It was a nice neighborhood. We met a lot of nice kids and made a lot of new friends. It was quite a change from living in the country.
I could walk to school again, even though I had to use my crutches. We'd walk down Montgomery Street to Shull Street and then down Prospect Street. I'd go down Division Street most of the time because Carol Henry lived at the corner of Division and Prospect. Then we'd walk to school together. It was the East Frankfort School. I was in the third grade. My teacher was Mrs. Smith I think.
The Backman family lived across the street from us. Their oldest daughter, Sharon, became my friend too but she was a little older than I. She was always my bad influence and Carol was my good..Ha! Sharon taught me how to steal candy and other stuff from a little grocery store over on Second Street. I think it was called Steele's Market. I'll never forget the day she told me to take a six pack of soda on my way out the door. I still laugh when I think about that day. She had a can opener all ready. I did take it and when we got a couple blocks away, she said, "let's have a bottle of soda now." But to our surprise I had grabbed a six pack of Tonic Water instead of the Cream Soda! Yuck! That tasted terrible! We left it in the bushes and continued on home.
Sharon and I used to sneak down in her cellar and she'd smoke a cigarette and get a bottle of her mom's canned fruit off the shelf and we'd eat it.
One day we were walking by Vickie Baker's house and there was this box sitting at the curb with the garbage. It said Girl Scouts on it. We looked in it and it was full of unopened boxes of Girl Scout cookies. So we took the box to Sharon's house and hid it down in her cellar. We ate cookies for quite a while..ha ha ! I still wonder to this day why those cookies were out there. Doesn't seem as if they'd be thrown out. Even if they couldn't get sold and were stale, they could still be given to someone. But we enjoyed them!
I used to get into some bad fights with Sharon too. I still don't know why but they could get real nasty sometimes. She had a real dirty fight with one of my cousins one time and ripped my cousin's blouse right off her. In front of the whole neighborhood! Seemed everyone was watching. Can't believe kids could fight like that... She'd be hitting me sometimes and I'd want to hit her with my fist in her face so bad but I could never bring myself to do it. She'd always get the best of me. She was a real toughie!
Sharon ended up running away from home because of her step-father. He never treated her very well and used to beat her a lot. I saw it because I was always at her house. I remember she came home one time with her hair all dyed black and straight. She was living in Greenwich Village in New York City and was what they called a"Beatnik". I never saw her after that one time until years and years later when her brother, Gary, brought her into my bar in Herkimer.
Carol Henry was just the opposite of Sharon. She only had one brother (Jim) and her parents were such nice, polite people. I spent a lot of time down to her house, playing Monopoly or other board games. They had a very nice home. Carol would have birthday parties and I remember playing "Spin The Bottle" and having to kiss whatever boy it pointed to. Ha! Ha!
All the neighborhood kids would get together at dusk and play "Hide And Seek" till it was time to go in for the night. We'd go way down to the end of Montgomery and Clark Place to play sometimes. There was this one boy that lived on Clark Place. His name was Guenter Reider. Carol and I both had a crush on him. I kissed him on the cheek a couple times and Carol did also.
Guenter would come up our back stairs and knock on our door and ask if I could come out and play. I have an old blurry picture of him and I in the back yard. Wish it wasn't blurry. I did have one of him and Carol too but it disappeared over the years somehow.
One summer I was invited to go with Carol and her family to a camp they had rented on Seventh Lake for two weeks. I had so much fun up there, swimming and playing. I only had one incident that scared me. Carol's other neighbor's, the Stark family, came up to spend the day. Their son Tommy was swimming with us and he got to rough housing and he held my head under water too long and I panicked, thinking I was going to drown. He was just being mean. I never liked him after that.
I saw my first baby toads that summer. They were so cute! I had never seen any before. I still get excited when I see them. I like to study and photograph them. I really appreciated Carol and her family taking me along that summer. Was the last time I'd ever do anything like that.
I really enjoyed those days on Montgomery Street.
I did not like it when my father appeared at the door though. All I could think of was, " Oh no, here goes more fighting." It was 1956. He was out of jail again.
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