Running out the back door and into the back yard was well rehearsed. First one foot out the door onto the deck, and completely skipping the steps, taking a long jump to the driveway using both feet together to make a graceful landing. About in middle of my next step I would hear the crack of the screen door slamming behind me followed by the clatter of the uncoiling metal spring. I would just be taking my next step when I would hear Mom yelling to me "to stop slamming the door"! Too late!

About a half hour before the beginning of Summer Vacation I would have been at school having finished up the last "half-days" of class that were required to make up for the unused "snow-days". I'd have run home, changed out of my "school clothes", and then sprung out the back door directly into Summer Vacation. Somehow, in the incredible world of Summer Vacation, the colors were brighter, the sounds sharper, the world smelled fresher, the sun would be shinning, the Robbins would be singing, I'd be in just a t-shirt and jeans, and that "slam" would be the starting shot of Summer!

:: The whooshing sound of hand-powered lawn-mowers.
When my Dad came home one day with a gas powered lawn mower I though at the time that this was the neatest thing ever. A mower that you didn't have to push through a yard full of too tall grass that had grown much too quickly in the humid, fresh air found in the lee of the Great Lakes. Pushing an unpowered push-mower through tall, moist grass was a near impossible task for a boy who didn't weigh much more than the mower. So when Dad brought home the power-mower it made my job of mowing the lawn a lot easier. It became easy enough that I began earning money mowing lawns around the neighborhood. It wasn't long before most of the neighbors has switched to electric or gas mowers too. Years later I realized that Summer's had been a lot quieter before those power mowers had arrived.

Before power-mowers we would sit on our screen porch on a summer's day and about the only sounds that you would hear were birds and the occasional whoosh-whoosh of someone's hand-powered lawn-mower. The whooshing sound came from the sets of spinning blades in the front of the mower. You would push forward and make a whoosh, then pull the mower back a little and push forward again to make another whoosh. Over and over again around the yard, little advances like someone would do while fencing with a sword. All the while the whooshing sound would comfort you like the sound of waves breaking against a pebble beach would do. The power-mowers took all that away.

Our house had a "milk-box", a one-foot square hole in the side of the house with a door on either side, one outside, one inside. The Milkman would open the outer door, retrieve the empty milk bottles and leave new bottles of fresh milk. Mom or one of us kids would then open the inside door in the morning and take the milk bottles to the fridge. On top of the milk, in the neck of the bottle, was a layer of fresh cream that my Mom could skim off for the morning coffees or we could shake up the bottle and blend it all into the milk. Today, drinking 1% milk I wonder how I drank that heavy grade back then. Yet I survived.

In the winter when temps were really cold the milk would freeze while waiting inside of the milk-box. The paper stopper would often be pushed out by the expanding milk but sometimes the entire bottle would be shattered. We stopped using the Milkman when a modern "Super-Market" opened just a short distance away, and where the price was cheaper.

My first skateboard was made out of a liberated rollerskate. Throughout the Winter while waiting for the snow to melt my sister and I would skate around our basement for hours on these all-metal skates which clamped to your shoe's soul using a skate key. She used one skate and I used the other so we got pretty good at "surfing" around on one foot. I must have seen California kids skateboarding on TV because one day I disassembled the skate and attached it to a plank using some roofing nails. Before long several of the neighbor kids had done the same to their skates and after that it was surf up on Mildred Ave.! It must have been noisy because of the metal wheels and even though they had no lateral traction we developed some pretty good tricks using jumps and teeter-boards. We didn't have knee or wrist protection, and of course no helmets. And yes, cars were using the street too. We fell a lot, skinned a lot of knees and hands, and somehow survived.

At my new Jr. High School I met Benno, a kid who had grown up in post-War Germany. Benno and I were fellow artist, skateboard buddies, and California souls. He had a real skateboard with wide fiberglass wheels that you could carve turns with and were really quiet. The first time that I tried his board I lost control, fell, and tore the knee on a brand new pair of pants. My brother found a place that sold just the fiberglass wheels and trucks so with the help of a Saber saw we cut out some boards to paint up. After that I was a skateboarding fool. I still have the board in storage somewhere.

