Boys Will Be Boys

 

Boys Will Be Boys

At the age of ten or so, I had the whole world in front of me and my list of friends was filling fast. In the prosperity that followed the post war era of the fifties, folks were moving to the suburbs at light-speed with their children in tow. I would later learn that we kids were part of a “Baby Boom”. Northport was in the crosshairs and there was no shortage of new friends.

One such new friend was a boy named Robin Larson who migrated with his mother from Rutherford, NJ to claim their new spot at 31 Stanton St. Robin was a well spoken lad of slight build who wore brown “turtle shell” rimmed glasses giving him the appearance of a nerd, a term that had not yet been coined.

One of our pastimes was playing baseball in his front yard which was not much wider than a rail car. We were constantly knocking the ball over the west retaining wall and into the steeply terraced yard of Mrs. Smith, just below. She was an old grump and looking back, she must have been a widow since we never saw a Mr. Smith. Suffice to say, she was no fan of baseball and objected strongly to our trespass to retrieve the ball each time it became necessary. Finally, after the umpteenth time of disturbing her solace, she impounded the ball, stating firmly that Robin’s mom would have to petition for the ball’s release. Over the next day or so, Robin’s mom made the necessary connection with Mrs. Smith to clear the air with this neighbor and retrieve the ball. The connection was less than civil and Mrs. Smith called us everything in the sailor’s dictionary which didn’t sit well with Robin’s mom. She told Robin that she wanted him to have no further intercourse with that woman! Her choice of phraseology was a great source of amusement for us. Whatever was she thinking? We had no thoughts of any intercourse with that woman. We laughed for weeks.

Speaking of weeks, Mrs. Smith must have been friends with another neighbor, Mrs. Weeks who lived diagonally across Stanton St. on Bayview Terrace. For reasons that my old brain can’t remember, Mrs. Weeks, with her broken accent called us “Yuvenile Illinquents”. Long Island was a melting pot for people who immigrated from all points on the globe and she envisioned us as troublemakers, or in the vernacular of the day, Juvenile Delinquents. Ne’er-do-wells, slackers, no-counts; hard to believe that we were viewed with such disdain by our elders but I guess we earned it. The thought is even harder to conceive when you factor in the atrocities that were experienced by those who left their home country for a better life. But, here we were, ten-year-olds as future candidates for the Riker’s Island lock-up.

As the reader might imagine, we did have some dubious ways. Enter Fred Huntington, another boy who lived a few houses down the hill on Stanton St. Fred was an eccentric, studious fellow with red hair and glasses, the kind of stand-out that typically gets picked on by other kids. An example of his eccentricity is as follows: At the corner of Stanton St. and Bayview Avenue stood a U.S. mail box under a Long Island Lighting Company street light. One early evening we saw Fred standing on top of the mail box with a pair of binoculars, trying to read the wattage on the light bulb. He told us that he was verifying the wattage to keep LILCO honest about the proper lighting requirements.

Fast forward a few months One late, dark wintry afternoon, Robin and I were having a snowball fight as we passed by Fred’s house. The light was on in his bedroom, and we could clearly see Fred doing his homework. I picked up a snowball and lobbed it at the window, never expecting to hit the target, a gross miscalculation. When the snowball broke the glass, it all came in on Fred. Oops!

Fred’s family could well have been a pattern for the “Flanders family” of “The Simpsons” fame. Mr. Huntington must have heard the broken glass and thought “holy tomatoes, sounds like a broken window in Fred’s room. I wonder what the diddley-doo happened”? Fortunately, Fred was un-hurt. I really didn’t expect to break that window, but I did, and Mr. Huntington asked me nicely to pay for it which I did.   But…..It would not be the last pane of glass I broke in my youth. Oh, no. I became a regular customer at the glass shop as Robin and I entered our BB gun phase. Oh, those famous words, “You’ll Shoot Your Eye Out”, our next wayward caper.