NO SAFETY

   

No Safety

 Going to college was not something I thought very much about as a kid. No one in my family had ever gone to college. I certainly never expected to go when I was only eleven.

But I did.

Here’s how it happened.

It’s spring—1948. I’m eleven years old. I’m much smaller than the other boys my age, and I’m not very strong. Every week I get to embarrass myself in gym. Of all the things I’m not good at, climbing the rope is the worst.

A long thick rope hangs down from the ceiling of the gym. It ends just a few inches above the floor. When Miss Frissel blows her whistle, I’m supposed to leap up, grab the rope and pull myself up, hand over hand, until I reach the top. Most of the boys scamper up like monkeys. When it’s my turn, I just hang there, grunting and flailing, my sneakers barely off the ground. My hands sweat and slip on the rope as the other kids wait behind me and watch. Miss Frissel leaves me to my misery. I swing back and forth for a few more seconds, then—mercifully—she blows her whistle and the next boy begins his climb. Head down, I shuffle over to stand with the kids who have finished, wishing I were invisible.

This pathetic performance goes on week after week, from February to June.

Imagine my surprise then, when a few weeks before summer vacation, my classmates elect me to be the next Captain of the Safety Patrol—the greatest honor you can achieve in the sixth grade. Maybe—I think—being able to climb a rope is not so important after all.

Safeties stand at the street corners before and after school and at lunchtime, and stop traffic so the younger kids can cross safely. As Captain, I get to assign the other Patrol members to their street corners, and make sure they show up on time and know their duties. This is a very big responsibility!

Safeties get to wear a uniform: white pants and a white shirt. Instead of a badge, they have a shoulder belt that goes diagonally across their chests, from the right shoulder down to the left hip. The belt is a couple of inches wide, thicker than a car safety belt, and it has “Safety patrol” written along its length in big orange letters. I think about how good I will look, and how proud I will feel, running (not shuffling) from corner to corner, checking up on my Safeties.

As Captain, I wouldn’t just stand on the corner. I would really stand out, every day, several times a day as the whole school passes by. This would feel a lot better than standing out in gym every week as a clumsy hopeless rope-climber.

Because I’m a “midyear” (kids who turned five after September were called “midyears,” because we had to wait until January—the middle of the school year—to begin Kindergarten. For me, the second half of sixth grade would be from September to January) I can’t begin my new post until September. That’s a long time to wait! Luckily, I have summer vacation to look forward to, so I comfort myself with thoughts of the things I will do until I go back to school in the fall.

My summer days were always special because I had the freedom to explore. Some of the explorations were done on my own. I loved Nature, and I often spent time just searching for the world that was hidden in the underbrush in my neighborhood. There were colorful flowers and berries, along with the insects that crawled on and under them, like the spiders that hid deep in the branches of bushes. Sometimes I would poke a long stick into one of their webs and twirl it, winding a thick silk covering onto it. Then I could touch the silk without worrying that the spider would get me. Its texture was sticky and rough at the same time, like nothing I had ever felt before.

And summer was butterfly season. Whenever an especially large and colorful one flew by I would watch it flit and glide toward a flowering bush. When it finally landed on a blossom I would sneak up behind it. Quickly, with my heart pounding, I would grasp it between my thumb and forefinger, just above the place where the wings joined the body. That way I wouldn’t harm it, and it couldn't flap its wings and get away.

When I held it up close I could see the little hooks at the ends of its legs that helped it to hang on to the flowers it drank from. If I had hooks like that, I could have climbed the rope in gym. The butterfly’s tongue was long, but it was all coiled up until it was ready to suck nectar. Each antenna was like a long thin stalk, but it had a little club on the end.

Butterflies had colors that I didn’t see anywhere else, except maybe in a big box of Crayola Crayons. The Monarch butterfly had a body that was as black as coal, but dotted with pure white spots. The Tiger Swallowtail had intense yellow wings with long black stripes. The Black Swallowtail really wasn’t black. It was black and blue and purple, all mixed together in a color I had no name for.

But crayons were hard and waxy. Butterfly wings were soft and delicate. If I gripped the wings too roughly, the color would flake right off on my fingertips. So I tried to hold on very carefully while I studied it. Then I would let it go and watch it fly off to another flower. This was so much better than looking at the black and white drawings in nature books.

