When Mom sends me down to buy something from him, she always tells me to watch the scale and check the change because he'll cheat me. But, so far as I can see, he cheats himself more than anybody. He always throws one more of anything onto the scale after he weighs it and charges for only the two pounds or whatever it is you've bought. Also, he usually gives me some fruit to eat, for free. He does this for everybody, not just me.
Down our alley also comes the man who sharpens knives and scissors and the man who scrapes horseradish from big horseradish roots. He mixes it in jars while you stand there; you have to bring your own jar. My dad loves horseradish. It makes me cry. I think it'd even make a horse cry. The ashman, trashman, and garbage man come down our alley, too.
The milkman with his horse comes down the
front
street. He has a white horse with pale gray circles all over. This horse knows the milk route so well he goes from house to house without the milkman telling him. Mostly the milkman comes early in the morning and I never see him, but sometimes the bottles rattling in the metal holder or the sound of the horse's hoofs wake me up and I'll sneak down to watch him from our front porch. This is only in the summer when it's light early in the morning.
In winter he comes in the dark. When it's really cold the cream freezes in the bottle so it pushes right up, lifting the cardboard lid with the little tab, like the lid on a Dixie cup. That frozen cream is
almost
ice cream, and it's delicious on cornflakes, shining slivers of ice tasting like cream.
The coal comes into the coal bin through a tiny window in front. We buy five tons a year. The coal truck is the same truck as the ice truck but two men drive it and they're not our iceman.
The coal comes in big burlap sacks and the truck has a long metal coal chute attached. They stick it through the window into our cellar. One man dumps sacks of coal onto the chute and the other keeps it sliding along with a big shovel. The coal is wet and makes a lot of noise; coal is cheaper if you buy it in the summer so that's what we do, even though the coalmen always break our snapdragons and tromp the grass flat.
One of my jobs is picking up the pieces of coal that fall on the lawn. I usually get half a bucket that way, and it keeps coal from getting caught in the lawn mower. I mow the lawn and trim edges in the summer. Trimming's the hard part, especially around the picket fence. Dad put up the picket fence to keep dogs out of our yard; kids too, I think.
The breadmen come by in front, but that's usually in the afternoon. There are two breadmen, Freihofer's and Bond. My mother buys Bond the same way we buy the
Bulletin
for a newspaper, not the
Ledger
or the
Inquirer
. I don't know why. There are so many things young kids are not supposed to know. I know we buy Abbott's milk, Bond bread, and the
Bulletin
. I also know we've never bought anything from J.I., not even light bulbs for three years and I
know
why we didn't.
Now Dad's back working for them I don't know if we'll start buying J.I. things again or not. J.I. stands for Jersey Industries. Dad told me it's not like a Jersey cow but Jersey like the state. We live in Philadelphia but Dad works for J.I. That's where the main plant is, New Jersey. I
still
don't understand why he went back working for them.
Also coming down the front street summers selling things is the ice-cream truck, and the man with the tiny merry-go-round for little kids.
One thing we have a lot of in our neighborhood is kids. There are almost more kids than there are dogs and cats. Most of the dogs and cats don't belong to anybody but usually the kids do.
I like the alley better than the front street. There's something secret about it, everything's so
real
back there. Nobody's putting out bird baths without water or planting flowers. It's just the way it is and I like it. The front porches are mostly all painted and some people even have enclosed front porches. We have one of the only trees on our street. It's actually in the middle of the lawn we share with the Robins next door. The Reynolds on our other side have a tree, too, they share with the Fennimores next to them; it's not quite as tall as our tree. These trees are the kind that grow up straight; they're the tallest things around our neighborhood. Taller than the telly poles, even. Any other kind of tree, like the kind that sends out side branches, wouldn't find any space. Everything's jammed in awfully tight around us in Stonehurst.
