Memoirs of a Worldly Guy
When we moved into the Scarboro residence in the summer of 1930 I had no idea that the district would ultimately be one of the assumed elitist neighborhoods in years to come. In the past sixty years the population of the city has doubled and redoubled several times and the visions of the people who are the so-called 'movers and shakers' of the city are alien from those of the residents of the 'thirties'. Individuals I associated with are in their middle seventies; teachers and associated elders I knew are showing up in the obituary columns at ages in their eighties or nineties. We're moving on, no doubt about it!
There were no concrete sidewalks on our new property and the backyard was weed-infested dirt. The facing of the house was stucco inlaid with tiny bits of coloured glass and it eventually began to peel off and was replaced with a sturdier brand of stucco. There was a proper iron gate added to the back fence and we had a garage added to the west side of the back yard after a year or so.We acquired a lawn mower and the new grass in the back yard was an 'equal opportunity' for regular mowing as we boys were given the responsibility.
The large bungalow to our west was owned by the Ericksons, who had grassed over the vacant lot between their house and ours and Mr. Erickson and his son Jack used it regularly to practice chipping and putting for their beloved golf game. Erickson Sr. was Canadian agent for the Chautauqua organization and Jack kept us informed of the steady stream of celebrities and other notables who visited their home while in Calgary.
To the east of us in the next house were the Woodruffs and their only child, Donnie, and two houses east, the Friendlys with a daughter about Bob's age and two sons, one of whom, Jimmie, was about four years older than Lloyd and the other, Bill, about Lloyd's age. Across the lane to the south of us and facing onto Seventeenth Avenue was the Jones house. I think Mom had known Mrs. Jones in her working days in Saskatchewan. They had a daughter who had left home and was married, and a son Don, a year or so older than Lloyd. A son Johnnie, who turned out to be slightly challenged in a mental way, came along a year or so after our arrival and, like so many others of his ilk, was a great pal of my mother's for many years.
It wasn't long before I became aware of Bill's animosity toward Donnie. So far as I know they had both lived in the same houses since birth and Bill had two older siblings to nag and pick on him. Donnie, on the other hand, was an only child: what better target for Bill's habitual harrassment and mocking of Donnie?
One day I watched as Donnie found the comics insert of one of the American newspapers and ran away every time Bill approached to share in reading it. When he had finished reading it to his satisfaction Donnie spitefully tore the comics pages into small pieces then shoved them into a gutter head. Bill gave him a wrist twist and a 'noogie' and Donnie went back to his house in tears. As predicted by Bill, Donnie soon came out of his house, face washed and hair slicked down, wearing a clean silk shirt and munching on a cookie. Bill immediately found an excuse to get into an argument with him which knocked the cookie to the ground and sent Donnie home again in tears with his hair mussed. When Donnie was diagnosed with 'ringworm' and was required to have his head shaved and his hair replaced by a permanent woollen toque Bill's mockery was incessant.
'All light, coming Mommy!' Donnie would lisp when called. Bill's mimicry of this childish response soon co-opted the rest of us. On the other hand, when my Mother called me Bill had a habit of whispering 'Don't answer!' Sheer perversity, I'm sure. Most of us eventually assumed Bill's attitude toward Donnie as being slightly 'different'.
It's a long time since we moved up to Scarboro, so my recollections are somewhat sketchy. There is one incident that remains clear in my memory, however. The Friendly boys had dug what they referred to as a 'clubhouse' which took the form of a large hole dug in the ground across from the lane behind their house. It was about eight feet square and four or five feet deep. They must have laboured long and hard to dig it with hand shovels. Presumably they hadn't time to consult an interior designer so when my mother rolled up and disposed of a large area rug they immediately commandeered it. I was five years old and somewhat territorial and took exception to their arrogance. The memory I have is a mental image of them dragging the rug down the alley, a five year old (me) sitting astride it loudly protesting their behaviour. They ameliorated my annoyance by making me a member of their club and giving me carte blanche to visit the premises whenever desired.