Another thing I looked forward to in the summer was exploring with my friends. We were Cub Scouts, so we knew how to make a fire and cook food over it. We would walk to Leakin Park, which was four or five miles away. It had woods and picnic tables and barbeque pits that we knew were safe to build a fire in. We cooked hot dogs, baked beans and marshmallows, and even when they got burnt they tasted much better than anything our mothers ever cooked for us. We ate no vegetables, and we didn’t even wash our hands. We could eat seconds or even thirds if we wanted, and no one told us we would make ourselves sick. We learned that for ourselves.

If it rained we all ganged up on someone’s covered porch and read comics all day. My favorite was Captain Marvel, but Herbie thought Superman could beat him any day. Sheldon was a Batman fan. We argued about whether Plastic Man’s flexibility was better than the supersonic speed of The Whiz. We wondered if The Heap would ever get a girlfriend.

Some days we built model airplanes or played cards or Monopoly. Every day would be like going to summer camp, but without the counselors to tell us what to do—or not to do!

But I never got to be Captain of the Safety Patrol, and I never had the summer vacation I was expecting either. This happened because of another honor that was bestowed or—really—imposed on me.

It was all because I was such a good student. Each summer throughout the city, some sixth grade midyear students were given the opportunity to “skip” the second half of the sixth grade, and begin junior high school (seventh grade) in the fall. I was one of two students who were selected from my class. My parents said I had to go to Summer School.

I was outraged by this! I didn’t just want to be Captain of the Safeties: I needed to be Captain. I finally had a way to prove to the kids in my class that I could be a leader—not just the skinny kid dangling helplessly at the end of a rope. How could skipping half a grade be more important than this? I felt that my mother and father had betrayed me.

Looking back on this now, I think my parents must have realized that if my grades were good enough to skip, there was a chance I might be able to win a scholarship to go to college. They had no money to send me to college. The only way I could go would be on a scholarship.

But if I was a midyear student, there could be a problem. Since colleges did not have midyear classes, those of us who would eventually graduate high school in January would not be able to begin a regular four-year academic program until the following September. That meant I would be out of school for nearly nine months.

If that was their concern, no one explained it to me. And if they had, I would not have understood. To a twelve-year-old, a nine-month vacation from school would have sounded good. To a parent, it was an enormous waste of time—or worse. In nine months I could lose interest in going to college. At that time in my life my father, who had only a high-school education, went from job to job. He had no security. He wanted something better for me, and a college degree was the way to get it.

I announced to my class that they had to choose another Captain. I felt sad because I had to give up something that I felt I had earned. I remember being so angry that I declared, as well, that I planned to fail Summer School so that I could return to my class in the fall and claim my honor.

Summer School turned out to be a great adventure. Up to that point, the only school I had ever gone to was just a half-block from my home at 4008 Oakford Avenue. For six years I walked two minutes to school. Then two minutes home for lunch. Then two minutes back to school. And at the end of the school day, two minutes home.

But the first morning of Summer School I was picked up by a bus, and returned home in the afternoon. I had never been on a bus that was entirely dedicated to getting me from my house to my destination. It was door-to-door service. The only stops were to pick up the other kids, who lived in neighborhoods I had never been in.

And our destination? That was the best part. Summer School was held on the campus of The Johns Hopkins University. We met all day in a single classroom in a building called Maryland Hall. Our room was on a corner of the building, on the first floor. This photo shows that very corner.

In the basement of Maryland Hall were the laboratories in which engineering students did research toward completion of their Masters and Doctoral degrees. The room in which we met, that summer of 1948, was directly above the basement laboratory in which I would carry on my own PhD research, ten years later.

I had no idea, of course, that this building—actually this very classroom—would be a part of my future. In that one room I would later take classes with names like Thermodynamics, and Transport Phenomena, and Chemical Kinetics and Applied Mathematics. The bulk of my engineering education would take place in that single room. All I knew then, in the summer of 1948, was that I had been transported—literally—to a world I had not known existed.

It’s hard to describe how different Summer School on the Hopkins campus was from regular school at PS 69. Maybe this next picture helps.

