Troop 3

Troop 3 Scouts at Bald Hill Reservation in Boxford, MA. Left to right: John Kohler, David Butler, Terry Soule, Jim Stone, Don Ridgeway, Bill Doane & Assistant Scoutmaster Bob Baum at Bald Hill. Photo from Bob Baum

Troop 3 Scouts at Bald Hill Reservation in Boxford, MA. Left to right: John Kohler, David Butler, Terry Soule, Jim Stone, Don Ridgeway, Bill Doane & Assistant Scoutmaster Bob Baum. Photo from Bob Baum (1920-2009)

I came into Troop 3, Marblehead in early 1950 just after I turned 11, having been in a Cub Scout pack at the Old North Church. We met at the American Legion Hall on Pleasant Street, a building that first served as Marblehead’s high school and was converted to condo’s after Legion Post 32 moved to the Old Town House.

Our scoutmaster was Al Gross, then in his thirties, a veteran of World War II and a businessman who, among other endeavors, brought the first coin-operated soda dispensing machine to Marblehead.  We met every Thursday evening, and under Al’s direction, lined up in ranks of four patrols, each with a leader. There was Senior Patrol Leader Tommy Hansen, Junior Assistant Scoutmaster, Barnes Ellis and Assistant Scoutmaster Bob Baum, who joined a couple of years after I did. I lead the Horse Patrol, which included Ben Chadwick, Peter Miles, David Fleming, “Pic” Harrison, Charlie Pike, Peter Gottlich and a couple of others.

Al took us to Boy Scout Jamborees at the Topsfield Fairgrounds, where we camped in tents and cooked over open fires. He taught to prepare steaks in a salted frying pan and to enjoy canned brown bread. We had along a supply of waterless hand cleaner in tubes like toothpaste – a jellied substance called No-No-No which came in quantity from one of Al’s business ventures.  You rubbed your hands together with the stuff until it turned into little balls of grime that you brushed off.

I found several cartons of No-No-No in the large open attic of the Legion Hall near the closet where we stored our camping equipment—the product had not been as popular as Al hoped. It might be fun, I thought, to remove the caps of the tubes, and stamp on them to see how far the stream of jellied hand cleaner would squirt. Dave Fleming and I disposed of about a dozen tubes this way, producing streams that reached no more than five or six feet.

In the fall of 1951, Dave Eckhardt, a young man from Pittsburgh, took over as scoutmaster. Like Al, he didn’t have a son in the troop, but he wasn’t consumed with business ventures as Al was. Instead, he had a full time job with Sylvania in transistor research which left his evenings free for us. We camped in the fall, spring and summer, first in Harold Parker State Forest near North Andover, Breakheart Reservation in Saugus, and then in the White Mountains of New Hampshire.

Campfire at Bald Hill, February1956.Left to right: John Kohler, David Butler & Jim Stone

Campfire at Bald Hill, February,1956.Left to right: John Kohler, David Butler & Jim Stone. Photo from Bob Baum

I don’t remember a trip to Harold Parker  or Breakheart without rain or freezing drizzle. One Sunday morning at Breakheart in the late fall, Dave Fleming cut his hand badly chopping kindling for a fire. Our Scoutmaster wrapped Dave’s bleeding hand in some cloth, loaded him into his MG Midget, and took off in search of a doctor. Meanwhile, deprived of adult supervision, we needed to get the fire started.  Eckhardt carried a five-gallon jerrycan of gasoline on the back of his MG, which we saw sitting near where he had parked.  The mind that thought nothing of squirting tubes of jellied goo on the floor of the American Legion didn’t hesitate to connect the five gallons of gasoline with the need for a fire.  We dumped it all on and tossed in a match. We jumped back as a huge flame erupted in the wet forest. Three minutes later the camp fire went out and left us wet and shivering to wait for Eckhardt’s return. He was back in an hour with Dave Fleming properly sanitized, sutured and bandaged.  After Dave’s emergency treatment, Eckhardt took him for a large green frappe which Dave proceeded to throw up. It was Eckhardt who got the fire started in the wet woods. After all, he had been an Eagle Scout and knew how. Sixty-five years later Dave Fleming still bears the scar.

