Swamp Rat

I turned six in June 1947. At the time I lived with my mother and her parents on a quiet street of a small town. The photo is how the town looked at that time. You are looking toward the north.

The town was in a valley of the Brandywine Creek. In the 1940's there were wooded hills or farm land surrounding it. There were none of the malls, rows of fast food and chain restaurants or housing developments that stretch from small town to small town today. In the 'fifties they would build a farmer's market to the east of town, but that wasn't there yet in 1947.

My little block was quiet and had a splattering of kids my age, those of us born just the other side of the "Baby Boomers". Apparently I was a gregarious child or so my mom has claimed. I spent plenty of outdoor time with several friends and I guess I tended toward speaking out in public. One time at the shoemaker's shop (that seems such a quaint thing now) there was a man with some sort of skin discoloration, perhaps a large birthmark or a burn scar. I blurted out, loudly, something like, "look at that man", embarrassing my mother and grandmother. (I sometimes wonder if my extensive psoriasis was some curse for my youthful rudeness.)

But sometime in that period my father mustered out after serving during World War II. Before he had joined the Navy, his job had been as a stoker in a steel mill. Now he wanted something different and heard from a friend they were hiring at a trucking company out along the Lincoln Highway. His friend told him, "don't tell 'em you know mechanics or you'll never get out of the garage." My dad's dad had driven a delivery truck for the family store, so my father applied as a truck driver and got the job. It paid $100 a month plus the house.

Ah, yes, the house, there is the rub. It meant we had a place of our own, my dad, mom and me. It also meant we had to move out of the small town to several miles east, out past the busy little crossroads called Exton to a place called "Glenloch".

Glenloch had once been the 684 acre estate of a man named William E. Lockwood. His mansion, which still stands, a sort of spooky ghost from the past, out along Route 30, a dark and brooding stone edifice to opulence and gothic charm. It had been build in 1865-68 and was designed by a renowned Philadelphia architect named Addison Hutton. He was the man known not only for his prominent homes, but also for several libraries, hospitals, courthouses and schools. He designed the Ridgway Library, Swarthmore and Bryn Mawr Colleges and Lehigh University.

This mattered little to a six year old being torn from his little town home over Christmas vacation to the desolate remains of a long forgotten estate. No, we weren't moving into that famous mansion, now known as Glen Aerie. We were going a bit further east to a house in the middle of nothing in particular. It was surrounded on one side by a marsh, very brown and half-froze in the winter we arrived and festooned with cat o'nine tails and red-winged blackbirds in the summers. It sat well back from the highway, down a long double lane little more than some hardscrabble and gravel tracks. To the west stretched a barren cow pasture and beyond, running up a hill, the broken wasted stalks of cornfields.

The house, itself, was large inside, or in the perspective of this child it was. There was an eat-in kitchen, a dining room, a living room downstairs; four bedrooms upstairs. It had these very wide windowsills. I use to lay on these sills, curled like a cat, peering out on the emptiness.

The exterior was a mess. The house was cinder block that someone had begun to stucco over and quit halfway. The scaffolding still stood along one side of the building, the piping rusting, the boards warping and the structure would sing and sign in the winds.

During the week, it was my mom and I. The trucking job my father took was driving milk tankers long distance. He was to be a long distance trucker most all his life. He was seldom home. He was a weekend husband, and not too much of that time was given to being a father. In fact, the usual routine was to deliver me to my grandparents on Friday evening and take me home after Sunday dinner at their place.

I'd usually see Billy and Iva when I was back in town on those weekends, but most of my time was spent alone. I strode down the long lane to catch the school bus and went to West Whiteland School. I remember nothing of that school, not the teachers, not my classmates. It is a blank in my mind I can't explain. There were no kids my age who lived near me year long. My mom and I dwell in isolation during the week because she didn't drive in those days. I had to learn to be comfortable with just myself for company.

When your days are spend scooping tadpoles and snakes from a swamp or following crayfish up a winding stream, when you wander in the woods alone, sled down wagon rows alone, or invent games in your playroom along, you lose your gregariousness. A hermit becomes introspective and withdrawn. You don't develop social skills in an human-less landscape of bullfrogs and skunk cabbages. Notice there is no one else in these photos but me.

There was a period when there was someone my own age, a brief span within each year when we would play like normal children, but even this was to have its tragic conclusion.