PS 69 looked like some kind of institution for housing criminals or lunatics. It had a “Boys Entrance” and a “Girls Entrance.” I did not realize how drab and gloomy it was until I got to Maryland Hall. On the Hopkins campus I felt as if I were in a park. The buildings were separated by grassy lawns. Wide, tree-lined walkways connected one building to another. Instead of the oaks and maples that I was used to in my neighborhood, the walkways near Maryland Hall were lined with flowering trees like dogwood and magnolia, with pink and white blossoms.

In addition, I had new classmates. Until that summer I had spent six years with the same kids. Once in a while someone new moved into the neighborhood and I had a new classmate and friend. But it really was only once in a while. In six years I remember only four “newcomers” to PS 69. They were Leroy Frazier, Skippy Loss, Leonard Miller and Herbie Press. But now in my new class there were twenty boys and girls from all over the city. We were all bright and verbal and excited to be there. Instead of walking home for lunch every day we sat outside on the lawns and had picnics.

I got along well with my new classmates. I felt good about myself. I suppose part of this was that I was somehow able to leave PS 69 behind as I boarded the bus each morning. I was having fun, and the disappointment of missing out on summer vacation was quickly forgotten.

And just as rapidly, summer itself ended and I found myself starting the seventh grade at Garrison Junior High School. I no longer needed to be Captain of the Safety Patrol. I had new classmates, new friends, and a school that was more than two minutes from my home. Not that much more! Now it took me about ten minutes to walk four blocks to school.

Still: it was a beginning. My world was expanding. I was getting ready to grow.

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STREETCARS and JUNCTIONS

Some people think I have an abnormal preoccupation with Baltimore streetcars. I don't deny it.  But in the Forties it was just about the only mode of transportation that I experienced. The streetcars were electric and they rode on a rail system throughout the city. Riding them exposed you to all of the senses except taste. The car swayed from side to side, and some people got "car sick." There was the odor of people in the summer, and in the soggy winter, the odor of their musty wet overcoats. While the electric motor was fairly quiet, the clacking of the metal wheels on the metal tracks was incessant. When the motorman stopped the car there was the high-pitched squeal of the braking system. As far as touch was concerned, there was the feel of hard wicker seats or fake leather seat coverings, always cracked with stuffing puffing out. Visually, there were strange people to glance at; people who didn't live in our neighborhood. 

There were the advertising signs that lined the space above the windows. But the sign that sticks most firmly in my memory was the one above the motorman's window:  

NO SMOKING

NO SPITTING

No kidding!! There really was a sign telling passengers that you could not spit while riding.

Streetcars and Junctions

Some words come into your vocabulary, and into your life, at a time when you don’t think much about them as individual words because they arrive attached to such strong ideas. One of those words for me was, and still is, “junction.” The dictionary definition is simple enough: a place where two or more objects, for example, roads or railroad routes, join, meet, or cross. But I never thought of a junction as a meeting or crossing place. For me it was a boundary—an edge to my world—that separated me from a foreign land.

When we wanted to get somewhere we had only two options that did not involve our parents. One was simply to walk to our destination. This limited us to places within about two miles of home, and times when the weather was decent enough to walk in. The second choice involved the streetcar—we usually called it the “trolley.” Baltimore’s streetcar lines could take us anywhere throughout the city in a trip of 30 to 45 minutes at most, at a cost of about a nickel. By the time we were nine or ten years old, my friends and I rode the streetcars without fear of getting lost or stranded, and without dread of the strangers that we rode with.

My earliest memories of streetcars are of the #31 line that ran along Garrison Boulevard. Although my family lived in half a dozen places for the first fifteen years of my life, all of these homes were within a short walk of Garrison Boulevard. We rarely took the streetcar northward on Garrison because we lived within walking distance of the northern end of the line: the “car barn” at Belvedere Avenue. The car barn was the overnight home of the streetcars that ran along the route of the #31, as well as the cars that ran northeast along Belvedere Avenue into the Pimlico and Mount Washington areas.

                                     

                                     

                           This is a 1929 map of the streetcar routes through the northwest section

                            of the City of Baltimore. The route numbers are enclosed in the circles.

