Friday, October 10, 2014

Oakford at War





Oakford at War

We knew about the war. We were old enough to read and make some sense out of the newspaper. The comic books were certainly full of it—at least the ones I read.

 The radio serials—Hop Harrigan, Captain Midnight, and even Tom Mix—simply incorporated the war into the neighborhood, the city, the ranch. My friends and I chased each other with toy pistols, making guttural gun noises (not BANG! like our little brothers did) and arguing and fighting about whether we were shot. When it rained we sat on each other's porches and built models of P47 Thunderbolts and P38 Lightnings, stretching the delicate thin tissue paper over fragile balsa wood ribs. Our tongues tripped uncomfortably and self-consciously over words like dihedral angle and bulkhead



We were able to identify enemy aircraft from the silhouette sheets included in the model kits.  Our vocabularies expanded to even more uncomfortable words. We knew the German divebomber, the Junkers Stuka; the Japanese fighter plane, the Mitsubishi Zero—the “Zeke.”
 
Messerscmitt ME 109

Junkers JU 87 “Stuka”
Mitsubishi Zero







Each of our homes had "blackout" shades, ours on the big windows in our sun parlor that faced Oakford Avenue, and every few weeks there was an air raid practice. I asked my father why the shades were green if they were for "blackout." He taught me the word "opaque." Sometimes the air raid practice would come after I had gone to bed, and I would lie there wondering if the plane flying over our house was a Messerschmitt ME 109. I looked at the empty bed next to mine. My big brother was in the Army Air Force. I could draw a Boeing B17 without looking at a picture.

The war movies and the newsreels filled us with the images and sounds of bombing raids, and of men running—half-crouched—through woods and fields. Some of these men were our fathers, or our uncles, or our older brothers. We could never recognize their faces on the screen. Everything was too grainy, too fast, too scary. We talked about the war in school, on the playground, at Cub Scouts. But we learned to avoid “war talk” around Johnny Frazier—at least for a while—after his father's submarine disappeared in the Pacific.

Playing at war didn't seem quite substantial enough to me. There was no blood. We fell to the ground, clutching our stomachs, shouting lines heard at the movies, but making sure not to scrape our faces in the dirt. And then, in June and July of 1945, in that last summer of the war, we learned to become authentic—methodical—killers. We destroyed the Japanese in our own version of the War of the Roses.

I lived in an apartment building. Sylvan Richter lived across the alley, on Ridgewood Avenue. His house had a porch, and a long yard to the street. And all along the pavement to the front steps, Sylvan's mother grew roses.
The roses were also victims of the Japanese. Japanese beetles wearing iridescent purple and brown armor had invaded Baltimore, chewing holes in the leaves and petals of every rose bush that lined the walks to our homes. And we fought back.
The beetle traps were metal cans, painted a bright yellow or green, hung from hooks at the tops of long metal rods staked into the dirt at the foot of each bush. We didn't know what was inside the cans—just that it was "poison" and we were not to touch it. Of course we did touch it. And smell it!
 A strange odor emanated from the cans—a mix of gasoline and sweet perfume. The beetles were attracted to the aroma, and they entered the traps through holes that ringed the top of each can. In the morning we would look into the bottom of the trap and see a mass of drowned, poisoned beetles. What satisfaction—we were winning the war. But for some of us it was too passive a victory. We were not content on the sidelines, counting the kill. We went on the attack.

We were capable of such cruelty. Did the war do that to us? I don't think so. It was the recognition, at a gut level, that we had no control over our lives.  We were eight and nine years old, but we knew that someone—something—was pulling our strings and we flopped helplessly at the ends.

It was easy to capture a Japanese beetle. There were two methods. With care, you could pick a beetle off of a leaf between your thumb and forefinger, gripping it by its sides. It was a delicate task. If your grasp was off just a bit, the beetle was able to turn sideways and grab on to your finger. Beetle legs were clawed and strong. You could not separate the beetle easily from its hold on the ridges of your fingerprints. There were two choices at that point. One was to transfer the beetle into the palm of your other hand and keep it trapped within a loose fist. This could lead, after a while, to a handful of scrabbling beetles, tickling and squirming to break free.

