East End of Town - 65 years ago

Speaking of the East End of Maysville, it was a wonderful place in which to grow up. In the years between 1944 and 1964, there was little, if any, fear in the minds of parents who lived along that street, other than a child being hit by a car on the street. Growing up there during those years, it was as if the world was our oyster; nothing frightened us, other than Billy Dice, who lived in the next block up. From day 2, almost all of us walked to school everyday. It was three or four blocks from my house to the Sixth Ward school. I walked, rode my bicycle, and skated to school. I was a Patrol Boy in the fifth grade (high honor) and wore my belt and held my sign with pride. I will admit, however, that I usually stopped at Bill Kenton's house on the way to school because, first, they always had sweet rolls from Magee's Bakery and next, Mrs. Kenton always drove Bill (and me) to school in that great long dark blue Buick. Coming home was another story. We could walk down Second Street or we could walk down Williams Street. Bill Kenton's house was in the ten hundred block, so he would peel off there. I lived in the eight hundred block, which meant that I had to get through, you guessed it, the nine hundred block. Billy Dice lived on the river side of Second Street, but there was an open lot across the street from his house so he could see Williams Street plainly. I don't know what time that damned kid got home from school, but he was always waiting for me and for any other little kids who were walking with me. We were totally terrified of Billy and he did everything he could think of to amplify that fear. He would chase us, jump out from behind cars or bushes in front of us, threaten to cut our heads off with a knife. He always had a big hunting knife strapped on his belt. And you know, I never had sense enough to tell my parents what mortal danger I was in coming home from school. I don't know whether they could have done anything about it or not because Billy was a pretty bad kid, or at least we thought so. Anyway, the afternoons we got by that point in our journey without any encounter of the dreaded Billy was simply a great, great day, no matter what the weather. He really never actually did anything to us, but I was scared to death of him. Otherwise, East Second Street was just like the Garden of Eden. Before the floodwall, the houses along the street had long, long back yards, stretching from the house down to the "first bank." When you got to the first bank, the land dropped off about eight to ten feet. When you got to the bottom of the first bank, you were in the garden area, the spot where people raised wonderful vegetables, flowers and what have you. This garden area was problaby about 200 to 300 feet wide and its soil was replenished every year by spring floods. The next bank was the actual river bank. River willow trees (wild, stumpy and not pretty) grew on this bank and kept the river from washing the bank away. The bank sloped very gently down, through the willows, to the river shore, which was sandy. And then, of course, the river. For many years after we moved to Second Street, there was no municipal trash service. Everyone was expected to take care of that problem by themselves. I remember my mother carefully separating the trash from the garbage. The garbage she would wrap in newspaper and place in a separate can. The trash went into another for burning in a large barrel with holes in the bottom so air could enter. The garbage, however, wouldn't burn, so everybody took their garbage and threw it over the first bank. If that situation was objectionable, I never knew it. Of course, this was long before the days of the EPA. One of the really fun neighborhood social events was usually held in the spring time when the weather was nice. Every year, the river flooded to some degree or another, but most years, it got up near the top of the first bank. Because of the garbage, there were some monumental rats on the riverbank. So, at cocktail time, we all gathered down there, the adults with their drinks and .22 calibre rifles; the men shot at rats that were swimming in the flood waters. This was a great celebration and a way to reduce the rat population on the riverbank. My father was a good shot, but the more he drank, the fewer rats he hit. That seemed to be true of all the men who had guns; and the more they missed, the funnier they thought it was. Memorable! All Second Street children were told all sorts of things about how dangerous the river was. The biggest danger were the step-offs. Such things do exist, but they aren't a significant danger to those who can swim well. Most of us couldn't! To re-inforce the fear factor, we were told that you could walk out into the river until the water was up to your knees and, without any warning, the next step would take you over the step-off, whereupon under water currents would suck you under and that would be the end of