Benno had a buddy named Art, another boarder, who seemed to like to push the envelope on getting in trouble. Benno and I would keep him reigned in so we never really did anything that would get us into anything too deep. We used to camp out in Art's backyard in an old Army pup-tent and get up in the middle of the night and go boarding down two lane James Street. Every once in a while a car would come along and we'd go hide in the bushes until they passed just in case it was a police car. One night Art got a hold of some cans of spray paint. Benno and I were two of the school artist so we did a great job decorating the street while Art kept an eye out for cars. We only painted the street because we knew that it would be worn off by the cars before too long.

Suddenly someone yelled something about a cop car and we all scattered for the bushes. I took a few long strides and in the dark I suddenly ran head-long into a pole! I nearly knocked myself unconscious. The police car stopped right in the middle of the street in front of me. I was still on the ground in the dark so I crawled toward some bushes and a gulley to hide the best that I could. The cop got out with a flashlight and surveyed the street and then started to walking toward the bushes and us. At one time his beam ran right across my little gulley and across the back of my black jacket. If he had only looked a little harder he would have seen me there. After a few minutes he got back into his car and drove slowly away with his spotlight scanning for us like radar. We all ran through the back yards to get back to Art's tent without being spotted by the roaming police officer, hiding our spray cans as we went. It was when we got back to the tent that the other guys discovered the blood on my forehead but all they kept saying was, "Vaughn! We thought he had you ... he shone his light right at you!" Eventually Art ran into the house and got some wet paper towels and a first aid kit. Benno, a fellow Scout, patched me up. We had just turned off our flashlights when the tent was struck by a strong beam of light. It was the same cop and he had spotted our tent through the neighbors yard. We played possum and sweated it out while trying to rub the dried spray paint off our fingers. What a relief when he finally drove away a few minutes later. I convinced the other guys that the cop could be sneaking up on us in the dark and that we'd better go to sleep before he caught us.

The next morning Art's mother cooked us all pancakes. She had just walked back from the store and recognized Benno's and my artwork on the street. She said that since she didn't spot any bad language or vandalizm that we weren't in trouble. We didn't tell her about out-foxing the police officer.

Favorite Sights :: The first glimpse of "the lake", whatever lake it was, it didn't matter. If we were going to a lake, that was a very special day in the World of Summer Vacation. My siblings and I riding in the back of the family car would practically climb over the front seat to get the first glimpse of the lake as we came over some hill or around some corner. Spotting it was like seeing the gates to an amusement park and, when we were finally out of the car, the first thing that we'd do was to run down to the lake to see and touch it. The draw of a lake was so strong that once you got there you couldn't imagine being anywhere else.

The Grandy's, longtime friends of my parents, owned a camp on one of New York's Finger Lakes named Otisco Lake. They had this great cabin that could hold several families for a night. This is where I first slept in a bunk bed. When I was 14 a few of us decided to swim across the mile and a half wide Otisco lake. Two people set out in a rowboat while the swimmers chased from behind. One person gave up swimming just after the halfway point and climbed into the rowboat while the rest of us made it all the way to other shore. However everyone, except me, boarded the rowboat for the return trip. I was the only one to swim all the way back across the lake.

One other Summer, the Shriners threw a BBQ at the next property over from the Grandy's cabin and brought along their little motorcycles. All the kids got rides on the motorcycles and second trips were just getting underway when one of the Shriners messed up and drove out of control into the creek the separated the properties. That's when the Mrs. Shriners told the Mr. Shriners to put the motorbikes away. Years later it occurred to me that beer was probably a factor in the Shriner's wild ride so I wondered if I needed to look more closely at the circumstances leading up to the similar ride of the famous Mr Toad.

On the next day I came out of the cabin and stepped onto a box of fish hooks that had been set on the stair by an obviously brain-dead fisherman. Several hooks dug into the bottom of my bare foot and it created quite a commotion as my Dad used pliers to pull them out. My Mom, a former nurse, kept things from getting infected with ample dousings of rubbing alcohol and forbid me from going into the lake for an hour.

+ Burma Shave Signs - Before the Interstate was constructed, trips to my Mother's hometown of Pulaski were traveled on old NY State Route-11. We would know when we were almost there when we came across a row of the famous Burma Shave road signs. These consisted of five spread-out signs with the first four each revealing one sentence of a limerick and the fifth one simply showing a can of shaving cream with the words Burma Shave. The cleaverly written signs could be found all across America in the time before the Interstate's 65-mph speeds made reading the signs impossible.