Everybody seemed to have bicycles of some sort in those days; some of them were stolen and many had a golden braze where the bar had broken free from the front post. Lloyd and I longed to have bikes of our own but had to wait until we were older to be owners. When Bill showed up with a three-quarter size English bicycle and rode it around our neighborhood Lloyd was filled with envy and began campaigning immediately for a trial ride.
'You can have it for a little while,' Bill said eventually, 'as long as you don't go too far away!'
The bicycle was only three quarters of the size of standard Canadian bicycles and Bill had got it only that day. It was all jet black and had white pneumatic tires. For some reason Lloyd had decided to ride it down the church hill. At that time the church sidewalk was not paved with concrete but had a covering of black cinders. By the time Lloyd had gone half way down the hill he had attained a higher speed than he wanted because the pedal brakes seemed not to be responding. What he didn't know and Bill hadn't told him was that the brakes on that particular English bicycle were operated by levers near the handlebars. Additionally, the bolts on either side of the front wheel axle hadn't been tightened. As a result, at the high speed Lloyd was travelling, when the bike hit a larger than usual bump the front wheel parted company with the rest of the machine and continued on down the walk at high speed. The front forks, on the contrary, buried themselves in the dirt on the pathway, bringing the chassis to an abrupt halt. Lloyd, on the other hand, continued on at the attained velocity, passing over the handlebars and landing on his forehead eight or ten feet ahead of the bicycle. All of this was merely hearsay on my part; I was still at home and when Lloyd appeared at the back door, a gory sight indeed, his face was covered with blood and tears.
Mom led him into the bedroom adjoining the bathroom and had him lie down, then covered his wounded forehead with a damp towel. I don't know if Dad was already on his way home or had been phoned by Mom but he arrived shortly thereafter. After examining the patient he got him to his feet and led him into the bathroom, filled the handbasin with lukewarm water and began the slow chore of removing the cinders from the large lesion in Lloyd's forehead. He had ceased sobbing and was moaning slightly and the water in the basin became more discoloured as Dad continued to swab the blood from Lloyd's face. I was an interested spectator, so interested that Dad had to ask me more than once to move back. Bill would have been crowded in for viewing if he hadn't still been looking for the front bicycle wheel.
'Am I gonna die, Dad?' Lloyd asked plaintively when Dad had first begun to remove the detritus from Lloyd's forehead.
'No, son, I think you're going to be all right!' Dad replied with a tight smile. Lloyd didn't die, in fact, and he learned later that he had uttered another of his deathless queries that would haunt him for years.
-o-
The dearth of homey touches in the underground club indicated the need for the area rug which, when laid on the floor, compensated for its previous absence of homeliness. I've concluded that the short-term fad for digging holes in the ground was motivated by the innate urge of young insecure humans to return to the womb. Years later we received permission to build a clubhouse of our own just outside the back fence. It was above ground and provided an opportunity to brag about its superiority to Bill and his cronies.
Toward the end of the 'dirty thirties' Mr. Davey missed an occasional year and the land was taken over by families from elsewhere in Calgary who had been granted plots of land on which to grow vegetables for their own use. One evening in mid-summer Lloyd and Jack Erickson and I had gone to a movie and since it was a moonless night it was dark on our return home. Just as we walked past our beloved clubhouse Lloyd stumbled over something in the alley. This was unusual and we all stopped walking immediately. Mr. Davey had not seeded grain that summer and the vacant lot was filled with the top growth of potato plants. In the silence that ensued I discerned two faint, unusual sounds. There was a short creaking sound that came from the direction of our clubhouse followed by what sounded like muffled laughter in the potato patch. Very peculiar!
Meanwhile, Lloyd had been trying to identify what he had stumbled over. To his amazement he made out what appeared to be a 'block', a part of an assembly of pulleys and ropes normally used for hauling or lifting heavy objects. He rushed without delay into the house and came out carrying a large, heavy duty flashlight. By this time Jack and I had gone into the potato patch and flushed out the villains of the piece. Bill was amongst them and bore the brunt of the blame for conceiving the operation, Weewee was considered to be a co-conspirator for supplying the block and tackle and necessary rope needed to encircle the clubhouse and the McInnes boys were willing co-conspirators. Fortunately, the thrill of building and using our clubhouse was waning by this time. Following an acrimonius exchange of insults and a cursory examination of our marginally damaged clubhouse the 'perps' gathered up their equipment and left. A week or so later we were chuckling about the incident; a month later we were all buddies again, looking for more mischief to commit.