By far, the majority of my streetcar trips were in the southern direction along most of the two mile length of Garrison Boulevard to Walbrook Junction, and from there east and south toward downtown Baltimore. The shortest “journey” we would take would be less than a mile to Liberty Heights Avenue, a street filled with small stores and shops. All of our family needs were met there by its two drugstores (Shure’s and Read’s), a grocery store (the A&P), a bank (The Union Trust Company of Maryland) and a barbershop where Mr. Libertini cut my hair. There was a shoe store and a jewelry store, a Kresge’s “5 and 10” where I could get comics or goldfish or toys, and a clothing store and a hardware store. Martha Washington Candies was two doors down from the Car Lou Beauty Shop. It was not until I was in junior high school that I noticed the presence of the Liberty Heights Recreation Center, better known as Knocko’s Pool Room.

The Forest Theatre was on Garrison, just past the intersection with Liberty Heights. There was a record store across from the theatre and, by the late 40s, a TV store with a set in the window that we could watch in the evening.

In the 1940s this is what we had before the creation of shopping malls.

In 1951, in the summer before I started high school, we moved away from Oakford Avenue to an apartment in Windsor Hills. This was a wonderful streetcar opportunity for me, because it enabled me to ride the #35 “jerkwater” line. You can get an idea of the novelty of this streetcar line from the definition of the word “jerkwater:”

1.      remote from population centers and considered insignificant and backward (insult)

2.      lacking consequence or significance

While Windsor Hills was somewhat remote from the population center, my move there was far from lacking in consequence. The #35 streetcar was an antique of sorts, having been built in 1905. It did not have a front or a back—each end was both front and back. The car could be converted almost instantly to go in either direction.

                                                   

The Jerkwater Trolley

From Windsor Hills the #35 streetcar line terminated at Walbrook Junction. The car rode into the little “car barn” at the corner of Clifton Avenue and Garrison Boulevard (I never could get away from Garrison Boulevard!) and discharged its passengers to transfer to lines that went north or east from there. The streetcar driver (he was the “conductor” or “moterman”) picked up his cash box and his change maker, detached his controller, the metal bar with which he altered the power to the electric motor that drove the car, and walked to the other end of the car. He attached his controller, installed his cash box, and was almost ready to reverse his route and head back to Windsor Hills. But first he had to do two things. He had to reverse the wicker seat backs so that the passengers would be facing in the direction of motion of the car. And then he had to change the “trolley.” The “trolley” was actually just the pole that connected the overhead electric power line to the motor that drove the wheels. The word “trolley” had become identical with the whole streetcar itself. There was a trolley at each end of the car, and depending on the direction the car was going, one trolley (at the back end of the car) was connected to the overhead power line and the other was pulled down and tied in place against the roof. A spring on the roof of the car provided the tension that held the trolley to the wire. At the end of the pole was a little metal wheel that rolled along the wire and maintained the electrical contact. To reverse direction of the car, the motorman lowered the trolley that had been in contact with the power line by pulling down on a rope attached to its upper end. The rope was then wound around a holder at that end of the car. At the other end (that would now become the rear of the car), the motorman then released the pole that had not been in use to that point, and connected it to the overhead wire. He was then ready to depart Walbrook Junction, head back through Windsor Hills, and continue on to the other end of his route, a tiny mill town named Dickeyville that went back to the late 1700s. Riding the #35 jerkwater was like riding a (slow) time machine. 

This is the #35 streetcar at Walbrook Junction, on its way

back to Dickeyville.

Part of my fascination with Walbrook Junction, and junctions in general, had to do with the streetcar tracks. Along Garrison Boulevard, and along Liberty Heights Avenue, two pairs of shiny steel tracks ran straight down the street. There was a crossing at the intersection of Liberty Heights and Garrison, but otherwise the tracks were uninterrupted. But junctions were much more interesting than straight tracks and crossings. At a junction there was a separate set of rails that curved off in a new direction. The pictures that follow show Walbrook Junction and Gwynn Oak Junction.

               

This is Walbrook junction, around 1950. On the right, the #31 streetcar is approaching the southern end of Garrison Boulevard before it heads downtown. On the left is the edge of the small car barn from which the #35 streetcar headed into Windsor Hills. The tracks coming from the right (behind where the photographer was standing) also split off to the left and circled the car barn. That’s how the #13 streetcar got into position, in the left of the picture, to head back to its eastern route across North Avenue.