Next week: Sea Scouts

Camp Norshoco

Skunk Hollow at Camp Norshoco with platform tents and the old dining hall and post-office ( barely visible at the right..) The new dining hall is near the top. Photo by Dave Crowley, age 14

Skunk Hollow at Camp Norshoco with platform tents and the old dining hall and post-office ( barely visible at the right..) The new dining hall is near the top. Photo by Dave Crowley, age 14

I might have been 16 when one of the leaders at Camp Norshoco in Alfred, Maine, showed me a small album of color photos depicting log cabins situated at the edge of a dense pine forest. When I saw the pictures, in 1954, the camp was mostly open fields with a couple of low hills and patches of new growth hardwoods, grasses, shrubs, and a swampy creek. “How I missed the old cabins in the pines,” I thought to myself, adding, “They must have been wonderful”  In fact, I had never seen them, because in the fall of 1947,  a series of fires had destroyed over 300 square miles of Maine forest, including Camp Norshoco, three years before my first two-week visit to the camp in 1950.

We campers, from various Boy Scout troops in Marblehead, Salem and other North Shore towns slept in tents on wooden platforms in three encampments: Skunk Hollow, where I stayed two or three summers, a second site whose name I’ve forgotten, and Little Egypt, named for its Army-surplus square pyramid tents. There were three buildings: a long prefabricated dining hall with a corrugated steel roof and a kitchen at one end, a small infirmary and a modest administrative structure that doubled as a post office. There was a lake, in which we swam and canoed, called, as far as I knew, Lake Norshoco. In reality its name was Bunganut Pond – as I discovered from a recent Facebook posting. The name Norshoco, I believed then, referred to the Indian tribe that had once lived on its shores.

Little Egypt was reserved for Scout troops that attended Norshoco together, with their own leadership rather than as individuals mixed in with kids, as I was, from other troops. The most cohesive unit to attend Norshoco while I was there was Troop 83 from Ste. Anne’s parish on Jefferson Avenue in Salem, Mass. Its scoutmaster was an energetic priest named Father Bourgault. I had never seen a priest out of uniform before Fr. Bourgault, yet there he was, walking across the parade ground, pot bellied, and wearing an undershirt, shorts and sneakers. I didn’t believe that he was really a priest until he celebrated Mass for us the next Sunday, in full vestments.

Marblehead Boys in Skunk Hollow 1951: Joe Homan, rear; John Collins, Fred Petersen, Ross Goodwinn, left to right; Paul Meo & Warner Hazel (?) front. Photo from Chris Brown

Marblehead Boys in Skunk Hollow 1951: Rear – Joe Homan,  Middle – John (Jack) Collins, Freddy Petersen, & Ross Goodwinn, Front – Paul Meo & Warner Hazel (?). Photo from Chris Brown

Troop 3 in Marblehead, where I was a member, didn’t seem cohesive at all. It wasn’t the fault of our leaders; it was, instead, the large number of misfits among us, or so I believed. I envied the other troops like Father Bourgault’s in Salem, and Troop 11 from St. Andrew’s Methodist in Marblehead. They each had at least a dozen Eagle Scouts; we had one.

In 1953 a group of us from Troop 3 spent a week in Little Egypt at Camp Norshoco, along with one of our Assistant Scoutmasters. The first two days were fun, but the rest of the week was absorbed in drama generated by the destructive antics of two of our misfits,

During my second stay in Skunk Hollow in 1952, I developed painful headaches, and lay on my bunk during a hot summer afternoon. My three tent mates and some others were not sympathetic, taunting and throwing shoes at me while I tried to rest. By the end of the day, I had enough of this mistreatment and headed to the infirmary; I was feeling feverish and sick all over by then.