The highest part of the hill we're on, starts up at Clifton Road, which is on the high side of Radbourne Road. Then, after Radbourne, it's Clover Lane, below us is Greenwood Avenue. The other side of Greenwood Avenue opens up on a big open lot where we look for snakes, break bottles, burn Christmas trees, those kinds of things.
The street that actually goes down the hill, just five houses toward Long Lane from our house, is Copely Road. It's the best sledding hill close by. For real sledding, we go over to the golf course by Upper Darby Junior High School. There are some good hills there. But Copely Road's fine for ordinary sledding. When the snow's packed hard you can go all the way from Clifton Road alley way down past the end of the vacant lot, almost to where Copely Road turns up toward Guilford Road and out to Long Lane again. Long Lane is where most of the stores are; that is, except for the Little Store.
Not everybody in our neighborhood has cars, so a lot of the garages are empty. Some people use them to store extra stuff and some men have workshops in them. The Hershafts built the Little Store in their garage. It's one of the only places you can buy food or milk with only a piece of paper you sign and no real money.
But you have to live in the neighborhood for Mrs. Hershaft to let you do that. My mother says everything is always more expensive at the Little Store, but a lot of times we buy food there, especially things like milk or soap or cans of soup or sugar. It's a place my mother can send Laurel or me to buy something and not worry.
My mom worries a lot, that's the way she is.
We do the real shopping up on Long Lane in the A & P or the American Store. Saturdays we go to the Giant Tiger on Baltimore Pike, when Dad drives us over there.
My father has a car. It's a car that was in a crash and wasn't running. Mr. Carlson sold it to him for five dollars. He worked on it in our garage and got it running again. He cut off the crushed back, made it into a kind of truck, and painted it gray with some of our porch paint. It's a Ford Model A car but it doesn't look like any ordinary car. We use it to haul the wood for building porches.
My father and I build porches on weekends to pay off our back rent. For a long time Dad didn't have any job because of the Depression. When the Depression came, J.I. laid off
everybody
, with only two weeks' notice, including my father. There was nothing he could do about it. Most of the people on our street didn't have jobs either. Everybody was on relief or working for the WPA.
During that Depression time, we got three years behind in our rent. Mr. Marsden, who collects the rents, let us stay on in the house because there was nobody with any money to move in if we left. If a house is left empty in our neighborhood, all the windows get broken and even the front-porch railings get stolen for firewood. Some people move out in the night without paying the back rent.
When somebody moves, everybody helps. They'll have an old truck or a bunch of cars and they'll move away all the furniture in the dark. A lot of people have their electricity and gas cut off because they can't pay those either, so they can't live in the house any more.
My dad helped people like the O'Haras across the street and the Sullivans move. Even if anybody knew where these people moved to, they wouldn't say, so Mr. Marsden wouldn't find out. I don't know what the police could do to those people if they did catch them. Nobody has much money except rich people, and you can't throw
everybody
in jail.
It was a couple years ago when my dad got the idea of building a new porch on our place. Mom was scared to go out on our old little rotten wooden porch to hang our clothes. Dad got the Reynolds next door to pay for the wood, by promising he'd do the work himself. Mr. Reynolds works in a drugstore. We call him a pharmacist because it's a nice idea to think you live next door to a real pharmacist, but he only works in a store in Media selling things like lipstick and corn plasters. But he has a job.
Dad built one straight porch across our two places, without any steps. It was a regular deck like the deck of a ship. He put down new posts to hold it up further out than the old posts but it still didn't go as far out into the alley as the old steps did. This new porch is ten times bigger than the old one. It's almost's big as the front porch and has sun on it in the morning. On our side of the street there's never any sun on our front porch, even in summer.
Now, with our big porch, Mom isn't afraid when she hangs out clothes; and we go downstairs through the cellar.
She and Mrs. Reynolds made Dad put wire on the railing so nobody could fall off. Little Jimmy Reynolds is only three and Mrs. Reynolds can have him out there in the sun and watch him from the kitchen while she's cooking and washing dishes.