The first time that I knew that it was the Atomic Age was when we had a Duck-and-Cover exercise at school. We would kneel in front of the walls in the hallway and cover the back of our heads with our hands while the teachers walked around and kept us quiet. I guess that teachers don't have to duck-and-cover.

Mrs. Dryscol was the kindergarten teacher that all of my siblings and I had. She had blue hair to go with her blue eyes. Sometimes her hair was white, sometimes it was blue-gray, but on occasion it was just blue. She played piano and we all sang songs together. I remember that she was a good story teller too. She was the first to encouraged me toward drawing, painting, and art when she discovered that I had a talent for them.

Our kindergarten class was the first class to move into the school's brand new addition. It was so modern compared to the older addition. I recall that I liked being in the New Addition with it's bright rooms, maple trim, and sleek look.

In kindergarten, the boys tended to go off to one half of the room, and the girls would go off to the other half. The girl's half had a mini-kitchen and a home setup, and next to it was the jungle-gym. I loved the jungle-gym! I would spend a lot of time scrambling around it. I started to live in the jungle-gym which was right next to the girls area. I remember building some bridges with blocks with some of the boys early on but I quickly made friends with these two cute girls. Before long I was playing house with all of the girls next to my jungle-gym. I was the daddy, two girls would be my wives and there were 2-3 other girls who acted as my daughters. Every day the girls would change roles so that everyone had an opportunity to be a wife or daughter. This seemed very natural at the time but years later I learned that the teacher tried several time to get me to hang out with the boys but I found it boring so I kept gravitating back to the girls. I guess that I've never gotten into male bonding once I discovered how much fun bonding with girls was.

+ New Centerville - In Mrs. King's first-grade we read a Social Studies book called New Centerville. At the time I just loved reading the stories and I was often scolded for reading ahead instead of waiting and staying with the class. I just couldn't wait so during other times of the day I would hide the book on my lap and sneak reading time.

I had only read through about 2/3's of the book when to my shock the books were collected and returned to the book closet! To my sorrow the teacher didn't intend on finishing the whole book and there were only a few weeks left before school was out for Summer. I had to wait until the following school year to stop into my old classroom to ask Mrs. King if I could borrow a copy so that I could finish the stories. My heart fell as she told me that we were the last class to use the books so they were all discarded! Over the years many of the details had faded until I could only recall a few scant details about New Centerville. It was a story of a small community and how it interacted with the farms and nearby small city. Centerville got a new modern highway and then big new school. These made such a change that the town's people voted to rename the town to New Centerville.

One day I was looking bored so the teacher naturally picked on me for an answer. The problem was I had been daydreaming so I couldn't know the answer because I didn't know the question, and of course I didn't want her to know that I wasn't paying attention. So I chose to stick with the "I don't know the answer" route. She believed that I knew the answer and that I was just being lazy or something and then suddenly she just lost it, like a menopause moment, and grabbed me out of my chair and down the hallway into a storage room. She kept asking for the answer and I kept telling her that I didn't know, and she'd yell back, "You do know!". Each time that she would yell at me she would shove me against the wall hard enough to snap my head back. After repeated times of keeping my head from hitting the wall it finally hit ... add pain to fear and you get "fight or flight" and I did both! I shoved her away from me and ran out of the storage room, slamming the door closed behind me so that I could buy me some distance. I just ran right past my classroom, down the stairs and out the door. I looked over my shoulder but she wasn't there chasing me. I got onto my bike and headed home.

I don't know much about what the outcome was but my Mom had a talk with the principal a few hours later after I had calmed down and then the two of them had a talk with the teacher. I sat in a big chair kind of sheltered from the action. The next day Mrs. Costello apologized to the class for loosing her temper and to me for over scolding me. I don't think that she actually said that she had done anything wrong but I didn't care, I just wanted the whole embarrassing episode to be forgotten.

After that Mrs. Costello accepted that I needed some extra attention especially since I was seeing doctors two mornings a week and she had to readjust and stay late with me to keep me caught up. And after that I probably never daydreamed so deeply again in class! At least I'd know the question next time!