The infirmary nurse was the only female in camp and seemed to be in her thirties. She had medium length dark curly hair and was very attractive in her white uniform. She took my temperature, fed me some fluids and aspirin and put me in a cot. I went to sleep and woke up feeling better. She appeared with food on a tray from the dining hall and asked if she and her son could eat with me. I had noticed the young boy, maybe about eight. He wasn’t an official camper and he stayed mostly in the infirmary with his mother. He had some ugly scars on one leg, centered around the back of his knee, and walked with a pronounced limp. I sat on the edge of my cot to eat my supper, while the nurse and her son sat on another cot. I was the only infirmary patient. Afterwards she and her boy retreated into the dispensary beyond the small patient ward; their bedroom was in the back, out of my view.  I went back to bed and turned over, and as I looked up, I saw her walking past the open dispensary door in just a white slip.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said, “I forgot you were here. I hope you don’t mind me in my slip. I don’t get many overnight patients.  My son is sleeping in the bedroom, so I change in here to avoid disturbing him.” She disappeared and came back in a bathrobe. “ I need to tell you about Paul,” she said, and in that instant, by addressing me as another human being who might be curious about the scars on the boy’s leg, she granted me a degree of adult respect that no one had shown me before. To her I wasn’t a patient requiring professional distance or a child needing supervision or discipline; I was another person, just as worthy as she was. Her appearance in the slip hadn’t seemed at all immodest to me, no more so than seeing my own mother in one.

She continued, “Paul was a baby when he pulled over a pot of boiling water on the stove scalding his leg. It was just an accident, but in healing, the burn left these very tight contractures that I have to work and massage every day to keep his leg and as flexible and mobile as possible. When he’s a little older, he’ll need an  operation on his tendons.”

Norshoco Patch

Camp Norshoco Patch

I awoke the next morning feeling fine and went back to my tent mates who didn’t bother me again. The nurse had given me refuge and the gift of respect.  So empowered, I thought again about the name of our camp − there never were any Norshoco Indians, it was simply a contraction of our Boy Scout district: The North Shore Council.

Next week: Troop 3

Freddy at 18 Pearl

Liquid Joy

Liquid Joy

After school one day in 1950 when we were twelve, Freddy and I got to Pearl Street and found a small plastic bottle sitting on the porch by the front door. There was a large tag attached to it proclaiming that “Liquid Joy,” a brand new product, would get your dishes, glasses and silverware cleaner than any of the old fashioned powders could. What’s more, the tag said, this very sample of “New Liquid Joy” was free.

Neither of us I had given any thought to dish washing detergents, but we brought the sample into the house anyway. No adults were home. We took it upstairs to the bathroom and I got the idea of pouring the whole bottle down the sink. I did and ran a lot of hot water after it for good measure. After a while we went into my room which had a window overlooking the side yard. I looked out and saw a large mound of soapy bubbles in the center of the yard. The pile of bubbles billowed larger and larger as we watched. I knew right away what I should have thought of before dumping the detergent into the sink and sending all that hot water in after it. In the middle of the side yard was a vent connected to the sewer pipe that joined the drains in the house to the sewer line in the street. The bubbles were lighter than water, and like the sewer gases that the vent was designed to expel, they rose to the surface.  The bubbles stopped growing and, very slowly, began to pop. By the time the adults came home an hour or so later no evidence was left.

After I reconnected with Freddy in 2102, he and I were talking on the phone when I thought of an incident my mother had recalled, but that I had forgotten. Freddy and I were around eleven when we came back to my house at 18 Pearl Street after an afternoon of fishing in the harbor. My mother was fixing dinner and I asked if Freddy could eat with us.

“Sure, let me speak with Vivian and make sure it’s OK with her,” my mother replied.

“My mother isn’t home, it’s only Omama,” Freddy said, referring to his grandmother.

“Fine, I’ll speak with her.”

