Continuation of Lyle (Corky) Larkin remembers:

Spick and Span

The people took great pride in our neighborhoods. You never saw trash on the streets. The women cleaned the steps in front of their row houses every Saturday, with buckets and scrub brushes. Fall was always a pretty time of the year. The streets were lined with trees of all shapes and sizes, ours had maple trees, which turned a  bright gold with the first frost. Now came the fun part, when the leaves began to drop the neighbors would keep them raked into huge piles that gave us kids a perfect  place to romp in. We would dive into these piles and sometime ride our bikes through them. After the piles would begin to get big enough to get out of hand, they  would be burned right on the street. Somehow, it never seemed to hurt the asphalt. Everyone watched out for us kids, and if we were out too late as it got dark – the  women would call to us “the lights are on, it’s time to go home now”. In the pre-air conditioning days of Philadelphia, everyone in our neighborhood would come  outside after dinner and sit on the front steps. The adults would chat, and we kids would play. It was all very friendly.

Taprooms

The Brown Jug, Flanagan‟s, Northeast Bar & Grille, Duffy‟s Tavern Now they‟re called BARS. The neighborhoods used to call them “Taprooms”. These places were  totally different back then. They were “Meeting Places” for the people in that neighborhood. Complete families would gather for a night out. The atmosphere was  always a friendly one. Nickel beers, regular Hard boiled eggs or Pickled Eggs and pigs feet in gallon jars on the bar, baskets of peanuts, take-out beer in a pail, which were called “Buckets” that looked like a miniature milk can. These buckets would hold about two quarts and would cost fifty cents each. You were always expected to return them on your next visit. When the adults gathered at home , there would be several trips to the local bar with a bucket or pitcher to bring home the beer. Taprooms always had a separate ladies entrance, either at the side or rear of the building. No self respectful woman would walk through the front door of one of these establishments.

Wissinoming Park

We would fill the trunk with empty gallon jugs and get into the car and drive here on Sunday afternoon, just to get the spring water. We would actually stand in line,      waiting our turn. Sometime, we would just stop for a drink of fresh spring water that flowed from a 2-inch metal pipe hanging out of the bank. The water led to a good  size shallow pond that we used for ice-skating during the winter months. During the summer months, this was a great place for family outings, baseball games and picnics. To be continued…

Continuation of Lyle (Corky) Larkin remembers:

Scooters

You couldn’t buy one at the store because all of them were hand made by us kids. The materials needed to build one of these beauties consisted of a three or four-foot  piece of 2X4 lumber and a discarded orange crate. Add one, old steel wheeled street skate taken apart, which now gives you two sets of wheels. Nail a set of wheels to  each end of the 2X4 and turn it over and nail the orange create to one end of it with the open part facing toward the other end. Next, make yourself a set of handlebars. Take two short pieces of lumber and nail them to the top of the create forming a “V” with the pointed end facing toward the closed end of the create, tack some plastic streamers at each end of the bars. Next step was to decorate the sides of the box with bottle- caps. You can spell out your name or make different designs. Take two empty soup cans and nail them to the front and you now have a set of headlights. We used these to get all over the neighborhood, whizzing down hills and leaning into  the turns to keep from turning over. If your buddy didn‟t have a scooter, that was OK because he could sit inside the crate while you did the scooting. Each one of these scooters was unique as they portrayed the individual who constructed it. Some kids even made “Low-Riders” by using a longer 2X4 and it would sag in the middle almost touching the ground. We were more than happy to oblige when mom asked us to go to the store for her, for we now had “CARGO” for our scooter. It was not an unusual sight to see a band of kids each with one of their legs “pumping” the street with a “Keds” sneaker at the end of  that leg burning up the street in a big rush to go nowhere. Some Saturdays you could find us at the top of the Wakeling St. hill getting ready for the big race of the day.

Street Games

This is kind of like the boy with a stick and a hoop; it just takes a little imagination to make a game out of anything. We would take the cap from a soda bottle and fill it with melted wax. Most times this was from mom’s candles when she wasn’t looking. We had games both with and without wax. We also spent a lot of time smoothing the bottom of the caps against the concrete to make them slide better. We then met on the street or sidewalk with a piece of chalk and drew our playing field. A large square was drawn, with numbered boxes at the corners and the middle of each side. In the middle of the square a skull and cross bones was drawn. The object of the game was to flick the bottle cap from one end of the square into each of the numbered boxes. The first person to do so was declared the winner. If a bottle cap  happened to land on any part of the skull and cross bones, that person was out of the game. Some of the grown-ups used them as chips while playing cards, they had a value of one penny each.

