Growing Up Rich

My mother, was born during America's Great Depression, into a family in Southern West Virginia with five other surviving children and a father that was a coal miner. When recalling her childhood she used to say, "we were dirt poor but we didn't know it." When asked to explain what that meant she said that everybody she knew had the same
lifestyle; so she had no frame of reference that their family was any different from anyone else.

Sometime during my fifth year of life my parents moved from Fayetteville, West Virginia to the East End of Oak Hill, West Virginia. where I would start school.

Our new home was located on a dead end street, Rhodes Street.  At the time there were ten houses on each side of the Street. Actually five pair of identically designed houses. Our house was a small three bedroom Gunnison Home. Gunnison Homes were prefabricated post World War II homes developed to meet the demand of the thousands of soldiers needing housing after the War. A Gunnison Home could be assembled on a cinder block foundation in a matter of days. Our home was exactly like the one beside ours. Three small bedrooms, one extremely small bathroom, a living room and a small eat in kitchen.
                                                             

A Gunnison Home

Rhodes Street ran from North to South. Our house was on the West side of the Street, the Arbuckle Creek flowed behind our House. The Creek ran from the working coal mines in the small mining towns of Summerlee and Lochgelly. The bed and the water was coal black, in that it was simply the waste and sewage from the mines. This long before the days of the EPA the only protection we had was the threat of our mothers to stay away.
Which was taken in one ear and out the other, even when I was warned that playing near or in the creek would surely cause me to contract hydrophobia, which she described as something akin to the plague.

As dumb as we were to the hazardous waste exposure, we knew by the horrible smell to avoid getting into the water. On days when the smell was not too acrid the creek offered some entertainment when we would harvest small tree branches to use to spear and retrieve "stink balloons" It was a few years later that I learned why our parents were so apoplectic about this sport, when I realized we had been fishing for used condoms.


My interest was singularly focused on sports, my best buddy at the time was Tom Sarver. Tom was also a Rhodes Street kid and obsessed with sports. Practically every daylight hour Tommy and I would be playing whatever sport was in season as long as the day would last; and many nights sleeping over at one and others houses while studying sports trading cards or a sports board game until sent to bed, only to rise the next morning to begin the process over.

The boys of Rhodes Street, at that time, were blessed with a vacant lot, that acted as what is now called a multipurpose sports facility The lot was primarily used for football and straight base baseball, which means you only have a pitcher, a batter and if lucky you could round up one fielder, but that was rare. Though the lot was quite level on top the outfield was a small cliff.

 A ball hit over the cliff was a home run and required considerable time being found. The search was most always lengthy and difficult in that the baseball was most often a sphere of black tape that had been tightly wrapped around what had once been a real baseball that had literally had the stitches and cover worn off.

The property to the north of the field was a grown over field with cherry and apple tress. There was a charming white house with a large wrap around porch. The house was occupied at times by a man known only to us as Groucho.

 Should a foul ball be hit over onto his property and you were to attempt to retrieve it, you could suffer the wrath of being shot by the Maniac or at the very least receive a severe tongue lashing in some unknown foreign tongue. I had once myself had one of this close encounters in rescuing one of these strays. Therefore if a hunt for a ball would go on too long, a reasoned assessment would be declared lost depending on the balls condition as opposed to our lives.

All of our parents had accepted that he was crazy and we were forbidden to go onto his property and told should we be killed it would be justified. Much later in life I learned Groucho was in fact a Russian musician who was a member of the Pittsburgh Symphony and this was his summer home that we disturbed

For these reasons the field was much more suitable for football in that the trajectory of a pigskin is obviously much more predictable than a horse skin or more literally in our case a round cork wrapped in black tape.

It was usually easier to field a group for a football game, in that the older boys enjoyed the opportunity to knock hell out of the younger boys. The only form of protection that we would wear were ill fitting helmets. Once while I was still in grade school I was playing in one of these games and received a concussion which hospitalized me unconscious for over 20 hours. When I regained consciousness in a bed at the little hospital a nurse came in and said, "oh you're awake? Your mom wanted me to call her if you came to."

My mom came and took me home and I wasn't allowed to play football again for two weeks.

Rhodes Street's basketball venue was on the other end of the street in the back yard of Puck Painter's house. The basketball goal consisted of a backboard nailed to an oak tree made of weather worn and rotting plywood and a rim that had the remnant or a net sadly hanging from it. The court was about an eight foot by eight foot hardened and grass worn  part of the Painter's backyard. The dirt made it totally useless in rainy conditions, but dry or frozen it was well suited for imagining you were Jerry West or Rod Hundley making last second buzzer beating shots. The small dirt court was not conducive to much more than a 3 on 3 game, but that was fine in that it was usually just Tom and me or one of us alone shooting, rebounding and winning games in the arena in our minds.

And I, with their mother spent countless hours providing time and transportation for my sports playing sons in games, tournaments and sports camps. Expensive shoes and sports logo gear so they could have the maxim reward from sports participation I now realize trying so hard to make it better for them than I had experienced was impossible.