“She doesn’t speak any English, only Spanish and German,” Freddy answered.

“Well….” My mother paused and said, “OK, can you call and ask if it’s all right for you to stay over?”

Freddy called Omama and emitted a rapid-fire burst of Spanish. He listened for a minute and turned to my mother and said, “It’s OK.”

Later my mother told me that she had been uneasy. After all, she didn’t want to get into hot water with Vivian, a very strict European-style parent, but she also  wasn’t about to deprive Freddy of dinner.

At age twelve, I knew nothing about Omama except that she and Vivian spoke in German.  For all I knew she could have been the witch from “Hansel and Gretel.”

When I told the story to Freddy he laughed. “Omama’s English was fine,” he said, “She could speak six languages.”  I had forgotten that he had said that she had been married to an Englishman in Argentina for many years. Now we both laughed. At age eleven, Freddy had bamboozled  my mother about his grandmother’s English and gotten away with it. But something about what he said had ignited my curiosity about Omama. His truthful account had liberated her from the fairy tale in my mind.  “If Freddy’s grandmother looked and sounded so Germanic, wouldn’t her name have been something like Hilde or Gertrude?,” I wondered. What was Omama’s name, I asked Freddy.

“Her name was Margaret Lewis,”

Next week; Camp Norshoco

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 Robot

P4900 Robotic Vacuum Cleaner

P4900 Robotic Vacuum Cleaner

A few years ago, Barbara and I saw an exhibition of the Roomba®, a robotic vacuum cleaner that patrolled a small patch of floor delimited by two-by-fours. Disk-shaped and about three inches thick, it buzzed and whirred, glanced off the barriers, and turned half or three-quarter pirouettes on the little wheels underneath. Unanswered by this demonstration was how well it cleaned floors.“That can’t possibly work,” I told Barb, “and look at the price: it’s almost two hundred bucks. What a rip-off.” We both laughed, and forgot the weird little machine.

In 2006 I was waiting for the results of a test for a brain tumor, when my favorite household gadget and useless accessory catalog arrived in the mail. There it was on the front page, a robotic vacuum costing only fifty dollars and promising to “pick up dirt, dust, hair and more from wood, carpet, vinyl and tile floors!”  My judgment collapsed. “I deserve a little distraction from all this worry about the tumor,” I told myself as I placed my order. I felt guilty, but just as quickly found the excuse I needed: “Well, it’s not much money and it might be fun. Besides, if I can get it to work in just one or two rooms, it could be worth it.” The mind that rationalized this purchase just as easily suppressed the memory of the Consumer Reports article that panned robotic vacuums as next to useless.

I unpacked the new machine a few days later, charged it up and turned it loose in the living room. It rolled and whirred, just like the Roomba®. It bounced off a couple of obstacles and sought refuge under a table. Each time it struck a table leg it pivoted neatly and charged into another leg. Our two cats, who flee at the sound of a real vacuum cleaner, ignored it.

Its major flaw, not to be deduced from the advertising, was obvious: it had no memory of where it had been. How long, I wondered, would it take to extricate itself from under the table in the corner of the large and still to be vacuumed room? At last, the robot broke free and headed for the large rubber plant in the corner.

The latest model (P3IP4960)

The latest model (P4960)

A few days later, after learning that I didn’t have the brain tumor that I had used to excuse buying it the first place, I tried the vacuum out in my study, which has a plastic mat under my chair to protect the floor. I left the room.  After twenty minutes, it fell silent. Did the battery run down? No. It stalled trying to get over the one-eighth inch edge of my floor mat and had shut itself off. To its credit, it had collected a couple of dust bunnies, but two white paper punched-out holes lay undisturbed next to my desk.

I now understood why it sold so cheaply. Pricier models, I learned, come equipped with a remote control, supplying what every memoryless robot needs, some means for a human operator to tell it exactly what to do.

Next week: Fireworks at 18 Pearl