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