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35
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We had some kind and helpful neighbors on 35th Street. This was in the West End of Louisville in the fifties, when people weren't so suspicious of each other. Neighbors would knock on your door and ask, "Do you need anything from the grocery today?"
In today's society my family would never have been able to live our lives pretty much unaffected by bureaucracy as we did back in the forties and fifties. Somehow we always had enough to eat and wonderful Christmases. We did live a rather vagabond lifestyle before we moved to 35th Street. I was born on Amy and Michigan Streets and we moved about six blocks away to the northeast corner of 35th and Riverpark Drive. We also ended up on the northwest corner of 34th and Riverpark, 41st and Vermont, North Bayly Ave., Dresden Ave., all in Louisville. We also lived in Providence, KY, Henderson, KY, Fort Knox, KY, Fort Lauderdale and Hollywood, Florida. All by the time I was seven. My sister attended thirteen elementary schools.
I was telling this to our friend Judy one evening and she exploded with laughter when I told her we had been raised like gypsies, what with our moving all over the place. She thought I said that we had been raised by gypsies, ergo the outburst of laughter. I thought that was pretty funny, too.
When we got to 35th Street, we finally settled down and stayed for twenty years. After our mother died, our good friends who lived next door to us on the corner of 35th and River Park, bought a house on 35th Street just off of River Park for the express purpose of renting it to us. We paid $35 a month rent and they never raised it in the twenty years we lived there, even after adding central heat and storm windows to the house.
The West End was a wonderful place to be a kid. We had Shawnee Park with its shady trees and baseball diamonds, Fontaine Ferry Park, known colloquially as Fountain Ferry, the great amusement park with a swimming pool and a "dancing under the stars" night club, and a roller skating arena. We had the Ohio River to the west and the C & O railroad yards and a great junkyard to the east. There was a grocery or drug store or bar on almost every corner. There were theatres, a library, a bakery, two bus lines and a couple of hardware stores, all within easy walking distance. In other words, a real neighborhood.
The swimming pool was where my friend, Steve's younger brother Crow, drowned. He didn't come home from the park one evening and his dog started howling at nine o'clock that night and wouldn't stop. The lifeguards found Crow's body at the bottom of the deep end of the pool the next morning. His death was estimated to have happened at about nine o'clock the previous night. Right at closing time.
Henry Clay Elementary School was only one block away. Shawnee High was one mile distant. Most of my pals went to Saint Columba Parochial and Flaget High, the local Catholic schools.
My friend Jim Cowles, has written several stories about the winters in Louisville and he is right, they were much colder in the 1940's and fifties. The whole state of Kentucky was. It was brutal, walking a mile to school every miserable day in that cold. That's not one of those, "Why, when I was young...blah blah," stories either. Or maybe it is, but it's true nonetheless. But we didn't have to walk uphill either way.
But in the glorious summer, we would just be hanging around somebody's front yard, or playing tonk or trading baseball cards on the big front porch and the vegetable kids would come around. At least that's what we called them.
Some guy would park a truck on the corner, and a half dozen boys and an occasional girl would carry a basket full of farm fresh vegetables, and walk around a couple of blocks selling their stuff. Then they would hop on the truck and move a few blocks down the street and do it again. They were fourteen or fifteen years old I guess, and they were a tough looking bunch. They wore sleeveless T-shirts and smoked cigarettes and cussed and walked with a swagger. We didn't want any part of these guys one on one, so we pretty much left them alone, but there was often some half-joking banter between us.
One of them would come up and say, "Hey, any of you squares live in this dump?"
Someone would reply, "Yeah, I do. So what."
"Go see if your old lady wants some vegetables."
"Why would I do that?"
"'Cause she'll kick your ass if she misses out."
You knew that was true, so you'd go get your mom and she would buy some stuff and the kid would say, "See you chumps later, don't get any on you," and head on down the street.
Someone would mumble, "Yeah, I oughta kick his ass," and we'd all agree, but we also knew we would probably never try.
Some people may get the impression that I was not a very good guy a lot of times here, but as my grandmother always told people, "Ronnie is a good boy, it's just some of those kids he hangs around with."
Yeah, but if I didn't hang out with this crowd I would be one of those guys shooting baskets in my yard all by myself and I didn't want to be that guy. Running with the wolves was a lot more fun than hanging around the barn with the sheep.
So there you are. It wasn't me, it was those bad boys I hung around with who, "led me down the path of wrongful doing."
But there, I felt like I belonged as a teenager. For once I could even wear the unofficial uniform: brown leather jacket, white or black T shirt, beltless jeans, white socks and strollers. Not the famed penny loafers but with a plain leather tab across the foot, not a sissy penny holder.
I was very proud to have that leather jacket. When I got a job, I bought it from a neighbor friend for twenty dollars when he got a new one. I wore that jacket for another ten years, through rain and cold. It was my favorite jacket of all time. There was even a repaired knife cut, small but obvious, on the sleeve. It was there when I got it.
For as much time as we spent in the company of other kids, there were few fights amongst our neighborhood group. Now and then some disagreement would get out of hand, but not too often. I remember one incident where some of the guys were talking about a confrontation about to happen at Shawnee's football field. They were collecting guys to come along and somebody asked me if I wanted to come and I said, "Sure."
So we got to the stadium, climbed over the fence and waited. We decided to have a few guys hideout in the shadows until our foes arrived. Then, when they thought we were outnumbered, we would come out of the shadows and surprise them.
We did just that and it worked. They were ready to rumble until they saw the reinforcements appear. Then they weren't so sure and began hemming and hawing and one of their guys I knew danced up to me and began jiving and shadow boxing, and said, "Hey, Durbin, (I changed my name a few years later) let's you and me get this thing started."
Without even thinking I gave him a quick right jab straight to the chin. I just kind of did it without thinking. I put a little shoulder into it, and it went, "Pop" and he went down.
"FRAZIER IS DOWN!"
Startled, he just sat there and looked at me and a couple other guys started snickering and soon everyone was standing around laughing and talking. Then they talked about having a "fair fight" and finally decided to call the whole thing off.
Don 't get the idea that I am trying to portray myself as a tough guy, I was not. I got in a surprise punch that time, but despite my early training, my pugilistic prowess was more akin to Michael Rapaport's character in "Mighty Aphrodite." He boasted to Mira Sorvino, "I've had thirteen professional fights and I've won all but ten of them."
That is right up there with, "I'm your huckleberry," from Doc Holliday and "You're gonna need a bigger boat." Great movie lines.
There were bunches of kids in our neighborhood and when I speak of my gang, I don't mean an actual gang, I am referring to the neighboring kids with whom I normally interacted. We played lots of games. Baseball or softball, basketball, football, roller skate hockey, bicycle polo, miniature golf (we made our own course and clubs). We drank soft drinks and ate sweets and no one was fat because we were always out playing. And Shawnee Park wasn't very far away. We rode our bikes far and wide.
In the summer afternoons it was usually sports and in the evenings we played sundown, prisoners' base, lemonade and under the streetlight, we played mumble-de-peg, to mention a few. As I got older and talked with others, I was amazed how these games seem to be universal. No one specifically taught us these games, We just joined in with the others and played. Kids in Miami and Boston and San Francisco played the same games. I think now the computer age has pretty much put a stop to that.
If
you had mentioned a "playdate" to one of us, we'd have
thought you were nuts. I can't tell you the last time I saw a bunch
of kids playing together, except in an organized event with parents
and officials all over the place. You can't play prisoners' base in
your room and how often do you see a kid with a sunburn
anymore?