The alternative was to take the single beetle, still between two fingers, and throw it onto the cement pavement—to disable it. This was rarely successful. If the beetle's grip were strong enough it would not be flung easily to the ground. Instead, it would be released from between our fingers at a much-reduced speed, and it would fly away before it reached the walkway.
We honed our skills through the spring and into the hot Baltimore summer. We learned that the beetles were lethargic early in the morning. We belted our holsters to our waists and crept through the jungles of the neighborhood. We met under the wooden back porch of 4008 Oakford Avenue and compared prisoners.
The beetles were transferred to small cardboard cartons—usually the boxes that our mother's kitchen matches came in. In answer to the periodic question—why are all the wooden matches loose in the sink drawer?—we just shrugged without even looking up from our comic books. The beetles scrabbled, agitated, within their prison, and we prepared our "flame-throwers."

Our garages, our basements, were virtual arsenals in the war against the beetles. We had access to paint thinner, lighter fluid, gasoline—if it burned we brought it. In small quantities so that it wouldn't be missed. The boxes containing the "prisoners of war" were placed in a pile and we sat, usually three or four of us, cross-legged, surrounding them. We couldn't stand; the headroom under the porch was no more than three feet, and in places much less. If we stood we were at risk of hitting our heads on the support rafters of the porch, or worse. The underside of the wooden decking was the breeding ground for huge black and gray spiders. They sat in dusty webs waiting for ants, bees, roaches...and small boys playing at war.

We soaked the boxes with the flammable liquids. The intensity of the scrabbling rose to an easily heard frantic scratching. One of us, assigned as a lookout, gave the "all clear" signal. No mother was on the porch above. We opened our matchbooks. We did not close the cover before striking. Flaming matches were tossed into the middle of our circle. With a low "woof" the flammable vapor exploded and the small containers began to burn. We shouted obscenities at the "Japs" and elbowed each other. We were doing our job.

I don't know what the others felt, but I was scared—there was a scrabbling inside my stomach, as if a beetle was in there, clawing to get out. Our outward reactions were varied. We shared the need to be quiet so that we would not attract attention from above, but the excitement of the moment usually overtook us. I remember making bombing noises as I tossed matches into the fire. Sylvan always whined like the siren that announced the air raid practices.
 Johnny Frazier never made a sound; he stared at the pile of destruction until the last flame went out. 
And we glanced at him quickly and then away, and recorded in lasting memory his silence, and though we were just boys we understood that he was the only one among us who knew what the war was all about.

About this Blog

These are stories about time and space. The time is the 1940s—the time of my childhood. The space is just a few square miles of Baltimore. It is a space filled with images that bring back the memories that I share with you here.



Don’t Fence Me In






Some images from childhood come back with such strength, and so without warning, that I startle at their sudden appearance. It’s as if a gust of wind has blown 1940 into my face—stinging me with recollection. It begins with the picture of me on a pony. I’m about three years old, and the picture is taken in front of the house that we lived in at that time, at 4015 Oakford Avenue.

There is a section of the stone wall of the house, a little above the pony’s head, that draws my attention. It’s a small portion where several larger stones came together, leaving an odd-shaped space that needed to be filled in with smaller pieces. 


Whenever I come across this photograph, I always look for this special place. I see a triangle, pointed down, with a short horizontal piece of cement through the middle of it, and it seems out of place with the general pattern of the stonework on this wall. You probably would never notice it, or if you did you wouldn’t give it much thought. So you might wonder why it came to my attention at all. Certainly, when I was three years old, I was not noticing geometrical patterns in the world around me, and cataloging them as like or unlike. It reminds me of the visual “intelligence” tests that display five pictures and ask you to pick out which one is different from the other four.

The answer to this mystery has to do with how often I looked at that wall. And that’s part of another mystery: why did we live in so many different places within one block of this house?