There were no "gangs' as they are thought of today but we were conscious of the fact that there were certain 'territories' extant and that we were advised not to intrude. The young fellow living in the house immediately behind Bull's Grocery was friendly and we were in no danger if we ventured that far. Going further into Bankview unannounced and encountering the Mackenzies or the Burrells was unwise.
One late afternoon a troupe of us found ourselves deep into alien territory. How we got there and for what reason I don't remember. What I do remember is that we were in full flight, having got crosswise in some way with the majority of the large, healthy fellows who lived in that area. No one had been killed or seriously injured, of course, but if captured we were subjected to rude things like 'Indian Wrist Twists', 'Chinese Knuckle Rubs' to our heads and other painful manipulations. We departed the territory in the order of our personal footspeeds, with Bill Friendly, the McInnes boys and Weewee in the vanguard; Lloyd, Bob Robertson and I brought up the rear. Our escape route was just past the southwest corner of the barn behind Gourlay's house and then on past Bull's Grocery and across Seventeenth Avenue to safety.
There were many barns still in existence, although most of them no longer held horses. Harness was not in evidence but some of the harnessing prerequisites still existed. One of these was a wooden two by four plank nailed to the end of the barn and projecting about two and a half feet from the corner of the barn approximately at eye level. It had been used in the past for temporary harness storage. Unfortunately Bob was not close enough behind the others to see their behaviour, which included ducking below the harness holder while still running at full speed. When he came to the two by four he didn't duck; he ran in to it full speed! There was a sickening thud as Bob's forehead impacted the wood and his legs and his body flew up like those of the Wily Coyote cartoon character in Saturday morning cartoons. His body seemed to remain suspended parallel to the ground momentarily before dropping straight down in what appeared to be a comatose condition. Miraculously, when I ran up to him his eyes were open and he was shaking his head groggily from side to side. An ugly blue mouse had already begun to rise on the right side of his forehead. I helped him to his feet and, using me as a crutch, he was able to stumble the rest of the way to safety.
Toward autumn Jimmie decided that the potatoes were now large enough for eating. He dug a hole at the end of the potato patch, dug up a few of the nearby potatoes and buried them along with the embers from a fire he had been tending nearby. He generously shared the baked potato with the lads hanging about. Jimmie soon tired of this and dug a deeper recess in the ground. He then stuck a couple of sticks with forked upper ends on either side of the hole and suspended an empty honey pail from a third one he called a 'dingle stick' lying across the uprights. Once he had some water boiling he added some skinned cut up potatoes to the pot and added some carrots. It wasn't long before there were four or five similar cooking fires going in a row along the edge of the potato patch. Anything boilable was boiled for a day or two until boredom set in once again.
'Hey, come and look at what Jimmie's doing!' Lloyd said to me one afternoon. Even before I reached Jimmie's cooking area I could see that he had discovered some interesting new ingredient for his 'boil up'. A grey-coloured foam was starting to well up in his honey pail and just as I reached his vicinity it overflowed and started to run temptingly down the sides of the pail.
'Wow! that's fantastic, Jimmie! What is it, anyway?'
'I can't tell you,' Jimmie replied arcanely, 'It's a secret,'
This was the most spectacular development in two or three days and I was marvellously curious. This new ingredient could change the entire nature of our cooking procedures. Jimmie was adamant, however, and refused to divulge the secret of his new additive. I stood for a long time watching his stew foam up then gradually diminish. Then I had a momentary glimpse of his secret. He lifted a piece of shingle and revealed a small pile of white chunks of some material and delicately plucked out a morsel with a pair of twigs he handled like chopsticks.
'What is that stuff?' I asked, undeterred.