Of course, Dad had to get Mr. Marsden's permission so he could build this porch, but since the old one was falling apart anyway he said O.K.
When Mr. Marsden saw it finished, he asked Dad how much it would cost to have porches like that one built on other houses. I was right there. I'd never seen Mr. Marsden before. He was driving a new Dodge car, and wore a suit with a tie. I think it might be the first time I ever saw anybody dressed like that in the daytime, except in the movies.
Dad looked up at the porch, then at me. He said to Mr. Marsden, “I can build a porch like this, materials included, for sixteen dollars.”
Mr. Marsden looked at the porch again.
“I'll tell you what, Mr. Kettleson. I'll knock twenty dollars off your back rent for every porch you build me.”
The materials cost less than seven dollars, so Dad could make thirteen dollars' profit for every porch he built. Our rent is twenty-eight dollars a month so he could pay off our back rent pretty fast building porches on Saturdays. Only, somehow, we had to save that seven dollars for the wood, nails, and paint.
Dad explained all this to me afterward because he wanted me to help him. I'd
watched
him build the first porch but I didn't help.
This is the way we'd do it. First, we'd buy our wood at the big lumber yard on Marshall Road. Dad'd buy enough at one time to build three porches. Mom wasn't too happy because he was using the emergency money they'd saved for doctor bills, but Dad wanted to get that back rent paid; it really bothered him, owing money.
Then, we'd go down in the cellar. Dad had all the measurements for everything, even the railings. I'd mark the wood from his measurements and hold the long ends while he cut the lumber to length. We could do all the cutting for a porch at once; usually on Friday nights. At first I used to worry I'd mark something wrong and ruin valuable wood but then I got good at it.
Somehow, Dad found out about gray paint for battleships on sale, cheap, at the Navy yard. He went down there and bought four barrels of that gray paint. They were big as ashcans and we stored them in the cellar on the other side from the furnaces, at the bottom of the steps under our dart board. All the porches we built we painted with this gray paint. Then, early Saturday mornings, unless it was raining hard or too cold, we'd go out.
First we'd tear down the old porch. We have crowbars for this and Dad showed me how to start at the top so nothing fell down on us. The last thing to go would be the rickety old steps; there were sixteen of them. Then we'd chop and saw the old steps and posts into pieces and stack them in back of our car, where we'd carried the new wood for the new porch. The new lumber we'd have laid in the alley in a certain way so I can hand each piece to Dad as he needs it. He has it all worked out.
He has his tools lined up in a wooden box with a place for each tool. My dad has good tools from the days when he was a carpenter with
his
dad. There are two saws, one rip and one cross; two hammers, both Stanley, one carpenter, one mason; a level, chisels, everything you need to build. He has another wooden box he built for nails. Eight sections for different-sized nails, from four- to sixteen-penny with and without heads.
The old wood we'd take home at the end of the day and store in our cellar. We'd burn this in the furnace to save on coal during winter.
Next, Dad would bolt the wooden beam called a plate onto the wall. He'd stand on our ladder while I'd hold the bottom and hand things up to him. After that, we'd set in the cut-off-pyramid-shaped concrete foundation blocks to hold the posts for the new porch. These had bolts sticking straight up from the top where they were cut off. We'd set the posts up and Dad would stand up high on the ladder, with me holding it, so he could pound in the framing for the deck.
After that, we'd be up there, working from above, nailing down deckboards and putting on railings. About then, I'd start painting. Dad would nail along fast and we'd usually end up at about the same time. From start to finish we could put up a porch in under five hours.
At first, I hated losing my Saturdays, especially when it was school time. We worked Saturdays almost as long as a school day, and the only free day I'd have left would be Sunday. Sunday mornings are ruined by getting dressed, going to church, then having a big breakfast afterward. It's eleven o'clock before I can even change into play clothes.