                        

This is Gwynn Oak Junction, in 1950, looking east up Liberty Heights Avenue. The #32 streetcar is going to turn to its left (to the right in the photo) and go down Gwynn Oak Avenue to Gwynn Oak Amusement Park. The photo also shows the two main movie theatres in my neighborhood, both of which I could walk to from Oakford Avenue in less than fifteen minutes. The Ambassador is on the left and the Gwynn on the right. The Gwynn showed cowboy movies on Saturdays, along with cartoons, a serial, news of the world and a Three Stooges Comedy. If the photographer turned to his left he would shoot the scene shown in the next picture below.

                                         

          This is another view at Gwynn Oak Junction, looking north up Gwynn Oak Avenue.

Looking back now, I think my fascination with the junctions and their curves had to do with the idea that there were places along the streetcar routes where I thought the motorman could make choices. In reality, of course, the motorman did not exercise those choices. He had a specific route to follow. If you were the motorman of the westbound #13 car approaching Walbrook Junction, you circled the car barn and headed back east along North Avenue. You did not continue straight along the route of the #35 into Windsor Hills; you did not throw the switch that shifted a section of the track and forced the wheels to follow the curve to the right and head north up Garrison Boulevard. You followed the routes that the streetcar company dictated. When a passenger got on the #31 streetcar he could be assured that the car would follow the same route every day.

So, I must have been attracted to the possibility of departing from the rules that were dictated by the map of the routes for the various lines through the city. Was it possible that, like the motorman, I could push a button that would switch my track to a new direction? That would have been a strong attraction to a boy who felt fenced in by the rules that the adult world placed upon him. Of course there were the usual childhood safety rules with their implied consequences:

don’t run into the street (you’ll get run over by a car)

don’t play with matches (you’ll get burned)

don’t climb over fences (you’ll fall and break your neck)

don’t get scratched by a rusty nail (you’ll get lockjaw)

Lockjaw sounded terrible, so we stayed away from rusty nails. It is a real disease; its medical name is tetanus. If you look it up, you find “an acute infectious disease, usually contracted through a penetrating wound, that causes severe muscular spasms and contractions, especially around the neck and jaw.”

One of the unstated rules—one that we just learned from experience—was:

don’t cross the boundaries of your neighborhood.

The problem was: how do you define the boundaries of your neighborhood?

 Looking back seventy years, I think the answer was that my neighborhood boundaries were defined by the streetcar lines, and particularly by the junctions. By and large, my world was bounded by sections of the Baltimore Transit system. I hardly ever went beyond the #35 line on the south. I rarely crossed Gwynn Oak Avenue. The first fifteen years of my life were lived almost entirely in the small triangle bounded by Gwynn Oak Avenue, Liberty Heights Avenue, and Garrison Boulevard. 

These neighborhood boundaries had no fences. They were uncrossable out of fear of the unknown. I did not know anyone who lived across Gwynn Oak Avenue. So far as I knew, no one in my school lived on the “other side.” As for the #35 line, I did not know that anyone lived on the other side. It was like the edge of the known world, to me.

I did go to school with kids who lived on the other side (to the east) of Garrison Boulevard, but I rarely had occasion to go to their neighborhoods. I had enough friends on my side of Garrison. I was not scared when I crossed the Garrison line, but the air did seem somehow different from that on “my side.” It’s hard, especially so many years later, to describe the difference, but whatever it was, it was enough to make me aware that I was out of my neighborhood.

I wonder if my grandchildren have any sense of “neighborhood.” I don’t see how they could. They don’t walk to school, or to after-school activities. They don’t have neighborhood playgrounds or movies. All of their activities require an automobile trip, and most of those ventures are over the Los Angeles Freeways. I doubt if they have ever walked a half-mile in the rain. They certainly have never walked through snow or on ice. Even though I rode the streetcars, I still had to walk to the streets along which their tracks were confined. I knew the sidewalks and the curbs—the feel of the rough concrete.

And sometimes, as I stood on the corner waiting for the trolley, I stared up and down the street at the gleaming steel tracks, and wondered if today, just maybe, the motorman would throw a switch and take me somewhere I had never been.

