for Service” bells, it was a place I truly loved. And I was growing more and more impatient with mom and dad. They should be out here by now. Dad’s 1953 Ford Sedan sat in our driveway. Maybe I’d just have to go to Kresge’s myself.

Maybe someone saw me climb into it. Sitting behind the wheel I reached up to the stick, just like I’d seen my dad do. I remember saying, “start up the car!” I remember yanking the stick down.

A bunch of stuff then happened real fast. I felt the car roll backward. I heard my sister Mike yell “Roger!” She somehow opened the driver’s side door, avoided being knocked to the ground by it, and pulled me out. We watched the car roll down the driveway, across busy Gulley (how was it not hit?!), and onto the lawn across the street.

I wonder if most people can remember the first time they felt that terrible onrushing fearful feeling of being in big, big trouble? For me, this was it. My dad would be out soon, showing his hot Kentucky temper, no doubt whipping his belt from around his waist. I wanted to run, but my sister held on to me. Though I expected that this worst sort of behavior would draw my parents’ worst possible punishment, my mom and dad acted in a totally unexpected way. I suddenly sensed their relief that I had not been killed. So, instead of the belt’s sting, the next thing I remember was being sat down at the end of the dining room table. My dad sat at the other end, brother Steve, sister Mike, and my mom sat around it. Dad gave us not a safety lecture; not a “Roger, you could have been killed” lecture, but a lesson in how a car gearshift worked and what the letters PRNDL stood for. I guess I had mastered the N.

This was neither the first nor last time my parents felt relieved that I hadn’t been killed. In fact, I was barely born; sick and in and out of the hospital for the first three months of my life. Years later I would learn about my “subdural hematoma,” my collapsed lung, and how my brother and sister, hearing my mom’s tears, used to hold each other and cry themselves to sleep. Around the same time as the driveway incident, I fell through a weak board in my Aunt Orie’s living room. I remember how after falling into her basement, my aunt, dad, cousin, brother, and sister rushed down the basement stairs - and I remember their amazed faces when they saw I'd landed on a cushy sofa. In later years, there’d be the living room fire, the car crashing into my bedroom wall, the gun on the dorm room floor (though I don’t think they ever learned of that one), and various other incidents.

But back to Gulley. Another drama—much less dire, but nearly as scary for me as the car rolling backward—unfolded one day when I pedaled my tricycle two doors down Gulley, just past the house of the old bachelor. Pausing, I stuck a few small twigs into a bare spot at the corner of his lawn. Without warning, the old bachelor came out of his garage. He was a gruff gray haired guy who worked for the Wayne County road commission. He had a rough sort of voice that today makes me think of a carton of Chesterfields.

“Looks like I’ve got some grass growing!” he growled. I just sat and smiled. He came closer “Sticks!” he bellowed. “Those are sticks! Don’t you put sticks in my yard! You go put sticks in your own yard!” Other than my parents, I don’t think I had ever been yelled at by a grown up before. I was shocked and embarrassed before I even knew what those words meant. And it seems kind of funny now, but for the next 20 years, the rest of his life, despite the fact that he lived so close and was always sitting on his porch, despite the fact that I continued to cut through his back yard to get to the Marches, I never spoke to him again. I don't think I ever even looked him in the eye again.


Next: Mason - The Final Battle

My Neighborhood

The homes expanding out beyond our back fence were older than ours, and the Kotlarczyks had lived in this neighborhood longer than we had. They had a son, Johnny, who along with Donna Shader (two doors up Gulley from us) was to become my first best friend. Yes, you can have two best friends. Johnny told me stories about Charlie Mason.

“He put a puppy on the tracks,” Johnny said. He meant the railroad tracks that ran along the other side of nearby Michigan Avenue. That a little boy was allowed to cross Michigan Avenue and play on the tracks didn’t phase me much then, but I knew that my eight-year-old brother and eleven-year-old sister could never do that. “He has a knife,” Johnny added. We were barely four years old and talking about this stuff.

Donna Shader didn’t know anything about the Masons--yet. Donna lived two houses up from us on Gulley. I usually just watched her across the backyard fences, but one day she came with her mother, Lu, to our new house.

“It looks just like ours!” Lu exclaimed as she passed from my parents’ bedroom, through the bathroom, past the basement stairs, and into the kitchen. Meanwhile, Donna wrestled with my stuffed toy dog (I still have him) while I played with blocks. I wanted the dog back. But I had to share. It turned out for the best, though, because Donna and her family shared a lot with me over the years. I’d go up there for “tea parties” where we’d drink warm sugar water in plastic toy tea cups. During summers I’d go there for the Koolade Donna or one of her three brothers would make, usually with extra sugar. I remember the sound of the metal spoon stirring and scraping against the inside of the aluminum pitcher and I remember how extra sugary Koolade tastes when served in an aluminum tumbler. The Shader family and the Shader house were to be darn near my second family and second home for many years.

Sometime that year, or maybe the next, Johnny Kotlarczyk and I figured out how we could catch a rabbit in my backyard. It was so easy. We’d both seen it on TV. All you had to do was get a box, a stick, a carrot, and some string. Tie the string to the stick, use the stick to prop up one end of the box, put the carrot under the box, then “hide” about 20 feet away in plain sight. The rabbit would, of course, smell the carrot and hop under the box at which point one of us would pull the string. That we had never seen a rabbit anywhere in the neighborhood made no difference. The reason we hadn’t seen one was that no one had ever put a carrot out on the lawn before. We waited quietly for a while, but soon began to wonder why something that always worked on TV failed for us.

