Thinking Things Through

The picture to the left was taken in 1952. I am with our dog, Joey, and I am proudly wearing one of my father's Army caps. You can just see one of the vacant lots and the begining of the woods in the background.




Our house on Montgomery Ave. in Holyoke, MA was at the end of a dead end street. To the north, just past our house, were two vacant lots, and on the other side of these vacant lots began “the woods”. The woods were so important to me as a child that I sometimes view this space as a kind of character in my life. There was a straight path through the woods to the Daniel Wax home where my friends Marilee and Bobby Wax lived, and then on to the home of my friend, Dana Hathaway, the only child of Dwight and Doris Hathaway. Both the Wax and Hathaway homes were essentially to the west of the woods, right on Northampton Street (Rt 5); those homes are still there, but alas, the Waxes and the Hathaways are long gone. To the north of “our woods” are the dinosaur tracks which I write about in another piece on my Blog. However, we rarely roamed north of the Hathaway house. On the eastern boundary of our woods there is a steep embankment, at the bottom of which are the RR tracks which run from Holyoke to Northampton and on to Montreal (though just about the only train traffic today are cars containing coal for the Mt. Tom Power Plant), and just beyond the tracks lies the Connecticut River. We rarely went down this embankment, because our parents told us that tramps stalked the RR tracks looking to kidnap little boys and girls. There was an old log stairway down the embankment, but we hardly ever went down there.

We all loved the woods; we could play all sorts of games there; “cowboys and Indians”, “capture the flag”, “kick the can”. We built tree houses in the woods (where I was the “ground lookout” because I couldn’t climb trees). One year, we made ice blocks using snow and boxes, and we built an igloo out of these blocks. We discovered that it’s true; if you sit in an ice igloo for a while, it gets quite warm from the heat of our bodies. . Of course, with the trapped heat of our bodies, it started to drip inside. I could never understand how real Eskimos managed to live with the constant dripping. Over time, I got to know every square inch of the woods. I remember once I had to go into the woods to retrieve Eddy Abbot’s pants which had been taken from him by the “older” kids in the neighborhood. Eddy hid in a bush until I found his pants. He never showed much gratitude, though. Well, I was just a little guy at the time, and I don’t think it was Eddy’s finest moment.

One time, Gary Cox, the oldest son of Dr. Gardner and Helen Cox, tagged along as a few of my palls and I went playing in the woods. Gary was a few years younger than we “big” kids, so we decided to play a trick on him. We told him we were going to play hide and seek and he was it. As he closed his eyes and counted to 100, we ran away. But before Gary got to 100, we started yelling “Help, Help – the tramps have caught us.” Gary went tearing off, and we all had a good laugh. But unfortunately, we had not thought this out completely. Gary ran straight home screaming “The tramps have Bobby Fowler and Larka Twing and Jerry Web. The tramps have them”. This in turn led to urgent phone calls to our mothers, who absolutely freaked out. The police were summoned. And as Jerry, Larka and I casually emerged from the woods, we discovered that we were in a raft of trouble. But worse was to come.

Once, a friend of mine and I found a huge boulder right at the edge of the embankment. I honestly can’t remember who that friend was. It might be easy to guess it was Jerry Webb; whenever I got into trouble, Jerry was generally there. Anyway, we decided to see if we could get the boulder to roll down the embankment a bit. We dug out the dirt surrounding the boulder and pushed and pushed. At first it didn’t budge, then it rocked a bit, then more --- and finally, to our delight, it came out of its hole and started to roll down the embankment. It was a very heavy boulder and a very steep embankment, and the boulder simply bounced off of trees and such as it plunged down below. We were, like I said, delighted. Well, we were delighted for a little while. Just a moment, really. Then we weren’t delighted.

In fact, we were quickly horrified. You see, we just hadn’t thought this thing out completely. The boulder had simply bounced off of every obstacle until it came to rest right between the rails of the RR tracks. Yikes! Down the log stairway we went. And we pushed and we pushed, but we were unable to roll the boulder out of the tracks. It started to get dark. We were nervous about the tramps. Our parents expected us home for dinner. So we did the natural kid thing – we climbed back up the log stairs, went home and forgot all about it.