The Secret Passageway

The Secret Passageway

W

hen I was a kid my family didn’t go on vacations, so instead I made up exotic names for the ordinary and everyday places on Oakford Avenue that I played in and around. There was “Paradise,” and “The Secret Passageway.” Even “The Alleyway” seemed to have a special sound to it when we whispered it as our destination. Going to “Valerie’s Pond” was like traveling to the jungles of India.

The “Water Tower” loomed over the whole neighborhood as if it were part of a medieval castle.

We wondered what lay behind the doorway that we never saw opened. What secrets were just inside the dark open windows at the top?

 

The names make me think, now, of the treasure maps in the stories that we all read at the time. There was no treasure hidden in our neighborhood, but if there had been, here’s what the map of our block would have looked like.

This is the block where I grew up in Baltimore. I lived in an apartment at 4008 Oakford Avenue. We moved there around 1941, and moved away in the summer of 1951.
          

This is what the block looks like now, in a satellite photo taken around 2006. Some things from my childhood are still there; some are not. The apartment building to the left of 4008 is gone.

Four families lived in each of the Oakford Apartment buildings; two downstairs and two upstairs. Across the alleyway, fronting on Ridgewood Avenue, were semi-detached houses: two families lived side-by-side in two-storey homes. They shared a wall, but had separate walkways from the street, separate entrances, and each had its own covered porch. If you look at the satellite picture you can see that the Ridgewood houses were fronted by large lawns. The Oakford Apartments had only a short slope of grass down to the sidewalk.

I envied the kids who lived on Ridgewood. They were not crowded into a tiny two bedroom apartment, and they had porches that they could sit on in rainy weather and work on projects, or play games. We would play on their front lawns. I was very aware that they lived a step up in the economic scale of the neighborhood, even if it were only a small step.

The big step up was at the end of Ridgewood, next to the grounds of the Water Tower. That was where a girl named Valerie lived, in a bungalow that was not shared with another family on the other side of a wall, or with neighbors who lived on the floor above them. It was the most beautiful house in the entire neighborhood, on what seemed to me to be a huge piece of ground with pathways and trees and flowers and—most exciting of all—a pond full of fish.

“Valerie’s Pond.”

The name still has a magical sound to it. I’m sure it’s the reason I have always been attracted to ponds.

I did not refer to it as “Valerie’s Pond,” however. I called it as I heard it: Vallalee’s Pond.” It was only years later that, on reflection, I realized that the girl was named Valerie.

I have some photographs taken when I was about two years old, on the grounds of the Water Tower. At that time we lived on Oakford Avenue, but just across the street from the apartment at 4008. In one of the photos, Valerie’s house is in the background.

                              

                                    

This photograph of the side of Valerie’s house was taken around 1938, from the grounds of the Water Tower, which stands just to the right side of the picture taker, but out of the camera’s view. Behind the house, across the alleyway, on the right side of the photo, is the back porch of our apartment on Oakford Avenue.

In the photo above you can see, running along the side of the house, a low hedge that separated Valerie’s house from the grounds of the Water Tower. Just behind the hedge was a private driveway that connected Ridgewood Avenue and Oakford Avenue. That driveway led to a small one-car garage that Valerie’s dad parked in. If you look at the map you can see that, toward the Oakford Avenue end, the driveway ran along the side of the last of the Oakford Apartment buildings. There, the driveway was separated from the apartment by a long wire fence. The narrow space between the driveway and the apartment building was “The Secret Passageway.”

The reason that I called it “secret” was that no one knew you were there when you stood in the space between the fence and the concrete foundation of the apartment, As skinny as I was at that time, I had to stand sideways to move through the passageway.

The fence was covered with leafy vines—I remember grape vines and morning glories. In the summer the leaves were so dense that it was really hard to see through them.  It was a safe place where no one would discover you, but it was also a place where you could discover things.

One finding was the grapes. To me, grapes appeared once in a while on our dinner table, and otherwise I saw them displayed in the grocery store. It never occurred to me that they grew somewhere, and I certainly was surprised when I discovered that grapes grew on a fence near my home. Through the summer I observed the grapes as they grew fatter, and turned from pale green to purple. That was the point—when the grapes were plump and purple—that I risked death by poisoning: I would bite into a grape!