'Never mind, you wouldn't understand, it's already been processed at least once anyway,' he said, maintaining his secretive manner. So saying , he dropped the material into his pail and watched as the contents foamed up immediately.
I was still talking about Jimmie's discovery when I walked back to our house at supper time. 'I'd sure like to know what that 'secret ingredient' is!' I told Lloyd. He looked back at me with what I construed as a mixture of scorn and patronizing indulgence.
'What?' I exclaimed, 'do you know what it is? You better tell me if you do!' My vague threat was understandably ignored but Lloyd probably decided it was time to let me in on the big secret.
'It's dog shit, dummy!' he said with a patronizing smile.
'Dog shit? You've gotta be kidding!!'
'Nope, plain old dog poop,' he declaimed, 'that's all it is!'
'But you saw it,' I exclaimed, ' it's almost pure white!'
'That's because it's been lying in the open all year; it's just bleached out.'
'I guess that's what he meant by saying it had been previously processed at least once!' I said, totally disillusioned.
Jimmie seemed to have achieved the ultimate 'cook-out' status, there was no place to go! We turned our attention to other important matters.
When Mr. Erickson became manager of the Community Chest in Los Angeles they rented the house to the Christies. There was an eave just where the glassed-in back porch met the main house roof and Bill and I had watched the movement of pigeons in and out of the overhang for several weeks. In the absence of the owners Bill and I felt free to climb up and rob the nest. We climbed back down with two squabs in our possession. One was dark blue and the other a combination of reddish-brown and white; we named them Snicklefritz and Jalopy. Taken from their nest at an early age and hand fed with bread and milk and water-soaked wheat they bonded with Bill and me. We could walk about with the birds on our shoulders and whistle to get them to circle about and land again on our shoulders after their free flights. Except for the bird droppings on our shoulders and the whitish streaks on the backs of our shirts we were pretty hot dudes!
Seventeenth Avenue was a main thoroughfare and we would lie in bed at night listening to the trolley cars come hurtling down the hill from the west. I think it was sometime in the sixties before the final trolley street car was replaced by busses but by this time they had built a history of their own for themselves. Al, who was usually broke after he had given up his paper route told me that he had a scam he used to get a cigarette when he couldn't afford to buy one. After boarding the streetcar he would walk back to 'the smoker' at the back of the car and pull out a cigarette package he knew was empty. After a passable simulation of a person disgusted to find he was out of fags he would throw the empty package to the floor and sit back with a look of mixed frustration and yearning on his face. A witness would usually offer him a fag; it worked nearly every time. When all of the occupants had departed he would pick up the empty pack and pocket it for the next time.
Thinking back, I realize that the 'smoker' was not without fond memories for me, either. Gunner and I had become familiar with the consumption of large quantities of bottled beer during our first year at college but our ability to cope with hard liquor was still unproven. One weekend during the summer of 1943 we decided to enjoy an evening of frivolity at Bowness Park with Gordon McInnes. Armed with a 'mickey' (12 ounces) of King's Plate rye ($1.25 each) we boarded the Calgary Street Railway line and rocked and rolled our way acros the prairie to Bowness.
Our first choice of entertainment was miniature golf. A couple of swigs of straight rye from his bottle were sufficient to encourage Gord to treat the miniature golf course like a PGA venue and he drove his ball over the fence and out of bounds somewhere after the 12th hole. After being banished from the miniature golf course we wandered into the dance hall and its adjoining recreation facility and played some of the games. There was a machine that increased the current between its handles the farther they were forced apart. I was reminded of the electrical connection for the lights in our garage at home. The ceramic cover had been removed and Lloyd and I had been entertaining ourselves and our friends with electrical shocks for weeks. When the excitement had eventually paled it occurred to me that the involvement of something metallic would enhance the effect. I was accordingly invited to test the effect of holding the two arms of a pair of pliers against the electrodes.
'Brilliant idea, Ron,' Lloyd said, 'go ahead and see how it works!'
The effect was greatly enhanced! So great, in fact, that I was hurled back several feet and decided that the inclusion of metal objects would no longer be a part of the entertaiment.