About a week later, my family was just sitting down to dinner. My father was finishing drinking his martini and reading the newspaper. “Here’s an interesting bit of news”, said my father, as he folded the newspaper. “A train de-railed near here. Just north of our house, I think. Seems the train hit a big rock and went right off the tracks. Fortunately, it was a freight train and nobody was hurt.” I was absolutely immobilized with fear, but I managed with great effort to say nothing. In fact, I said nothing to anybody about this little episode until both of my parents were many years deceased. Why take chances? To tell the truth, before writing this piece in my Blog, I have tried to look up the statute of limitations on train de-railings. Not much luck finding precedent of young children de-railing trains, but according to general tort law, I think I am ok about revealing this little mishap now. Anyway, I’ll bet lots of kids have de-railed trains. Like me, they just didn’t get caught. So what’s the big deal? I used to think this was the worst thing I ever did. But on reflection, I realize that I have done much worse things in my life. I’m just not going to tell you about those other things. Let’s just say that de-railing a train was fairly close to the worse thing I’ve ever did and leave it at that.

On the 4th of November, 1955, an airplane crashed into the river just below “our woods” and promptly sank. It was a C-47 ( a twin engine “tail dragger”, the military version of the famous DC 6) on route to Westover Airfield. There were 8 people on board; only 4 survived. The pilot had radioed Westover that he was having engine difficulty. It is supposed that the plane encountered carburetor icing and subsequent engine failure. I have always imagined that the pilot, realizing that he couldn’t make it to Westover, looked at his charts and saw this long, straight stretch of the River – an inviting emergency landing strip. Of course, he had aeronautical maps which would NOT have shown water depth. And the water is very shallow there in “the rapids”; the rocks simply tore the belly out of the plane. Moreover, just past the rapids, the water gets very deep, going to 80 feet in some places. So the plane came down, hit the rocks, suffered catastrophic damage to the underside of the aircraft and then sank in extremely deep water.

Immediately, all sorts of people showed up in a large scale effort to recover the plane and the bodies of the occupants who didn’t get out of the plane. There were frog men, and cranes and special railcars outfitted with emergency equipment, and boats of all description. Oh boy! This was serious stuff for a 10 year old kid. Frog men, for crying out loud! A real plane!! Dead people!!! Like every kid in the neighborhood, I begged my parents to temporarily lift the ban on going down the embankment so I could watch the fantastic goings on. And I had an ingenious argument; with all these military and special-forces guys around, how could a tramp possibly kidnap me? Eventually, my parents relented, with all sorts of admonitions about staying out of the way of the workers and certainly staying out of the River. It was November! What were they thinking I might do?

As it turned out, the emergency workers were great about our little band of spectators. They seemed happy to have us about and even invited us to keep warm by the big brush fire they always had going to keep the frog men from freezing to death. My mother sent me down there with cookies, doughnuts and other treats for the workers, so that helped in making us welcome. For days, I would beg the clock to move faster as I sat squirming in school, and then I would bound home and head straight for the embankment stairs and the River. We all expected a plane to emerge from the River with dead bodies at any time, but it was not to be. At least while I was observing, no plane ever came out of the River.

Some years later, after I mentioned this to a friend, she sent me newspaper clippings from that time which reported the entire event AND stated that the plane had indeed been recovered, dragged to the South Hadley side of the River and sent on to Westover for the detailed safety examination to determine the cause of the crash. How could I have missed it? Even if it was recovered during the day when I was in school, certainly the recovery workers would have told us.

Much later, a good friend, Carl Eger, told me that he was one of the three frogmen attempting to recover the plane. This is what he has told me:

"The airplane was a military C-47 that we know in civilian life as a DC-3. It is not uncommon for the military to leave downed planes that are in odd places and difficult to retrieve, e.g. there is one left in Quabbin Reservoir. They do take the time to make certain sensitive equipment is removed - if possible - and that there is no leaking of fuel. The pilot ended up as far away as Essex, CT. A sailor unfortunately made it thru the canal gatehouse, ending up next to the former Parsons Paper Co. - certain of his anatomy missing. Another passenger, a Naval Commander, ended up surviving and making it out of the river onto Rt. 5, north of where you lived. As for the airplane, it is still in the river at the bend where N. Pleasant & Montgomery Streets intersect. Though we were able to make it down to the plane in search for any human remains of those who might not have made it out of the aircraft, none were found inside. Because of the current, we had to use a surfing type board with a rope tied to a motor boat, and by planning it in a downward position the current took us to where we could maneuver to the plane and not be swept away by the fast current."

Now this has intrigued me. If the plane was not recovered, why did the Air Force put out the story to the press that they had recovered the plane? I can only think of one reason – to discourage people from looking for it.