Fortunately for me we all got to do a test run before the competition began. I had over adjusted my brake tension so when I applied it at the end of my test run it actually picked one of the rear wheels off the ground causing the car to swerve out of control clipping a curb and bending the rear axle. When I got the car back to the top of the hill I had just over an hour before the race to replace the old axle with a newly purchased one. Fortunately there were people around with the tools I needed and I made the swap on time. I took some of the tension out of the brake so that the end of my second run finished in a nice straight line.

I saw this staircase that went up to a walkway high up on a wall. I wanted to see what was on the other side of the wall but Mom had told me to stay put. The need to know was too strong so I snuck up the stairs to the top. I was really disappointed that over the high wall was just a parking lot, so I climbed back down the stairs and returned to where Mom had instructed me to stay-put. I felt safe that I'd gotten away with sneaking off. A week after the vacation Mom got back the photos and in amongst the pictures that Mom had taken was one with me in the background, climbing up the stairs that I wasn't suppose to climb!

For weeks Billy and I were preparing for the best part of the Vacation, Fronter Town! It was probably all that we talked about for weeks. I'm sure that not since the previous Christmas had the two of us been so excited about anything. I really wanted a cap gun to take with me to Fronter Town so that I could defend my family while there. Mom evidently didn't think it was necessary to buy me a cap gun even though I had been asking for one for weeks. Fortunately I was able to borrow a six-shooter from a neighbor kid so I didn't go into Fronter Town unarmed. Bill and I had a great time shooting Outlaws and Indians all day long.

I ran into the house telling everyone what I saw but all that Mom was interested in was getting all of us to the table for dinner. It was very frustrating that no one seemed to believe me that I saw an armadillo in our driveway. After all, how many times does one get to see an armadillo in Syracuse, NY? I was even able to describe it. It was dark grey and it had a long tail.

The next morning the first thing that I did when I got up was to run down the driveway to where I had seen the armadillo and that's where I found claw marks in the dirt. Now I knew that I had proof of what I had seen the night before! With great excitement I ran into our kitchen and announced to everyone that I had solid evidence that I had in deed seen an armadillo the previous night. Again to my frustration no one believed me or even wanted to go and see the claw marks that I knew were my evidence.

Scout Camp was a blast even if I did have an allergy meltdown one time and had to sleep through most of a day. I learned how to boone-doggle, a craft that I've never found another use for but seem to occupy a lot of my time during those two weeks. I also earned a lot of merit badges including the two mile swim.

The first week was highlighted with a canoe trip overnight and camp out. About sixteen of us paired up in canoes and paddled accross the lake and around a large island to a small cove. We'd had just gotten there when it was somehow discovered that some swimming tests that myself and a kid from another troop were supposed to take where scheduled for later that afternoon. The two of us jumped into one of the canoes and began paddling back to camp. I had figured out that we were circumnavigating a peninsula and persuaded the other kid to portage the canoe over a steep hill and down the other side. It worked and cut our paddling distance in half and we got back in plenty of time to take the tests.

Afterwards the two of us paddled back to the camp-out. By now I'd figured where the camp out was on the other side of the island so we cut straight across the lake instead of around the land. This was a quarter of the paddling distance that we had taken that morning.

We'd arrived just in time for dinner, something we would have missed if we'd paddled all the way around the island. After dinner we sat around a campfire and did campfire things, figured out constellations, and send Morse code to each other with our Boy Scout flashlights.

Suddenly a rain shower ran through so we headed for our tents to get some sleep. The gullies quickly filled with water and that's when someone pointed out to me that the tent that I was sharing had been pitched by my tent mate in one of the gullies and there was a small stream running through it. We grabbed our sleeping bags and backpacks out of the tent and with some help took the tent down and repitched it higher up the hill. But by the time we got into our relocated tent we were drenched. Fortunately I still had a dry sleeping bag and some dry clothes so I soon dried out and fell asleep.

The next day I tested for my two mile swim. It consisted of swimming twice across the lake and back. I finished the test and rested for an hour when another group started setting up to do a mile swim. I volunteered to go along in one of the rowboats to keep an eye on the swimmers. We were almost to the other side when one of the swimmers started to say that he couldn't make it. For some encouragement I jumped into the water and swam along beside him showing him how to change strokes to keep from tiring. We swam together around the mark and the rest of the way back back to shore. Because of me he earned his mile-swim badge.