you. Occasionally, someone would drown or jump off the bridge and the police would be out in boats with grappling hooks trying to find the body. Sometimes they found them and sometimes they didn't. Whenever this happened, it was a learning experience and an opportunity to reinforce the danger we would be in if we went into the water. There was another reason we didn't go into the water much. About every three blocks along the street, a sewer emptied into the river. It was raw sewage; as fourth and fifth graders, we were most interested in the condoms that emerged, and would spend serious time speculating about whose house "that" came from. We all knew it didn't come from one of our houses, because our parents didn't do that stuff. Anyway, the sewers were a considerable deterrent to getting into the water. Those locations were, however, the prime fishing spots because the fish seemed to be attracted to the sewage. Parenthetically, we didn't catch many and we certainly didn't eat them. We sat on the river shore, prop up our poles on a forked stick, and wait for the end of the pole to quiver. That meant that a fish was interested in the bait. We used chopped pork liver (the older, the better) to fish for cat fish, worms to fish for other fish and some kids used wheatie balls, particularly for carp. I remember trying to make wheatie balls one time. I took what was left of the wheatie cereal to the river bank and mixed them with water and tried to roll the result into a ball. I got that far, but everytime I tried to put one on the hook, it disintegrated into a sloppy mess. No one ever told me that you had to make them a day or two before and let them dry before they would hold together on the hook. So, I never caught any carp. The fishing was a wonderful pastime. The catch was not so good, but looking back on it, we certainly didn't think we were wasting our time. In any event, the "river bank" was a magical place. We had our Army Club on the river bank, where eight to ten little boys would take their army guns, hide behind trees and stumps, and shoot at the enemy. We played cowboys and Indians some, but mostly cowboys chasing bad guys who were either cattle rustlers or bank robbers. If the garden plots had not been plowed in the spring, a plant called a horseweed would grow densely everywhere. Indeed, they grew to be ten feet tall and perhaps an inch to two inches thick. If you went into the horseweeds, they were so close together that there was no way anybody could find you, making it a perfect place for an ambush. The stalk of the weed was slightly prickly and they were hard to pull up. When the autumn came, though, these weeds turned to gray stalks of cellulose and the head of the weed just withered up! This was when they were really fun. After the first frost, they became much easier to pull up. By this time, they were very dry and would burn like tinder. Well, by this time, the floodwall was pretty much finished and we built fires on the river bank all the time. We used the horseweed to start the fire and would gather drift wood or fallen rotten limbs and would keep the fire going for hours. When the floodwall was completed, field fescue was planted on it. When this fescue dies with the oncoming cold weather, it turns brown and will burn. One day, our riverbank fire got out of control and set the floodwall on fire. It was a pretty good blaze. We tried to stamp it out, but we couldn't. So, what did we do? We vanished into the wilds of the riverbank, and traveled several blocks downstream before re-surfacing on Second Street. We heard the fire engine go by; fortunately nothing of consequence was burned, and we were not asked about the matter. Nor did we mention it. When I was in the sixth grade, almost all adults that I knew smoked cigarettes. My grandmothers didn't, but they were the only people I knew who refrained. Mr. Buck Atkinson lived a few door up the street from us and he and his wife were great friends with my parents. Mr. Atkinson worked for R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company and had scads of four-pack cigarettes. These four packs were paper, usually light cardboard, with the brand printed just as on full package, and contained four cigarettes. R. J. Reynolds made Camel, Winston, Salem and my mother's brand, Cavalier. Cavalier were king-size Camels and, if anything, they were stronger. Dad smoked Camels and Mr. Atkinson brought them carton after carton of these sample cigarettes. Sometime in the spring of my sixth grade year, I stole two sample packs of Cavalier and my friend, David, and I climbed the floodwall enroute to the river bank. We had matches and decided to build a fire so that should be smell of smoke when we got home, we could blame it on the bon fire. From that time on, until I was fifty years old, I was an ardent smoker and loved everyone of the cigarettes I smoked. Enough of this rambling. I will revisit this tale on a subject that is a little more serious, one of these days.