Real Nightmares

The cowboy me, smiling at the dangers of the trail, ready for that bronco of a bicycle to buck me off into the marsh, ready to stand firm in the middle of stampeding railroad trains. I stood up to the challenges of the wilderness I existed in. I had faced down a growling, angry dog (well, actually I fled in abject terror, but why besmirch my adventure image now). I had my trusty companions by my side, Peppy and Topper. I had the daydreams of a blossoming Frank Buck.

But what of the nightmares.

Like the mist that rose in early morning across our marsh, nightmarish images can appear on the brightest days. They can blight a snowy road with a spray of blood or turn a summer flower into a siren of doom. And the most nightmarish aspect of all is they are real, they can't be changed and they claim squatter's rights in a back room of your mind.

Yes, we lived back behind a swamp in the middle

of what was nowhere at that time. It was an insulated world in many ways, but it did have a great connecting link to civilization. We were

beside the great Lincoln Highway.

The Lincoln Highway, Route 30, also called in our parts, the Lancaster Pike. We were tied to the breadth of the country by that road, which began in Times Square, New York City and ended in Lincoln Park, San Francisco, California.

The Lincoln Highway has been probably as dominate a landmark throughout my life as the

Brandywine Creek. It seems to me it's been

around forever, but it was just twenty-some

years old when I was born. It started out being named the Coast-to-Coast Rock Highway and was the brainchild of the man who also gave us the Indianapolis 500 Speedway and Miami

Beach, Florida. Carl Fisher [pictured on left] looked out one day in 1912 and realized with the growth of automobiles there was a need for a

good road. He decided to build one coast to coast with the help of money from the automobile makers. Henry Ford didn't see the point and without Ford money it seemed a doomed dream, until Henry Joy, head of the Packard Motor Car Company suggested naming it after Abraham

Lincoln. This struck a patriotic chord and eventually funds were raised and the highway completed.

And my first nightmare image appeared on it in the first winter after I moved to the swamp. I rode a school bus to school. It was late afternoon on the trip home. There was snow across the fields, a drifting here and there even across the well-traveled Lincoln Highway. The sun was bright, it glistened on the white of the fields and also off the lanes of the road. The bus slowed, as traffic in both directions had and we moved slowly pass the cause that lay on the center lines on the side to which I sat. A dog had been hit, it hindquarters crushed, its blood and other smearing the white. It struggled to get up, but couldn't, never would.

We passed, moved on. I do not know, will never know, if anyone stopped to tend the dog or to put it out of its misery. There was no carcass the next day, only the stain, so someone took it away somewhere. Beyond that I cannot know its fate anymore than I was ever able to erase that scene from my vision or my thoughts. Perhaps it was an omen.

Although I have been speaking of the isolation of this period, we weren't on a desert island somewhere. The house and land belonged to the owners of the hauling company my dad

worked for and their terminal was a quarter mile or so up the highway toward the east. The terminal was across the highway and set back. Opposite it' s entrance drive on our side was a small apartment building. I suppose most the tenants worked for the hauling company. My father and mother socialized with two families who lived there. Joe Bender and his wife remained long time friends of my parents. They had a daughter, Dot, but she was older than me. (She was in a later time and place to become my babysitter and even later, she and her husband became friends of my wife and me. Those are stories for later times.)

The other family was the Humes. They had a son, Tom (he was the model for Thomas in "Ground Dog Day"), but he was even older than Dot. He wasn't particularly interested in being a playmate to a 7 year old. So when my parents visited with the Benders or the Humes, Dot or Tom spent time amusing me, but beyond that they were as invisible as anyone else in my day-to-day world.

Further up the highway their lived eighty or ninety boys, none of whom were my age. It would have mattered little if there were. This was the Church Farm School (now known as CFS: The School at Church farm). It was a boarding school started in 1918 by the Reverend Dr. Charles W. Shreiner of the Episcopal Church. It took in boys of lower economic circumstances and gave

them a college prep and religious education. The students helped pay the cost of this by working the farm belonging to the school. As far as I know, this is still the case on the 1,600 acres of farm, school buildings and dorms.

But those boys were as insulated and isolated as was I. They lived in their self-contained world and I never saw them. That school could have been a hundred miles away in another state for all it touched upon my life.

Between the Church Farm School and the apartments was a factory, White Motor Company.

Based out of Cleveland, Ohio, the company made a variety of mechanical tools and vehicles. It manufactured sewing machines, roller skates, lathes and bicycles.