To get to Johnny’s house I had to hop the back fence. Hopping fences was always the fastest way to get to anyone’s house, even if it meant cutting through people’s yards. Apparently, as the first several families moved onto our block, there was some discussion as to whether backyards should even have fences. Mrs. March (the Marches had two boys and a girl and lived in the last house on Gulley before you got to Michigan Avenue) wanted no fences so that the backyards would be like a park for all us kids to run in. I think my folks liked fences, so thats what we got; aluminum chain link fencing around our yard. Most other families followed suit. Hopping fences became like hopping a creek. We made paths of convenience all over our neighborhood.

Hopping the fence to Johnny’s opened up a whole new wide-open space. But before I explain that, let me offer a geographic description of my early world. There was Gulley Road, named after farmer Gulley, who once had a vast apple orchard spanning a few dozen acres of what was once known as Dearborn Township. Gulley was a busy street and you couldn’t cross without your mom or dad. If you walked south down Gulley past the Marches, you got to the rock pile, the place where the builders had dumped a lot of concrete and brick.

Beyond the rock pile and running east along Michigan Avenue was “the field.” Michigan Avenue was a wide and intimidating boulevard separated from the field by a simple dirt path. Only the oldest, bravest, or meanest kids crossed Michigan without their parents. Beyond it ran parallel the Michigan Central Railroad tracks. Beyond the tracks was only mystery.

If you walked north up Gulley, toward and beyond the spot where I met Charlie Mason, you’d come to the Lower Rouge River (AKA, “The River Rouge” or just “the Rouge”), a slow stinky polluted stream even back then (they say it’s much cleaner today). On the Inkster side, the Rouge meandered through the woods, to and beyond mythical places that only kids knew with names like “Motorcycle Hill” and “Car in the Water.” Without a parent, those woods were off limits to me. On the Dearborn side the river ran through a golf course whose hills we’d sled down in winter (and yet woe to the kid caught by its “Rangers” any other time of year).

Hopping my backyard fence and walking east out into Kotlarczyk’s front yard opened up another vast expanse of homes and families living on safe-to-cross streets. That was the rest of “our subdivision.” Beyond one of its dead end streets was the “other subdivision,” another mostly off-limits place with kids who liked to fight. In reality, despite the fences, my neighborhood was very much like a park, sans swings, slides, teeter-totters, or equipment of any kind.

Maybe a better way to describe it would be to say that the strip of Gulley from the Shaders to the Marches (including Johnny’s backyard) was a little kid’s familiar hometown. The rock pile, the field, and the rest of the subdivision were his frontier, a place to explore and discover stuff. The frontier was where he learned things. What is mumbly peg? Do girls have doojiggers? Why will only Catholics go to heaven? Grasshoppers spit tobacco on you. A dandelion can tell whether or not you like butter. Some girl got stabbed over across the railroad tracks. Who likes him and how much? Who can he trust? Who will hurt him and how badly? The frontier is where I would again meet up again with Charlie Mason.

Next: Hazards on Gulley

Early Lessons on the Homefront

I was three years old when I met Charlie Mason. It was early evening, down near the corner of Gulley Road and Fairway Street, several houses beyond the point my parents told me not to go. He was a dark-haired boy, about five years old, with a voice and a smile that made me want to be his friend. And he wanted to be my friend. He told me so. He told me his name and asked me mine. Then he said, “Roger, you and I are going to be good friends!”

We had just moved to South Gulley Road (or just “Gulley,” as we called it) a few months earlier on February 13th, my third birthday. Gulley was a two-lane street, the dividing line between Dearborn and Inkster. We lived on the Dearborn side, in a new home in a new subdivision. The first day I entered our new house my big sister Michael took me by the hand and led me up and down the hallway showing me the bathroom, the linen closet, and the room where my brother Stephen and I would sleep. It was a simple three-bedroom ranch house with a large basement and a big back yard. I don’t remember anything else until that first warm pleasant evening I met Charlie. He was the first sociopath I ever met.

“Roger, you and I are going to be really good friends,” he repeated. This was great. I knew the word “friend” but I don’t think I’d had one before. A friend was someone who wasn’t your brother or sister, who smiled at you, and played with you.

“But there’s just one thing I want you to do for me,” Charlie said. I beamed at him waiting for his next words. “I want you to bend over and stretch your arms way back between your knees.” It didn't seem unreasonable. He’s my friend.

I bent down and reached my little arms between my knees and waited. “Will he spank me?” I wondered. He grabbed my hands and pulled them hard.

My parents say that a neighbor found me stumbling slowly back toward my house. I don’t remember that. I think I was crying, and I do remember being rushed to the hospital. “Rushed to the hospital” was a new phrase for me, one to be repeated many times during my youth along with “take him to Oakwood,” the name of the hospital where I was born. I remember throwing up five times on the way to Oakwood. I remember doctors and bright lights and throwing up more.

I don’t remember much after that. I don’t think my parents called the police. I’m not sure whether they really grasped what happened to me. Maybe they thought it was simple kid roughhousing. I mean, I don’t remember Charlie or the Mason family being called to task for my concussion. It wouldn’t have mattered. The Masons, as I learned over the next few years, were a bad family. Sometime during the days following this event, our neighbor across the back yard, fence, Mr. Kotlarczyk, gave my dad and me some stern words of advice—“keep away from Charlie Mason.”

Next: My neighborhood