I did ultimately pay a price for the fun I had during this exciting time. Remember the brush fire that was always burning to warm the workers and the frogmen? Well, they must have thrown in some poison ivy. Do you know you can get the poison ivy rash from exposure to smoke? Indeed you can. In fact, it is a very dangerous way to get poison ivy. Of course, as I sat by the fire waiting anxiously to see dead bodies, I had no idea. I got an epic case. It was interesting that I got the rash on one side of my face, neck and head but not the other. I must have been facing sideways to the smoke, no doubt to help me breathe. But on that one side, the rash was devastating. One whole side of my face was so swollen that my cheek hung down on my shoulder. But more seriously, I got it in my ear, up my nose, even on one of my eyeballs. What concerned my doctor the most was the fact that I got a small exposure to the poison in my lungs. This can actually kill you. I was put on all sorts of powerful anti histamine medications and kept home from school for weeks. Ever since that experience, I have been hyper-sensitive to poison ivy, and believe me, I have learned to identify it and stay the hell away from that plant. Several of my childhood friends got the poison ivy rash as well, though no one got it as bad as I did. I would imagine that many of the frogmen and emergency workers got it as well. They were sitting closer to the fire than we kids, so some of them probably got fairly severe cases. You see, they just hadn’t thought this brush fire business through completely.

Most of the woods were owned by Daniel Wax. I was very good friends with both of his children, and was often at their home. Dan Wax was a real character. My parents didn’t like him all that much, but they loved his wife Agatha. One 4th of July, Dan brought to the annual neighborhood party some truly fabulous fireworks. Fireworks had just become illegal in Massachusetts, so God knows where Dan got them. Probably from that “outlaw” state, Connecticut. But Dan’s fireworks clearly outshone all of the other pinwheels, sparklers and roman candles and such. One firework in particular was to be Dan’s “Grand Finale”. It was shaped like an ambulance with wheels and everything. When lit, it was supposed to go screaming across the field propelled by rocket power, complete with a loud siren and flashing lights, and then it was to explode. Dan lit the fuse and the entire neighborhood waited expectantly. Nothing. Dan walked back to it and nudged it with his foot. Nothing. Dan tried to re-light the fuse. Nothing. Annoyed, Dan picked it up and peered under it. Not thinking it through, again. BLAM. Off to the hospital, but nothing serious had happened, just a few minor burns.

Another year, Dan Wax invited the entire neighborhood to his house for the annual 4th of July party. And again, Dan had acquired the most dramatic fireworks. One rocket was fired off, shot up over the woods, exploded into these wonderful star bursts and such. “Ohh.” “Ah.” The star bursts slowly descended, unfortunately without extinguishing, and promptly started a fire deep in the woods. Dan had not thought this through, completely, and he had no “contingency plan” for a fire. Consequently, the fire department was called, and the firemen were not amused when they arrived. In fact, the firemen were notably annoyed because it was a difficult fire to control, way away from fire hydrants and such. And they were probably called away from their own fireworks parties. Since the firemen and several police officers were down there in the woods, Dan didn’t fire any more rockets in their direction, though I honestly think he would have done just that if Agatha had not pleaded with him to stop. Obviously, Agatha had thought that through.

I spent many nights enjoying “sleepovers” at the Wax house. They had the biggest house in our neighborhood. It was huge, with rooms on rooms. It had a complete bar, for example, just about the same size as Francy’s Tavern in Holyoke. While I was friends with Merilee, I was very good friends with Bobby Wax. When I was about 8 years old, Bobby Wax had managed to discover his father’s pornography collection, hidden away in a big box in Mr. Wax’s closet. We pored over these magazines every time his parents were not around. I got some very early anatomy lessons from these pictures. Some of these magazines were what we would call today “hard core”. Bobby Wax told me he thought that what we were looking at had something to do with making babies. Of course, the people in these pictures were doing all sorts of things to each other, so it was hard to tell precisely what had to do with making babies, besides getting undressed. Maybe you had to do all of those things to make a baby.

Now this puzzled, indeed, troubled me no end. Naturally, I had asked my mother where babies came from, but she had told me that I was delivered by the mailman, and that satisfied me for several years. Our mailman delivered all sorts of things; why not babies? But after looking at Mr. Wax’s porno magazines, I began to have serious misgivings about the mailman. I knew my father had been away for a long time fighting in WWII …… Could it be???? …… One day about that time, our Welch Terrier dog, Joey, bit the mailman. This distressed my mother because she feared that we might have to put our dog to sleep if the mailman lodged a complaint. I remember thinking: “Probably served him right”. Well, I just hadn’t thought it through completely.