I am outside in the yard. There is the smell—sour, vaguely rotten. And then the sound. It is high-pitched, but that is not the problem. The radio makes high-pitched sounds, too, and so does my mother when she sings to me. The problem is the loudness, a force as feelable as a blizzard. Every morsel of me shrivels and shakes. And even so, maybe I could stand it if only it would stop. But it does not and does not—and I cannot hear my own scream. My mother is running out to get me …
This is my first memory of my first house. It was on Marshall Street in the so-called East End of Norristown, Pennsylvania. Behind the house was a brewery—the Adam Scheidt Brewing Company—and that, I later learned, was where the smell and the sound came from.
The smell was hops, used in the beer-brewing process. Forming a constant cloud about us, the odor was especially strong once a day when a horse-drawn wagon hauled spent mash down the alley that led from the brewery past our side yard. Then the alley became a sour, steaming stream from the drippings of the wagon’s sopping cargo.
The source of the sound was an air-raid siren. It was propped on the roof of the brewery, hardly a stone’s throw from our house. This was during the early 1940s. World War II was raging in Europe, Africa, and Asia, and air-raid drills were a common practice in towns and cities throughout the land.
While the siren’s frightful wail seemed to come from everywhere, another frequent sound—a long, low drone—came from directly overhead. Many a day I looked up to see planes or airships—dozens, sometimes hundreds of them—moving in neat geometric shapes across the sky.
Our house was red brick, flanking a block-long row of red-brick houses that ended at the brewer’s alley. The sidewalk was brick also. We lived in an apartment on the second floor. The Printzes—Mickey, Big Leroy, and Little Leroy—lived on the first floor. And on the third. Each night they trooped through our quarters to go up to bed.
The landlady lived in the adjoining house. Neighborhood kids said she was mean. Stray balls that landed in her yard never came out. Luckily for my father’s baseball budget, she was nice to us. My father lobbed underhand pitches to me, and I regularly whacked them over the back fence into the landlady’s yard. My father, according to Marshall Street lore, was the only person ever to return alive from her yard, ball in hand.
Unable to find a bat for a four-year-old, my father bought a standard-size Louisville Slugger, then put the saw to it. He presented me with seventeen inches of hickory handle—perfect. That stunted, clubbish “bat” stands in a corner of my office today. It reminds me of how small I once was, and that the landlady’s fence was both the first and last fence that I ever hit a baseball over.
A budding ballplayer (age 4, 1945).
Over the fence out front, I sent something else. The gate facing the sidewalk was metal, and I used to grip those bars with my tiny hands and plant my feet and belt out “Jesus Loves Me” to the turning, smiling passersby.
At some point during my brief singing phase, I acquired a baby brother, Billy. My mother tells me that because I then had to compete for her attention, I brought my performances inside to the living room and kitchen.
The next house we lived in we had all to ourselves. It was also a row house, but it had a front porch. It was deeper into the East End, on Chestnut Street. I always remember the number—224 Chestnut—because my grandparents lived at 226, the house next door.
I wasn’t allowed to cross the street. But I did roam up and down the sidewalk, and that led me to the vacant lot at the end of our row of houses. When I think of that lot, I think of weeds and of brown and blue broken glass. It became my first playground, my first ballfield. Many of my days were spent there, until I began school.
I did not go to kindergarten, so my first taste of school was first grade at Gotwals Elementary. We learned to write the letters of the alphabet, then our names. I recall laboring over each pencil-printed letter, and the miracle of completing my name on the blue-lined paper: my first written work.
I was destined to learn little else at Gotwals. We rented our house on Chestnut Street, but my parents had been searching for a place to buy. When they got the chance, they took it, even though it meant transferring me to a new first grade in a new school.
We were moving to the West End.