With reference and apologies to the Watertown crew…and some very good and old friends from that group…they where more my brothers home boys then mine…I was 18 when my family made the move from Alden to Watertown (my brother was only 8)…I spent the next 40 out of 72 months away at 2 different colleges…but then 40 out of 510 months in Watertown…of the 729 months of my life well you do the math…
As much as I am apart of where I am now…I am still more apart of where I grew up….
When I was about 4 my family left a suburban Buffalo and moved about 15 miles to the east to the Town of Alden…a weird genetic mix of German/Polish farm kids and Eastern European Factory kids…. (Mostly but not totally Polish)…
I was watching I’m not smarter then a 5th Grader a week or so ago and one of the class was shocked because a contestant mentioned having a pocket knife in school…different era, different time…in my school…entered K in September of ’53…and left as a senior in June of ’66…if you had checked the pocket/purse/book bag (sorry backpacks were unknown)…90% probably had a pocket knife in them…and that included the girls…it was a tool…we never even imagined your Tom Mix as a weapon…
The drag races on our 100+ foot drive way…with several classes…the off-road races on course mowed thru the fields…the field car races…the building of “forts” out of spare lumber…the building of the jump for sleds et al down by the local creek…soccer, football, baseball, wiffle ball in any of a number of front, side or back yards…
To return to the above mention pocket knife theme…in the closet or some where in the room of most of the kids I knew…girls and boys was a .22 caliber rifle…not for shooting our classmates but for shooting targets…groundhogs and other vermin…a friend held the local record for shooting crows out of his dad’s corn fields…where I grew up knifes and guns were tools…not weapons…and half of the best high school rifle team in Eire county were girls…different time…different वलुएस...
I remember the Z girls of a family…a farm family 3 girls one guy…but it was the girls who accepted the farm life…all three were great kids…but the farm life was what they knew and they accepted that…
I remember one pickup tackle football game …4 on 4 where I was the captain and my 3 picks where the Z girls…the result while incomprehensible to others was a forgone conclusion to me…
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