Back at Bowness Park we were trying to cut a wide swath by paying ten cents a 'jitney' dance to glide around the floor with the girls who were eagerly awaiting our favour. In our case they seemed not to be too eager. It was near closing time and we lurched out to where the last streetcar was gradually filling up. We went aboard and made our way back to the smoker where we felt most comfortable. We found out that the members of the band were responsible for the delay but they were finally aboard and we set off for Calgary. There were about ten or twelve riders in the smoker and I remember Gus Griffin sitting with his back against the wall with his trumpet clutched tightly to his chest.
Since Gus and Gibber were long time neighbors Gibber felt that it behooved him to borrow Gus's trumpet for a few minutes. Although Gibber'd had lessons on the trombone he was soon shouted down after his few cacophonous riffs on the trumpet. A rude (probably sober) gentleman took exception to Gibber's lurching about as the streetcar swayed back and forth.
'Quit stepping on my feet, you drunk!' exclaimed the cranky passenger sitting next to Gus. He rose and gave Gibber a brisk shove in the chest. Although Gord was in no way involved, he felt in his inebriated way that nobody was going to treat his pal in that way.
'That sumbitch doesn't have a clue about what stepping on feet is all about!' he said, rising unsteadilyto his feet. Whereupon he lurched over to the 'shoveur', jumped into the air and landed with both heels on the victim's insteps . That, not surprisingly, incited a full scale war. Gord and the aggravated 'shoveur', locked in each other's arms in a pugnacious embrace, lurched first to one side of the smoker, then to the other, noisily knocking out the windows on each side. Gibber, feeling left out of the action, walked to the back window.
'May as well do this properly!' he said and smashed his fist through the glass. Regrettably, his fist was not properly padded, except for his own flesh, and he cut the first two knuckles to the bone. Blood was soon very much in evidence. Fortunately his mother would never allow Ian to leave the house without a clean linen handkerchief, and he was able to stanch the flow before bleeding to death, (this was not sequential! He wasn't in any danger of bleeding to death at the finish!!)
When we finally reached First Street West and Eighth Avenue we transferred to the Elbow Park street car and rode on down to the Koffee Kounter. The 'K.K' was 'the' place in the 1940's! We hung around for awhile saying 'Howdy' to a few other drunken buddies of ours and upsetting a few strangers. Gibber muttered something about it being reasonably close to his home and set off without further ado, leaning forward at a sharp angle. Gord had disappeared. I suddenly realized that I was getting drowsy, and since there was no place in the vicinity where I could have a short nap without disturbance I wandered down Fourth Street looking for a reasonable place to crash! Really! I told you we weren't accustomed to hard liquor! I laid down to recover my inimitable good behaviour and lapsed into unconsciousness.
I was wakened by the shrill sounds of a woman's voice.
'Stop! there's someone lying in the alley, he could be dead!'
'Just ignore it! There's no point in our getting involved!' The 'Good Samaritan' voice was coming from the driver of a car that had been starting down the alley before being abruptly halted by the concerned woman.
'He just sat up, so at least he's not dead! Now he's pulled his legs back out of the way! You'd better be careful though!'
Beyond being embarrassed by my ridiculous behaviour I owed a debt of gratitude to the woman in the car who had rescued me from having to explain to my mother how I managed to get a pair of broken legs during a quiet night of frivolity with my chums.
There's no point in asking me how I managed to make it home; I haven't got a clue!
There was an alley that ran down along the west side of the confectionery then turned ninety degrees and ran along behind the houses facing Superior Avenue for most of a city block before turning south again just past Erickson's garage and joining Seventeenth again.
Shaw's house was the only one facing Seventeenth Avenue from the point where Summer Street entered, all the way down to George's Confectionery. There were four or five vacant lots between the Shaw house and the confectionery. E.T. Davey lived across Seventeenth Avenue in an old three storey house situated on the southwest corner of what I believe is Seventeen A street across from the old Bull's grocery.