Our mothers told us that we should never eat anything that grew on trees or bushes or vines. “They might be poison!” We knew about poison because we had seen the movie or read the story of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. We were not afraid of apples, but there were plenty of wild berries to tempt us. The hedges in front of our apartment had small red berries. They had a bitter taste, so we did not eat them after the first test bite. There was a little red berry that grew on the ground that looked a lot like a strawberry. It didn’t taste good enough to bother with. There was a bush with small purple berries. We didn’t eat those, either. We mashed them into a pulp and used the juice as a dye for “war paint” when we were Indians. There was a big blackberry bush at the house on the corner of Oakford and Garrison. We knew those berries were good to eat because whenever we picked them, the lady who lived there hollered at us, and threatened to tell our mothers.

Another discovery from within the Secret Passageway was the life of insects. Of course, insects were all around us in the summer, but we usually did not get so close to them. But in the narrow space between the fence and the wall of the apartment building, there was hardly room to turn. Since I moved through the passageway sideways, I had a choice of facing the concrete wall, or facing the fence. The wall was not at all interesting, so I faced the leaf-and-vine-covered fence, and everything that lived along its length. It was full of life! And since the fence was taller than I was then, it was all in my face.

There were Japanese Beetles with glistening green and purple bodies, and ladybugs with black polka dots on glossy red backs. All kinds of spiders, hairy with fangs, lurked behind leaves, waiting for something smaller to come close. The spiders were not that large, but since they were just inches from my face they seemed huge and scary to me.

Although they were hard to spot in the dense green leaves, praying mantises were there, and they hunted everything. It was not unusual to see a mantis finishing a meal, with just a wing of its victim sticking out of its mouth. Of course there were wasps that fed on the sugary juice that oozed from the broken skins of the grapes. If I saw a wasp I froze and waited until it moved on. I was afraid of wasps. I was close enough to them that I could see that they had  mean looking faces.

                                                                                                          

There were ants everywhere, especially on the ground, cleaning up whatever fell from the activities of their fellow insects in the jungle above, and carrying it down into their underground nests. The Secret Passageway was not just a hiding place where I could fantasize adventures; it was also my own personal insect zoo.

“Paradise” was a different place altogether. It was the space between my building at 4008, and the one to the right: 4006. It was overgrown with bushes and weeds and flowers. There was no gardener to care for it—it just grew. No one fertilized the plants and bushes, watered them or pruned them, or tended to them in any way. It was an untamed space full of color.

Some of the bushes (I knew they were called “forsythia”) had small bright yellow flowers. Others (the “hollyhocks”) had clusters of huge pink and red blossoms, much larger than my hand, that attracted bees and butterflies. Paradise was uncultivated—wild and colorful. It was a huge contrast to what I saw when I stood in front of my apartment building, staring at the dark brown wooden shingles that covered its depressing exterior.

A bumblebee

The hollyhock flower provided an opportunity for adventure. Large black and yellow striped bees (we called them “bumblebees”) were attracted to the center of the blossom, to the part that was covered with pollen. The bee went headfirst deep into the flower. While it was in there you could, if you were very careful, and very brave, close the petals of the flower around the bee, leaving it trapped inside.

The bee catcher's dilemma

                  

A trapped bumblebee is very angry! It buzzes vigorously, and loudly, and you can feel the vibration of its wings right through the flower. Only the thin petal separates your bare skin from the stinger of the bumblebee. Mastering the skill of trapping the bumblebee was important, but there was an even more critical skill to learn. What did I do when I tired of listening to the bee (the angry bee!) buzzing inside the blossom? If I just loosened my grip on the ends of the petals, the bee could fly out, but would it? It seemed more likely that the bee would walk out onto my hand, raise an amused eyebrow, and sink its stinger into my palm. The trick was to throw the blossom away from yourself as hard as you could, and run in the opposite direction. I got very good at blossom tossing.

There’s another feature of the Oakford Apartments that you can see if you look closely at the satellite photo. Between the buildings at 4006 and 4004 there is a sidewalk that connects the alleyway to a sidewalk that runs along the front of all of the buildings. (There was a sidewalk between 4008 and 4010, but when 4010 was demolished, the sidewalk disappeared as well, so it does not appear in the photo.) The sidewalks served lots of purposes, but one of them was especially exciting to me. It was used for the delivery of coal to the basement of each building.

