Category Archives: Childhood

Fireworks at Eighteen Pearl

A package of one-inch firecrackers like the ones I ordered in 1951

A package of one-inch firecrackers like the ones I ordered in 1951

In 1950-51, when I was twelve and in the sixth grade, we lived with a family friend I’ll call Jean. She owned an advertising agency with offices in the Pickering Coal building in Salem, and had recently bought the Victorian house at Eighteen Pearl Street in Marblehead.  Our landlord at Twenty Circle Street wanted his house back on short notice, and Jean had two large extra bedrooms. We moved in just after school  let out in May 1950.

Like other boys in the days before drugs, I found all the excitement I needed in a non-chemical adventure just as dangerous: playing with gunpowder that we salvaged by scraping dozens of paper caps intended for toy pistols, or from the occasional firecracker that we scrounged.  Fireworks were illegal in Massachusetts, but as the Fourth of July approached most kids my age got their hands on a few firecrackers, either from family trips to the south where they were sold in roadside stands, or by mail order. Mail order fireworks were tricky. The vendors wouldn’t ship to states where they were illegal, but they did ship to New Hampshire, which had less restrictive laws than Massachusetts. Many Marblehead families had friends and relatives in New Hampshire, but I didn’t.

I was describing the fireworks dilemma to Jean, one day, when her face lit up. “There’s a man where I work, Ralston Pickering, who gets his fireworks by mail order in New Hampshire. I’ll see if he can get some for you.” The next day, Jean came home with a fireworks catalogue. I was delighted but didn’t really believe that the scheme would work: this Ralston Pickering guy would forget my part of the order, or he’d be stopped by the State Police when he returned to Massachusetts.  I went ahead anyway and ordered a modest collection including several packets of ladyfingers, tiny half-inch firecrackers that you set off by the whole packet, even more packets of the one-inch variety which were the favorite of all the kids, a bunch of sparklers and a few small rockets.

A box like the collection I kept in my blanket chest

A box like the collection I kept in my blanket chest

After two or three weeks of anxious waiting, Jean announced that Pickering would bring my order to work the following day. Jean brought the small carton home, and I raced upstairs to my room to inspect my cache. I couldn’t wait for the next day to tell my friends, Chris Brown, Tommy White and a boy I call Tim  about what I had. Setting them off by myself held no appeal; I had to share to enjoy them at all.

I kept the box in the blanket chest below the window in my bedroom and gave the fireworks to friends as the Fourth approached— with the understanding that we shoot them off together.  We did, mostly in the back yard at Eighteen Pearl during the daytime when we wouldn’t attract attention, or the police. We even fired off a couple of rockets there and had no idea where the hot debris landed.

Kids who wanted to set them off by themselves or with others had to pay me cash, I decided. After all, It added a little cachet to my otherwise powerless existence. I sold the final half-string of one-inchers individually for a quarter each, except for the last two or three which I sold to Tim for fifty cents each.

The association of New Hampshire with fireworks lay submerged in the recesses of my mind along with other childhood exploits and misadventures; I hadn’t thought about it for over sixty years. Then I read of the indictment of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the two brothers accused in the Boston Marathon bombing that killed three people and injured more than two-hundred others on April 15, 2013  Tamerlan, the deceased older brother, had visited Phantom Fireworks in Seabrook, New Hampshire in February and bought 48 mortars, which, the indictment alleged, the two of them used to construct the pressure cooker bombs that they detonated at the marathon’s finish line. It seems that fireworks laws in New Hampshire hadn’t changed much. Just like us at age twelve sixty years ago, they had salvaged gunpowder from ordinary fireworks.

Eighteen Pearl Street in 2012

Eighteen Pearl Street in 2012

We moved from Eighteen Pearl in the summer of 1951, just before I started junior high school. Jean sold it a couple of years later and eventually moved to Florida. The house looked shabby when I walked by during my high school years, but now it is restored to its delightful Victorian splendor.

Next week: Freddy at Eighteen Pearl

The USS Missouri visits Marblehead

USS Missouri off Halfway Rock, Marblehead August 3, 1946

USS Missouri off Halfway Rock August 3, 1946

I was seven and about to enter the third grade at the Gerry School when the battleship USS Missouri made a celebratory visit to Marblehead, anchoring in Massachusetts Bay just off Halfway Rock on August 3, 1946.  I knew about the ship from newsreels I had seen at the Warwick Theater showing the ceremony on its deck with General MacArthur and the top hatted Japanese officials. Looking out from our Elm Street yard I could see the Missouri way out beyond Children’s Island.  It was much further away than a couple of other naval vessels that had anchored off Children’s Island during their visits. I guessed that the waters off Children’s were too shallow for such a big ship.

UISS Missouri ArticlexIt was open for tours to which my mother and I were ferried, after waiting in a long line, from State Street wharf in Marblehead. The Navy used drop-front landing craft fitted with benches to take us out. The first thing I noticed when we approached the Missouri from the starboard side was the catapult near the stern with the float plane (a Vought Kingfisher) mounted on it. Then, sailors helped us off the landing craft and onto the narrow dock and stairway suspended along the side of the ship. On board, an officer led us to the plaque in the deck commemorating the Japanese surrender. I read the words:

OVER THIS SPOT ON 2 SEPTEMBER 1945 THE INSTRUMENT OF FORMAL SURRENDER OF JAPAN TO THE ALLIED POWERS WAS SIGNED THUS BRINGING TO A CLOSE THE SECOND WORLD WAR. THE SHIP AT THAT TIME WAS IN TOKYO BAY.