Games played around the neighborhood in the streets and alleys were some strange derivatives of Baseball called Stickball, Hose-ball,  Wallball, Half-ball, Step-ball and Wire-ball. Ya just gotta live in the city to experience these games. Bats, when required for a game, were old broomsticks. Believe me, hitting anything as small as a tennis ball with a broomstick is no easy task. In those days, one of the types of balls that could be purchased in stores was called a  „pimple ball‟. This was probably an unofficial name but its the only one I recall. It was a white rubber ball with bumps of about 1/8″ diameter all around it. Hence, the  name „pimple-ball‟. These were the balls eventually used for Half-ball; once they developed a hole in them and lost their air, they were cut in half at the middle to  make two half-balls. We started recycling a long time before it became fashionable.

To celebrate the 4th of July holiday, all of the kids in the neighborhood used to decorate our wagons, scooters and bikes with red, white and blue crepe paper, and ride them around the block in a mock parade. Another thing we did to our bikes  was to tie balloons in a position near the wheels so the spokes would rub against them and make a noise similar to a motorcycle. We would also tape small American  Flags to our handlebars.

To be continued…

Tuesday night at the first 2012 meeting of the Historical Society of Frankford, Torben Jenk and Joe Menkevich were taking advantage of the behind the scenes tour of the building to look into the corners.  In the process, a rare 18th century Duffield Compass caught their eye.  This instrument is over 200 years old.  It has been in the collection for a long time but it takes an expert eye to see the significance of an item of that kind.  There may be a program in the fall to discuss the significance of that find.

In other news from the meeting, Jim Young, President of the Society laid out plans for further improvements to the building this year made possible by a grant.  This will include finishing up exterior gutter replacements, interior painting and upgrades to the rest room on the lower level. Young says this year the budget is balanced.

There are additions to the board which were voted on and approved at the meeting. Several new volunteers have come into the group this year who will lend valuable expertise in several areas that heretofore have been lacking.

The next meeting of the Historical Society of Frankford will be on Tuesday April 10th with a presentation by Allen Hornblum on K & A’s SECOND STORY MEN.  Allen is a great storyteller.  You won’t want to miss seeing him.

This installment of my articles about life as we knew it in Frankford as I grew up in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s contains some somewhat “racy” material. Names have been left out, “to protect the guilty,” and adult readers may want to refrain from encouraging the kids to read this one.

There were nine of us kids, in our Wakeling Street house across from Frankford Stadium. If we wanted spending money, we had to work.

THE HARRISON QUICK SHOP

So, beginning in 1965, when I was 12, I worked after school and on Saturdays at the Harrison Quick Shop, a Unity Frankford grocery store at 1100 Harrison Street on the southeast corner of Harrison and Large Street. The owners, Mr. and Mrs. Matus, were a German-speaking couple from Czechoslovakia.  They taught me to do everything at the store. By the age of 16, I was filling in the Unity Frankford wholesale order sheet,  unloading the truck, “doing the count”  to square the invoice with what was delivered,  stocking shelves, filling customer orders, delivering groceries, cutting lunch meats, cutting steaks and chickens, and manning the cash register.

Mr. Matus’ English was about 80%, with a heavy German accent.  He would sound like this: “Peee-TAIR, get ten dozen ahx from duh vall-kin bahx” — “Peter, get 10 dozen eggs from the walk-in box,” the big walk-in refrigerator. He knew that sometimes he was hard to understand, and he would have fun with that.

THE SPECIAL IRISH LADY

The people were generous with their tips.  We delivery boys all shared the big tippers. There was one house the older guys never shared with me, though, until one day one of them said, “Do you think that Pete’s old enough for the Irish lady’s house.” “Yeah,” said the other, “I think he’ll survive.” I was about 14 at the time. I thought, “What are they talking about?”

The Irish lady’s house was a home in the middle of the block of Harrison Street opposite Frankford High School. I carefully lifted the large box of groceries off the bike,  walked up the steps, knocked on the door,  and an Irish lady in her thirties, completely au naturel from the waist up, answered the door.  And, sheesh, was there ever a lot there for a young man to see and be concerned about!

Inside the house there were all of these little kids running around in their underwear or naked as jay birds. The woman’s state of dress left no doubts about how there came to be so many.

I carried the groceries into the kitchen, pretending that there was nothing about the lady to gape at, received the money for the groceries and my tip, and left. There was another residence like that. The girl, a pretty lady about 10 years older than me, was always fully dressed when I delivered groceries, but she knew when I would be passing her home at night, while walking the dog, and she would often stand in window “in the buff.” I was just too naïve to do anything about it, to tell the truth — a good thing, correct?

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There will be a rededication ceremony for 33 newly installed Federal military gravestones for the Union veterans buried in the “Circle of Honor” surrounding the monument at the Civil War Memorial in Cedar Hill Cemetery on May 12th.  I met Tony Matijasick on a freezing cold day back in January to see what had been done and took some video.

The 33 new stones mark the graves that surround the monument.  The funds for the installation of the stone was mainly contributed by the reenactment groups that the soldiers would have served in during the war.

Now the monument itself is in dire need of preservation, so funds are needed once again to complete this project.  The lettering listing the names of all the soldiers from Frankford who served is barely readable today and it is time to restore it.

Below is a short video.