A radiator

 Our apartments were heated by radiators. Here’s how they worked. There was a big furnace in a corner of each basement. Coal was shoveled into the furnace by the janitor—the maintenance man for all of the apartments in our block. As far as I know, the coal was kept burning all the time. There was a huge coal pile next to the furnace, and James the Janitor (we never called him just “James.” He was always “James the Janitor.”) shoveled coal into the furnace throughout the day. Water pipes passed through the furnace, just above the fire, and the heat turned the water to steam. The steam then flowed through more pipes that led up to the radiators within each apartment.

                        

Small rooms (like a bedroom) had a single radiator. A larger room might have two. The hot steam passed through the inside of the radiator, and this heated up the metal surfaces, which became too hot to touch. The air in the room was then heated by its contact with the outer surfaces of the radiator. This cooled the steam inside the radiator enough that it condensed as hot water, which then flowed back downstairs into the basement. There was a valve on the inlet pipe that let you control the flow of steam into the radiator, and in that way you could regulate how hot it got.

It took a lot of coal to keep the furnace going continuously, especially through the winter. That’s where the sidewalks from the alleyway come into the picture. About once a week, a coal delivery truck would drive down the alleyway and then turn onto the sidewalk and pull up to a point at about the middle of the length of the apartment building. The basement had some windows that where just above ground level on the outside. From the inside of the basement, those windows were just below the basement ceiling. That ceiling was the floor of our apartment.

The coal man would place a chute (it looked just like a sliding board at the playground) through one of the windows, and then shovel coal from the back of the truck onto the top of the chute. From that point the coal would slide down the chute, through the window opening and end up in a huge pile on the basement floor below. After the coal truck left, James (the Janitor) would shovel the coal into a wheelbarrow and form a big coal pile next to the furnace on the other side of the basement.

Coal delivery day was exciting. As soon as my mother heard the truck, she ran around and closed any open windows. She did this because, otherwise, the coal dust would be blown into the apartment and coat every surface with a gritty black film. I was excited because I enjoyed watching the coal flow from the bed of the truck down the chute, to disappear into the basement below me. Television had not yet been invented, so watching jet-black lumps of coal flow down a shiny metal chute was more stimulating than you can imagine.

A lump of coal

After the coal truck was gone, and James (the Janitor) had finished his work, I would go into the basement and search for any pieces of coal that he might have missed. We used coal like black chalk, to mark off the boundaries of the street games that we played, or to write on the walls or sidewalks.

The furnace served another purpose, in addition to being the heating source for our home. It was also the “Incinerator.” That was another magic word in our vocabularies. The kitchen in our apartment had two doorways. One was the way into the dining room. The other opened into the narrow hallway that led to the two bedrooms and the bathroom at the rear of the apartment.

The chute to the incinerator

As you stepped through that doorway into the hall you faced the wall that divided my apartment from the one next door. In that wall was a small square hinged door about twelve inches on a side—it was the chute to the incinerator. It was just like a laundry chute, except in this case whatever you put down the chute fell into the furnace to be incinerated. When you pulled the chute door open you could feel the hot air rising from the furnace below. If someone else in the building had recently dropped rubbish down the chute, you got the odor of burning paper or, sometimes, even garbage along with the smoke.

This was not a pleasant experience, so I learned the art of opening the chute quickly, dumping the rubbish into it, and slamming the door shut.

When I think back to the time that I lived in that block of Oakford Avenue, I realize what an adventure it was. Each day was an opportunity for discovery. It was so different from sitting in front of a television set today and watching something that is completely separated from your own life. When I was a small boy, I created my own programming each day that I went outside. The programs took place in exotic lands: Valerie’s Pond, Paradise,  the looming Water Tower.

And my special place: The Secret Passageway. It wasn’t just a narrow space between a concrete wall and a vine-covered wire fence. It was a “theme park.” You did not have to buy a ticket. You just had to watch as life happened in front of your face. And if nothing was happening, you could memorize what the tendril of a grape vine looks like, wrapped around the rusty wires of a fence, and wonder how a dragonfly wing ended up there.