We'd started the last sorte across the lake as the sun went down and finished up after dark. A half of a steel barrel had been filled with logs and set on fire on the beach to warm us up as we came out of the water. We all stood around it enjoying the heat and congratulating each other on our accomplishment. That's when I backed into the lip of the barrel and burnt the back of my right calf, branding me. I never told anyone around me, I just went off and got out my Scout First Aid Kit and bandaged it up. I was a Scout after all. Somehow I missed getting any infection but it left me with a permanent scar.

The second weekend was Parent's Sunday and competitions were set up between the various troops to impress everyone. I signed up for the underwater swim and the canoe gunnel race. I managed to swim all the way to the rope that cordoned off the the swim area, and then under it for an additional 6-feet. I popped up and no one was ahead of me! I was just ready to let out a cheer when a head popped up about 6 feet past my mark, relegating me to 2nd place!

The gunnel race came up before too long so I grabbed a canoe and paddled out into the lake. The object of a gunnel race is to stand on the very stern of a canoe, on the gunnels, and jump up and down and that propels the canoe forward. Kind of like squishing a seed out between your fingers. No one in our troop had ever done a gunnel race so I volunteered for it. There were nine canoers in the race but one kid and I took an early lead. Another kid fell early and a second a half minute later. We were about 3/4 of the way to the finish line with me in second place when I suddenly lost my balance and fell off the canoe! Somehow I managed to scramble back into it, got back up on the gunnel, and still pulled down 2nd Place, my second 2nd Place of the day! My parents showed up about a half and hour after I finished the races, late again as usual.

A week later the day came for us to board the buses and go back to the real world. The buses took us back to the drop off area where our parents would be waiting but the bus got in over and hour early. Some kids hiked to a phone and eventually some parents started to arrive. One by one the cars would come into the parking lot and drive off a boy or a carload of boys until there was no one left but me, sitting out in a parking lot on top of my stuff in the middle of nowhere. Parents would offer me a ride but I did't know if my parents were all ready on their way or not. More than 30-minutes after the last car had driven the last boy away my parents showed up to drive me home, late again as usual, two hours after the bus dropped us off.

If the snow fall was less than 10-inches deep we probably had to go to school. I don't know if temperature was ever an issue for closing school since I know that I walked to school with temps double digits below zero for most of the winter. My High School was on the other side of a hill, so yes, I actually did walk two miles to school up hill both ways in sub zero temperatures.

As kids, each time we awoke to new snow, we'd run down to the kitchen asking Mom if we had to go to school or not. After a while she told us that if we could see the bottom of the car door (about 10"s) that the snow wasn't deep enough. After that we'd all run to the back window and look down at the cars in the driveway to see if the snow was deeper than the bottom of their doors.

One day the snow began just after we got home from school and was already getting deep by the time that Dad got home just after five o'clock. Our house sat on a hill so we'd listen to Dad spinning the wheels trying to get the car to the top of the driveway. Each attempt he would gain a little distance until he would eventually make it all the way to the end of the driveway. Probably drove the neighbors insane. Just before the storm my brother parked his old jalopy in the garage so Dad's car ended up outside in the snow! The next morning when the snow finally stopped we looked out the back window at the car doors to see if we would have school or not, and to our shock the snow was completely over the roofs of the cars, all that we could see was their antenna's sticking out, and we knew that there wouldn't be school for a week!

Once you got the boots on they were almost impossible to take off. You had to sit on the floor and struggle to wrestle them off. And then you had to reach inside to retreive your shoe. If you were smart you had remembered not to tie your shoes so that getting your foot out of the boot would be easier.

Getting a boot on required shoving the front of your shoe down the inside of the boot and then jumping up and down on that foot while you pulled up almost uselessly on the uppers. It probably took ten minutes to get those things on our feet! Overshoes had very high tops that went half-way to your knee and this unique buckling system. There was a row of ladder shaped buckles and these u-shaped leavers slipped through the rungs and cinched the two parts tightly together. The only problem was that they would get packed with snow and ice and freeze-up, so you'd usually have to thaw them out first before you could take your boots off.

+ One great thing about Winter in Syracuse for kids was sledding, and a few blocks from our home was a monster hill at Sunnycrest Park. It ran downward at about 35-degrees for over 1/4 of a mile. On any no-school day there you could find over a hundred kids with sleds, toboggans, or saucers. It didn't matter how cold the day was, the kids would be there.

For personal use only | All rights reserved since 2005 | Vaughn McGrath