The boy on the pony was a popular image in the 1940s, so much so that each summer a photographer would walk the neighborhoods with his (I guess, rented) pony and offer to take pictures of the children. This was an era when people did not travel much, and in my neighborhood this was even more the case because there was no extra money for vacation trips. I think that in putting their children on a pony, the parents could pretend that the family had the mobility that they saw in the movies about other people whose lives were more exciting—more interesting—because they could go on vacations “out West,” or even to South America. Popular songs of that era had titles like “Don’t Fence Me In,” and “I Love the Wide Open Spaces.”

Here’s the beginning of “Don’t Fence Me In”:

Oh, give me land, lots of land under starry skies above,
Don’t fence me in.
Let me ride through the wide open spaces that I love,
Don’t fence me in.

We didn’t ride wild horses through the wide open spaces. From Oakford Avenue we took the trolley down Garrison Boulevard to Liberty Heights Avenue. And for the first seventeen years of my life, I was fenced inside a very narrow portion of Baltimore. If I take an old map of my neighborhood, and draw the boundaries that I stayed inside of, the map looks like this:


I was born in 1936 in Baltimore  in a house on Fairview Avenue. If you look at the 1935 map above, the number 1 in a circle is at Fairview Avenue. Shortly after my birth, we moved to an apartment at 4006 Oakford Avenue (Number 5). Then it was directly across the street to 4015 Oakford (that’s Number 3). Not long after, we moved around the corner to Number 2, an apartment on Garrison Boulevard, between Oakford and Ridgewood Avenues.

The next stop was 4125 Woodhaven Avenue (number 4), just a few blocks from my birthplace. And then, at the age of four or five, back to Oakford Avenue (4008, next door to 4006) and directly across the street from 4015. So much directly across the street that for the next ten years, when I looked out the front sunparlor window, I faced the house of my pony picture. Yes. We stayed in one place for ten years—a family record.

The commercial center of this neighborhood was the corner of Liberty Heights and Garrison. To give an idea of how confined this region was, I could start at that corner and walk along Garrison Boulevard to either extreme—north to Oakford or south to Woodhaven—in about ten or fifteen minutes.

I began kindergarten at PS 69, and then after sixth grade went three and a half blocks south to PS 42 (Garrison Junior High School) for the next three years. When I finished ninth grade we moved to Windsor Hills (number 6). We stayed there for two years and then moved back to Fairview Avenue (number 7), right across the street from my birthplace. A year later in the summer after my high school graduation, we moved again, not quite back to Oakford Avenue, but close enough (number 8).

The upper (northern) boundary is Ridgewood Avenue, just one block past Oakford. Practically everything I did was below that border. Going down the map from there, my friends and I played games on the fields of the three schools within a few blocks of Oakford Avenue. The red line drawn across the middle is Liberty Heights Avenue. At the left-hand end of Liberty Heights were the movie theatres, the Gwynn and the Ambassador (the purple and green dots), that were our main sources of amusement, especially in the winter months. At the other end, just off the corner of Liberty Heights and Garrison, was the third movie house, the Forest Theatre (the blue dot).

By and large, when I look at this map with the artificial boundaries that I’ve drawn onto it, I am looking at the fenced-in history of the first seventeen years of my life. The first time that I flew on an airplane was not until after we had moved away from this area. During this time I did not ride through the wide open country that I love. I walked about in a narrow neighborhood of Baltimore. But even though I was fenced in geographically, I had an imagination that let me roam wherever I wished to travel.

I did not know that I was confined. Do you wonder how that could be? The answer is: I was very busy. I fought and won a war against Germany and Japan. With my radio I soared with Superman and rode the range with Tom Mix. I listened to the Baltimore Orioles play baseball in exotic places like Buffalo, New York. I studied the life cycles of spiders and ants and butterflies. An entire world opened up to me, and I was so deep inside it—so busy looking and listening—that I could not see any fences. Sixty-five years later, I can draw lines on a map. Sixty-five years ago, there was no map.

The stories that follow tell about what the 1940s in Baltimore were like for me.