Most years after we had moved to the neighborhood we would expect old 'E.T' to come across Seventeenth leading his pair of red Clydesdale plough horses and till the rich black soil from the edge of the Shaw property for about one hundred feet east and from the south end of the property to the north end. He would seed it to wheat and harrow it then wait for the fall to scythe it, tie it in sheaves and stook it in the old-fashioned way. We assumed he had some sort of winnowing machine in the back yard where he would winnow and sack the grain to be fed ultimately to his flock of chickens. Later in the year we would see the old fellow trudging from house to house in the neighborhood, a wooden grape-basket over his arm, marketing his locally-grown eggs to the housewives for ten or fifteen cents a dozen.
One year, after Mr. Davey had finished his ploughing, one of the boys picked up an old .303 Remington rifle bullet that had been exposed. It was probably a relic of WWI but we didn't handle it with the care it deserved. We were soon huddled around the vise mounted on the bench in Don Jones's garage. A pair of pliers was produced and, ignoring completely the chance of an explosion, we grouped around closely and took turns twisting the bullet head back and forth. By having the bullet facing off to one side we reassured ourselves that there was little or no danger . Eventually it came free and we were able to investigate the contents of the casing. It was packed with long strands of cordite with a diameter slightly less than a pencil lead. The cap in the middle of the cartridge head had not yet been fired and to my knowledge it never was.
Jack Erickson had access to an empty CO2 soda water charging cartridge and it was decided that we would fill it with the cordite and use it as a rocket projectile. The cartridge was carefully packet with cordite, then a single strand of it was left with about one inch outside the cartridge and the rest inserted into the cordite cluster in the interior. Lead foil was then tightly packed around the fuse strand. Since the cordite burned quickly it was decided that no one would be allowed to hand light the fuse; accordingly it was decided to tie a short length of grocery string to the fuse to act as a slow-burning 'punk'.
In due course the missile was considered to be ready and was set on a rock in the middle of the alley. Don't even ask me why we didn't tilt it upward! The punk was lighted and we all stood in our yard watching the string burn slowly toward the fuse. The next event occurred with astonishing speed. There was a brief flash as the spark on the punk touched the fuse followed by a loud 'Phwoosh!!' and the cartridge disappeared simultaneously.
'Where'd it go?' was virtually a chorus from the onlookers. Subsequent systematic questioning revealed that the CO2 cartridge had departed so quickly that no one had observed it. Since the police did not show up to question everyone in the neighborhood about a mysterious death resulting fom a home-made projectile we assumed that it was buried 'harmlessly' in the wall of some nearby building.
A favourite prank of some of the boys in the neighborhood was riding at the back of the streetcars. The windows of the 'smoker' at the back of the car were protected by brass bars that were curved to run along parallel to the back of the car. Further down, under the wooden partition below the window was a projecting 'bumper' to protect the rear end of the car from collisions. By grabbing onto one of the brass bars when the car was stationary at a scheduled stop the lads could hitch a free ride to their destination. Some of us were standing in front of George's confectionery one afternoon when a streetcar came to a stop in front of Bull's grocery store across the street. To my surprise a youth about thirteen years old walked around from the back of the car and came over to us. He was chewing on a large chunk of toffee and I concluded from the condition of his teeth that it was regular habit.
'I'm Dutton, you're Helmer, ain't ya!' he said, brusquely, 'Want some toffee?' I tried to figure out how he'd be coming down Seventeenth on the back of a No. 6 streetcar without having had to dangle from a brass bar for nearly half an hour. I confess that I never snitched a ride on the back of a streetcar but the ride down the Seventeenth Avenue hill must have been wild. Once you started you had to hang on, literally for dear life, since the streetcar must have achieved speeds of close to forty-five miles per hour. Anyone who let go of the bar in full flight would have had to abandon all plans for ever raising a family.