I felt amazed, as a seven-year-old kid, to be allowed to stand at this place. My mother had said, “David, you are so fortunate to live in America. It is the greatest country in the world.” Now, on the deck on the USS Missouri, I felt connected with the country, with the War and with the final victory. These feelings haven’t changed in sixty-seven years.

When we left the ship and descended the narrow stairway the sea had kicked up. The landing craft waiting for our group lurched, rising and falling with each wave. The sailors on the small dock had to time their transfer of each person to the instant when the gunwale of the small boat was level with the dock. After we were safely seated, I asked my mother, “What would have happened if I had fallen in”? “There are two-thousand sailors on this ship who would have jumped in to save you,” she said.

The Rotten Apple Tree

newtons-apple-treeThe tree in the back yard of our house at 20  Circle Street in Marblehead grew small, hard and inedible green apples that never ripened. They just rotted on the tree and fell to the ground.  As far as I could tell at age ten, they served no purpose, at least to human beings. That is, until the night that a storm broke our roof-top TV antenna and my parents summoned the man who had installed it for a replacement. I watched as he climbed the roof with the new antenna and threw the broken one to the ground. Part of it was a steel rod about two feet long which I saved.

I had an idea: if I could skewer a rotten apple on this rod and then whip the rod over my head with maximum force, I might propel the apple high in the air over the neighbor’s rooftops. It would work just like the medieval catapult that I had seen in a movie.  I tried one and it flew in an arcing trajectory over the next house and disappeared from sight. It was easy to suppress a flutter of worry over the possibility of injuring someone. I flung a few more apples over the rooftops and turned to other pursuits. Then, as now, my attention span was short.

My friend Tim lived some distance away and had an open field behind his house where he and other kids played and roamed in packs and sometimes fought  One day he was excited when I arrived at his house to play.  “Harry and some other guys have a fort just behind Harry’s house,”  he said, “There’s an old chicken coop behind my house and we can use it as our fort and we can have wars with them.”  Like Tim, Harry was in my fifth grade class at the Gerry School. We looked at Harry’s fort and Tim’s chicken coop. The distance between them was around a hundred feet. The question of how to do battle at such a distance nagged at me for a couple of days.

We were playing at my house on Circle Street when something in my mind connected. Rotten apples from my tree, skewered with my steel rod and flung in a mortar-like trajectory might just cover the distance.  I explained my idea to Tim.  “How can we get a load of these apples up to your house? It’s almost a mile away,” I asked. “I’ve got an old wagon. Let’s go get it; we can fill it with apples and drag them to my house.”  We returned to Circle Street in about forty-five minutes with a rusting metal express wagon. The wheels seemed wobbly, but it would have to do. We loaded the wagon with the rotten apples which by now had fallen to the ground.

Express wagon

In the street the loaded wagon was very heavy; it took two of us, one pulling the handle and other pushing from behind to move it along. Little bumps in the pavement dislodged apples from the load and we took turns corralling them before they rolled under cars. Curbs were very hard to manage: two of us lifted the front end of the wagon over the curbstone and then swung the back end up. We were perspiring; this business of moving a few rotten apples was much harder than we had thought.

At the corner of Pearl and Elm, about halfway between our two houses, there was another curb to negotiate. We dragged the front wheels down off the curb and one of them broke off.  I tried to lift one end of the disabled cart. It was monstrously heavy. “Shit,” Tim said, “What the Hell do we do now?” “We could carry them the rest of the way to your house.” “No! That’s much too far, Goddammit. Take ‘em back to your house” “No, No, No. To your house!” “No.To Your God Damn House!”

Tim looked around and found what he needed to reinforce his insistence that we return the apples to my house. There was a large pile of fresh, moist dog feces in the street next to the curb, and a sheet of newspaper next to it. With the newspaper to protect his hand, he scooped up the pile of excrement and waved it excitedly in my face.  Here was a side of Tim’s character that I should have expected to encounter. After all, a ten-year old willing to cooperate with me in harebrained schemes like this one, and others, must have had some reserve of latent aggression that was bound to come out.  Mine, I guess, was manifest in my willingness to get into these crazy adventures in the first place. For both of us, baseball just wasn’t enough to engage our depraved imaginations, and we were too afraid of injury to go in for manly sports like wrestling or boxing.

The threat of being smeared with dog poop was immediate and called forth in me a reflexive response. With my own piece of newspaper and an overhand grab I swept most of the reeking supply out of Tim’s hand, and then followed through in a graceful arc to deliver the entire load to Tim’s face. In a second I sized up my handiwork. There was a broad brown streak running from above Tim’s left eyebrow diagonally across his eye, nose and mouth and ending near the right side of his chin. There were a couple of subsidiary streaks parallel to the main one, on other regions of Tim’s face. I guess that I hadn’t taking the time to align my crap-flinging arm to deliver a square up-and-down pattern, and the diagonal blob was the result. Tim’s mouth and eyes were wide-open in shock.

In the next instant, fear took hold, and I ran to escape violent retribution. When I got home my mother was laughing. “I just got off the phone with Tim’s mother,” she said. I avoided him for the next few weeks, but when we got together again he didn’t say a word about it and neither did I.