As you can see from their logo on the left, they also were once automobile makers.

The company existed from 1900 to 1981 as the White Motor Company. This particular plant of theirs between the Church Farm School and our swamp made trucks, perhaps their most famous product.

Running alongside the truck factory just before the Church Farm School were a row of small houses. The first was next to the highway, then they ran back along the driveway of the factory, sitting up on a high ridge. The outer edge of this ridge toward the truck plant was covered in gravel.

I do not know how we came to meet, but living in one of those little homes was a family with kids my age. Perhaps the events which occurred later that summer have erased some memories from my mind, because I cannot remember the family name or the name of any individual member. There were four children, three boys and a girl. The girl was the youngest. She may have been four years old. All the children were close in age and the oldest was seven or eight. I didn't know them until halfway through June of the year we came.

The reason for this was their father had been killed in the war (World War II). Since those little homes were company houses, I suppose either he worked for White Motors before his death or the mother was working there then. The boys were students at the Milton Hershey Industrial School. Yes, the same Milton Hershey of Chocolate Bar fame. Milton and his wife, Catherine [pictured on the left and she looks as if she ate a lot of Milton's chocolate], established a boarding school in 1909 for orphaned boys. It provided care and education from pre-kindergarten through Twelfth Grade for boys in need (today this includes girls). Besides an education, Hershey provided for their clothes, board, nourishment, health care and career counseling.

Since we moved to the swamp over Christmas vacation at the end of 1947, the boys were back in Hershey, Pennsylvania by the time we settled in. But I did meet them somehow in the summer of 1948. Sometimes they would come down to my place and sometimes I would go to their home. I remember an instance at their place that summer.

I do not know who built it, but there was an underground structure atop that ridge amidst the houses. We used to use it as a fort or a hideout in our games. Once as we ran about in a game of war atop the high embankment, I slipped on the loose edge and fell face first down the gravel side to the drive below. I didn't feel hurt, but when I pushed my self up I felt a twinge in one hand. When I looked down, that hand was covered in blood. I had a strange reaction to my wound. I felt embarrassment. I didn't want anyone to see it, so after climbing back up the embankment, I stuck my bleeding hand into my pocket and hid in the underground hideaway.

I don't know who found me and took me into their house, but I remember their mother telling me to take my hand out of my pocket. She then washed it and dabbed it with iodine or mercurochrome. Which ever it was, it stung something fierce. After the cut healed I was left with another inch-long scar, this time running along the creases of my palm. (This was not to be my last battle scar of childhood.)

Summers fly by for children. It came time for them to leave again for their other life in Hershey. The boys came down to my place for one more day of play and they brought their little sister along. Late in the day, they left to go home, walking down our long lane, then up the shoulder along the Lincoln Highway to their house a quarter mile away.

My mom was outside when they left. We heard the screech and squeal together and my mom began to run down the lane. I followed behind, but before we reached the highway, she stopped me and told me to stay where I was. She then walked up the road where I could see traffic was coming to a stop.

Walking home, the oldest boy had noticed wild flowers growing on the bank across the pike. he wanted to pick a bouquet to give their mother. He had been leading their sister along, now he gave her hand over to one of his brothers and told the boy to hold on to her because she wanted to go pick the flowers, too. The older boy crossed. His sister struggled, but her brother held her tight, until she bit his hand and he let go.

She ran out into the traffic lanes and was struck and killed.

I don't know what happened to the family after that summer. I didn't see them the next year so I assume they moved away. How sad to lose your husband and then your daughter. How awful to lose your sister that way. (Strangely, this scene was to repeat itself a couple years later.) I don't know how those boys dealt with the guilt they must have felt because I know the guilt I felt in her death was heavy enough. They were going from my home, from visiting me, when it happened. I wish my last memory of them wasn't the sound of car brakes skidding on a highway. I wish I could remember their names.

The portrait of me at the top of this post was a detail from the one here. It is from the same year we first moved to Glenloch (1947), but was taken next to my grandparents house in town during a visit.

There was an itinerant photographer who came through town. He supplied the hat, bandana and pony. This guy must have got around [note this was marked as 479 on the stirrup]. Almost fifty years later, when I was working for the bank, the subject came up. So many of us around my age had similar pictures, we decided to have a "Pony Picture" day. All of us brought in our old photo and there was a display put up. Lot of little kids in the same hat, same kerchief on the same pony were hanging on the wall. That hat must have been plopped on so many heads it's a wonder we hadn't all shared heads full of lice. Maybe the guy cleaned the thing every time.