There was a rule against the practice which was adhered to by some conductors more than others. Some of them were sincerely concerned about the freeloaders and the risk of injury, others were going strictly by the book and another group just didn't seem to give a damn. Some of the miscreants figured it only added to the excitement when an angry conductor came charging back from the front of the streetcar to attempt to collar them. The attempt never succeeded but discouraged the scamps from the practice for a week or so. The conductors thought they had an advantage by glancing in the mirror to see if there were any foreign fingers wrapped around the brass bars. The freeloaders had an uncanny ability to sense a charge however, and were long gone if they sensed a stop that seemed too long. A peek through the back window would confirm any supicions they had. The game came to an unfortunate conclusion one evening when an overzealous conductor chased some lads at the top of the first rise of the Fourteenth Street hill and succumbed to a fatal heart attack.
I've always regretted that I wasn't present when a streetcar came down the same Fourteenth Street hill, shot across the intersection and ploughed into Crook's Drugstore on the northeast corner. Was it ice on the tracks? Did the brakes fail? I'll have to check that out, it was a big deal at the time!
Bill Friendly was the first to mock the behaviour of us younger lads for emulating Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and later Nelson Eddy 'tramp, tramp, tramping along the highway' as Captain Dick and 'his own infantry'. He had no hesitation, however, after seeing 'Lives of a Bengal Lancer', in organizing a similar but ragtag group to perform various lancer-like functions. He had found a source of long 1"x2" wooden slats with which every 'lancer' was provided. With one end planed down and sharpened and a forked banner flag tied a foot or so from the sharp end we were able to convince our commander and ourselves that we were the real thing.
There was a 'park' covered with an uncontrolled copse of poplar and cottonwood trees a block south of Bull's grocery. Bill led the troop with less than miltary precision to the stalking area and set us free to skulk about looking for victims (ourselves). The ostensible rules were that lancer throws would have to be well below the shoulders. Mom was absolutely horrified when Lloyd came home the first night with a deep gash on his temple just an inch or so to the side of his eye. She didn't prohibit him from rejoining the group but had a few choice comments about our leader, even implying that he was culpable in the errant throw that had injured her boy.
The next afternoon we were back amongst the trees once again but skulk as much as I was able I couldn't spot Lloyd. It turned out that he had wisely decided to keep himself out of the line of fire. Bernie Bray's home was located immediately south of the 'jungle' and Lloyd had squeezed himself next to a 1"x 12" retaining board next to their back lawn. There was a large wasps' nest situated between the earth and the retaining board and unfortunately Lloyd's right foot came right up against the bottom opening of the nest. Angry defensive wasps had little difficulty walking up his leg and stinging him at will.
I was lurking about in the woods when I heard a loud scream of horror and pain. I had no intimation of the cause nor its location, except that it seemed to come from outside the copse. I rushed to the north edge and looked around to see if I could see the cause of the ruction. I was astonished to see Lloyd without pants running at full speed in the direction of home! What the hell was going on? He was slapping at his unclad legs and the outside of his shirt between sudden yelps of pain as another of the insects buried its stinger.
When I reached home I found Lloyd partially submerged in the bathtub with Mom stirring in additional spoonfuls of sodium bicarbonate amongst a few floating dead wasps.
'Have you seen my pants?' he asked irrelevantly.
Bill was undeterred by Lloyd's wound or his adventure with the 'kamikaze' wasps and had us all marching again in a couple of days. On this occasion he decided that it would be less than military if the 'lancers' didn't have an opportunity to participate in a flag raising. For this solemn event Bill decided that the flagpole in Templeton's yard would be appropriate.
'We are gathered here today to claim this land in the name of His Majesty King George the Fifth of England' he said gravely, head bowed.
'He started out as though he was going to marry somebody,' I whispered to my brother. Actually, it was as far as he got, as a tall, bony fellow of indeterminate age with a gloomy countenance walked over to our troop.
'What do you think you're doing?' he said to Bill, 'don't you know this is private property?'
'We were just going to raise the flag again,' Bill replied, 'Actually, we were only playing!'
'Well, you can just play somewhere else!' he snarled, ' If I see you bunch out here again I'll call the cops!' Talk about skulking! He turned and walked back to the house while we skulked, hangdog, from the premises. If we'd had tails we would undoubtedly have had them between our legs. In the absence of any further mustering by Bill, we assumed that we'd been decommissioned.
— The End —