Many years ago, in the time called the Great Depression, there were a few boys, some of them not yet teenagers, who lived in a neighborhood in a Western New York community by Lake Erie, a little ways from Buffalo and Niagara Falls, in a place where the Winters were cold, with a lot of snow, and where the warmer seasons were enjoyable and beautiful. Most people had very little money. IN some places you found grown men working all day for maybe 50 cents to 75 cents or a dollar. If a kid was lucky enough to get an allowance it was usually a nickel to buy an ice cream cone. A quarter seemed as big as a wagon wheel. people called those years the “dirty thirtys”.
But just because these boys lacked money didn’t spoil their fun or mischievousness. And they could mow lawns 10 cents or maybe 15 cents or up to a quarter for a really giant yard. In the winter they shoveled snow. In those days the garages were built in the back of the house with a long drive way to the street. If there was a lot of pavement to shovel the snow was deep a strong boy could make 35 cents for two hours hard work and several would skip school on big snowy days to earn that kind of income. The rest of the kids strapped on their snow boots and mushed their way to school, often getting bawled out by their frostbitten grandmother age teacher who perhaps had to trudge twice as far yet managed to arrive on time, ahead of the youngsters. No one had heard of school busses. There were other ways to earn money every boy needs. Some had newspaper routes, others delivered 5 cent magazines for 1 cent profit per copy, such as The Saturday Evening Post, or Colliers, or Liberty. If a boy had a bicycle he watched for a rare opening delivering for a drug store just for customer tips. Once in awhile a boy could make as much as 2$ on a weekend day and evening during the winter when it was bitter cold and hard pimping a bicycle on streets were slick and maybe not yet plowed. Not everyone gave a tip and a boy the merchandise had to make it up out of his own pocket.
Squash heads father owned a drug store ,so he had a regular delivery job all year long. Pretty soon a windfall came his way when his father began carrying a new kind of frozen treat called, “fudgesicle” ,sort of a chocolate ice cream bar on a wooden stick. Some of the sticks had the letters ” free” stamped on them and were good for another fudgesicle. Squash head found out how to pull the stick out to see if it had the word “free”. When no-one was looking he would go through the freezer cabinet, pulling out the fudgesicle sticks and keeping the free ones after eating the fudgesicle, using the free stick to get a second fudgesicle which he had already set aside with its own free sticks. Very few of the regular costumers ever found a winning stick that squash head had missed. The old man never learned this trick though dumbfounded by the way his son put in so much time at sweeping and window washing duties. He had never met that cranky dried up old school teacher who used to say, ” you show me a perfectly behaved kind and I will show you a rascal”.
Squash head and banana nose were the most inventive of the boys, the natural leaders who planned almost every joint exploit. The other members of the group were crates, and Dutch, and rebel, and two ton, the fat boy, and gorgeous, the pretty boy, and tail baby, and hellfentink, and holly Howie, and the only one who complained about his moniker because, indeed, goose, as he was called, did have an awfully long neck, and there were two cute girls in that neighborhood who were getting some attention from the boys, maybe not as much attention as the would have prefer, however. One of the girls they called cross eyed Katie , sweet as any girl in town, who always seemed to be looking at the end of her nose out of one eye or the other, and then there was picture pretty Normal Eyes who picked up that handle when the teacher drew a laugh in the class by calling on the girl,whos name was Norma, to ” normal eyes” some topic for debate, Norma had eyes of a fascinating lavender shade, any of the boys who later in life ever saw a lady with eyes of such beautiful color would surely have recalled Normal eyes.
Squash head and banana nose earned their position as leaders of the group one dark Halloween night. It was a chilly evening though’ not nearly as frigid as Halloween of the year before when over 6 feet of snow buried sheds, fences, mailboxes and even auto mobiles, drifting in places almost up to second story window ledges. This night there were more exciting things to attend to than soaping windows,letting air out of tires, and greasing the uphill stretch of track of the local interurban trolley line.Leave it to squash head and banana nose to provide the excitement. they were the smartest kinds onto bunch and after they grew up one became the president of a company and the other became a federal judge, having figured out countless sorts of pranks and schemes without ever having to spend a day in jail. A few hours once, but never a whole day.
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