|
Mischief
And Games
|
 Image by free stock photos from www.picjumbo.com from Pixabay |
Mrs. Downs was the neighborhood "mom." When my friend Dumpy moved away, the Downs family moved in. They lived on the corner and we lived on the side street right behind them. There were eight of them: Mr. and Mrs., Granny and five children. Well, there was only one actual child, Kenny, who was my age. The others were all older. Their house, especially the kitchen, was the unofficial gathering place for neighborhood kids. Mrs Downs loved all of us and we sought her advice and comfort often.
Their living room was always filled with kids in mid afternoon and on friday nights to watch our westerns and wrestling. Mrs. Downs was well known to the police because she was always calling or hailing down the local patrol wagon #407 to fuss at the cops for giving us kids a bad time.
She really lit into them one time when I was harassed by some door shakers in the local laundromat. Door shakers were what we called the security cops. One night around 10:00 I went to the all-night laundromat to buy a pack of cigarettes. It was only on the next block and a couple of those guys busted in and accused me of everything from vandalism to robbery. That was one time I was completely innocent. I had done nothing except buy a pack of cigarettes. They kept at me for a long time and I finally just left them there and went home.
I had some white powder on my jacket from the whitewashed coping from our porch. One of them tried to say that it was detergent from trying to break in the soap dispensers. That was when I laughed in their face and went home.
I told Mrs. Downs the next day and she flagged down #407. She read them the riot act about these imposters running amok and bothering her children. Well, I never saw those guys in the neighborhood again.
My pal Jack and I were always up to something, though. One of our favorites was to store up snowballs every time it snowed. We would make a large snow mound in his yard and ice it down. Long after the snow had melted, our snow mound would still be solid and just inside the icy crust was plenty of snowball material for assaulting pedestrians and cars alike. Jack became legendary when he threw an impossibly wicked snowball at a bus one night.
It was snowing pretty heavily and a bus stopped at the corner of 34th and Vermont, right by Joe's Pharmacy. He pulled out onto 34th Street a little bit and Jack threw the missile. The driver opened the door so he could see down the street and the snowball flew right through the open door and smacked him right at the chin/neck area and I think it scared him more than anything. Let's say that he didn't take it too well.
We all ran, of course, and had a huge laugh over that one.
We also had an almost endless supply of firecrackers. Several apartment buildings in the next block would throw July 4th celebrations and buy huge boxes of fireworks. They would light strings of them at a time and many would not go off. Jack and I would get up early on July 5 and head for the apartment back yards and collect massive amounts of unexploded firecrackers. Another bargain we found was when a neighbor bought a bunch of the dreaded "two inchers" that didn't work. The wicks came out of the middle of the firecracker and when they went off, the powder just "poofed" out of the ends. No noise, no nothing. He gave us a whole bunch of them and we dripped melted crayons in the ends, plugging them up and changing the whole dynamic. In hindsight, maybe not the wisest thing to do, but it worked. When they were subsequently set off, they made a tremendous BOOM and would blow apart a milk box or a waste basket or a toy truck to smithereens.
We loved to put them to use in the summer or autumn when they were least expected. We would go to the drugstore and make a timer by putting the wick in a cigarette and setting it on the open back window sill and going around to the front door of the store. We would be innocently playing the pinball machine when it would suddenly sound like the boiler exploded. The proprietor would race to the back to survey the damage and come out after a while confused and suspicious.
One of our better gags came in what we will call "the club." It was a mysterious place close to Shawnee High. I don't remember if it was a pool hall or a burger joint, or what, but it was where all of the badasses hung out. Just anybody didn't go in there.
They once attacked a bus full of Owensboro football players after they had defeated Shawnee in a controversial game. It seems that the bus came down the street right past the place and a gang pelted the bus with rocks and other missiles, so it stopped and the players got off and a riot ensued. It was a big to do and the police came and I don't know what all. It even made the papers.
Jack and I wondered about it but never had the nerve just to go in and neither one of us knew anybody who did. So we thought it would be fun to stir them up with one of our little time bombs.
One day right after school, we snuck up to the back of the place. It sat on the corner of an alley, so we had an easy escape route if no one came by or saw us. We put the bomb on a window ledge and we could hear the noise inside. We slipped down the alley to a good vantage point and watched.
BOOM, it went off. As usual screams and curses were heard and kids came running out. Angry and confused, they looked all over the place, much to our delight, and of course, found nothing. They didn't look so tough that day.
Those times where the dangers of getting caught were heightened, were the most fun. You get a sense of walking the tightrope, so to speak.
We picked what we called winesaps from trees as ammo for our bean shooters, or pea shooters as some call them. The winesaps were little pea-sized objects. They were hard and made perfect ammo, but we had to pick the stems off of every one. That took some time, but what else did we have to do on a summer day, so we picked them by the hundreds.
While everyone else had to buy little bags of ammo, we had bags full at the ready. We also cut our beanshooters in half so we could fire away at a ballgame or movie or out of the bus windows and when the people looked around we would just be sitting there innocently, like everyone else. One day though, we were confronted by an irate woman who tried to grab our shooters as she was getting off the bus. We yanked them back, but she lectured us saying, "I pay taxes for better homes and better schools for you sons-a-bitches and this is what you do." Her little speech was forever notched in the Jack and Ronnie Hall of Fame. We put it beside the man who ran out of his front door and yelled, "Come back here you heathens," at us as we fled the scene after piling some dry leaves on top of his front yard fountain and setting it ablaze. It looked pretty neat for a couple of minutes.
Another candidate was the store clerk who chastised us for fooling around with a coke machine and warned, "You guys quit fooling around with that. Somebody might get hurt."
Jack retorted, "Yeah, well I don't care as long as it ain't me."
We thought that was priceless.
Our BB slingshots were similarly easy to conceal, but much more lethal. We also tried to make darts for the bean shooters with pins, matchsticks and adhesive tape, but we only achieved limited success with those.
If we had put our energy and thoughts into something worthwhile, who knows what good we might have achieved.
We played foto-Electric Football and a baseball game I got one year that we improved by replacing the little plastic ball, with a large marble that we altered by scraping it on the sidewalk until the bottom of it was flattened a bit. Our best effort though, was the basketball game.
Jack and I came up with the idea of making an indoor basketball goal. There was a gadget that was not very plausible that was on the market. It was a basket you hooked over a door and it was not very good. What I did was to make a plywood backboard, fashion a rim out of a coat hanger with a back brace of a couple of L braces and a net of string and adhesive tape. I attached it to the wall with some more coat hanger wire where it stood away from the wall. I used a tennis ball and it was a smashing triumph.
Jack had one in his basement and I had one in my room. I slept on a rollaway bed and I would close it up and play for hours in the winter. Mom would have friends drop by and before long the man would come in to see what I was doing and the next thing you know, his jacket and tie were off and he was all sweaty from a few vigorous games. My nephew always thought I should patent it, but I didn't know anything about how to do that, so I didn't.
After mom died, I made one when I was still living in the trailer. A newlywed couple moved in next door and the groom came over one day, out of curiosity, to see what all the jumping and bouncing was about and became addicted. I had pretty much cleared out the living room and it made a great playing area.
Several times his affection starved bride had to come over and practically drag him out by the ear.
I,
at that point, had no bride, so I just kept on playing.