Snapping turtle trap didn’t pan out

 

Part three

 

Here are a few more of Cardinal Charlie’s old memories.

Jim Luthringer and I used to hunt for snapping turtles in the creek at the first bridge on M-62.

We once made a turtle trap, but it didn’t pan out as we expected.

We had to change our school clothes before we could go out and play.

We used to roll barrel hoops with a stick of wood that had a cross piece on the end near the ground.
An old orange crate, a piece of 2×4 wood and some wheels off some old roller skates could be made into a little scooter.

We spent many hours in the Heddon dump, which was between the main factory and the golf shaft building.

I remember we picked up large pieces of sandstone in back of the Premier factory.

It was something we could sculpt things out of big hunks as it was kind of soft and easy to work with.

I can’t forget Arley Lee’s sweet black cherry tree next to our lot where we played work-up baseball.

We rough-and-ready boys used to play cops and robbers on Ralph Tice’s welding machine shop’s roofs.

Something else I remember was the five cents old Ross Buckle used to give us when we went to his house on trick-or-treat night.

When I looked out the window and saw the Graf Zeppelin, I told my mother there was a big boat in the sky.

I used my mother’s old pedal sewing machine’s bobbin winder as a lathe by putting a crayon where the bobbin was supposed to be wound.

We used to make a whip out of the long things that hung from Lyle Stevens’ weeping willow tree.

I also used to have pretend funerals using my mother’s cover of her sewing machine, which made a good casket, and use several pretty laced or crocheted flowered pillows as a substitute for flowers.

At election time for president, we picked up a lot of promotional buttons and pins.
I remember my time as the ball boy at the football games.

I still have a jar full of charms that used to be in those penny machines at gas stations.

I can remember Walt Engle working on his airplane at his mother’s house across from our playground at Oak Street School.

We kids shoveled snow and mowed lawns the hard way for practically nothing moneywise.

My neighbor, Paul Brissaud, had one of those Whizzer motor bikes and used to drive it from Hartford to come to work at the Rudy factory.

A bunch of us kids used to hitch-hike out to Indian Lake to get in a good swim on a hot day.

Some of us not too bright kids used to try to make maple syrup out of icicles that hung from a frozen maple tree limb.

We got catalpa worms and big, black crickets for fish bait and sold some of them.

We used to roller skate and ice skate at the old Oak Street tennis courts and played a lot of tennis as we got older.

— “Cardinal Charlie” Gill