The Winter Of "50"

I was a skinny kid and didn't cast a shadow until the age of 13.

Despite this I was encouraged by my parents to join the annual Boy Scouts Thanksgiving Weekend in the mountains of Western Pennsylvania. I assumed we were getting holiday company and they needed my room.

Why else would you put a stick figure child in the mountains during the winter unless the Boy Scouts needed a life sized thermometer?

It's a well known fact that there was no inside plumbing in the tiny cabins. You slept in bunks on top of tic mattresses. The entertainment schedule included a spitting contest with the potbelly stoves as targets. We loved to hear them sizzle.

Into this mix went ole Bar who could have worked part time as a stand-in for The Duquesne Light Company's mascot - "Reddy Kilowat" when they changed the lighting during commercials.

It was this same skinny rearend that graced the privys spread across the campgrounds. My favorite was "The Cadillac", so named because it had 7 stalls arranged in a circle. I found #5 to be the best one for ultimate wind blockage.

I recall little of the events but I'm sure some of them must have been designed for the acquisition of Merit Badges. If I had been interested "The Donner Expedition" badge" would have been my first choice.

My scouting career peaked at Star Scout. The attraction of the winter scout meetings back home was to play basketball in the Atlantic Avenue Auditorium at the conclusion of the formal stuff. I was among the first to start folding up the chairs

It was in 1950 that a group of about 15 to 20 of us attended the Thanksgiving festivities at a campground in the Laurel Mountains near the tiny town of Trent. One day we future leaders sliced our way through the testosterone and smoke in our cabins to hike into town.

The main, and possibly only, attraction there was a young store clerk, named Kate, who had achieved the prodigious development of her mammary glands.

We salivated all the way back up the mountain and froze over the zippers of our parkas.

We scouts were in these mountains during the worst snow recorded in the annals of Western Pennsylvania weather at the time. This event caused us to have to remain an extra day as the roads were closed and we had no telephone contact. On the last day and a half we subsisted on Pea Soup the consistency of pond scum but, it was hot and nourishing as all get out.

Our chefs were Mr. Chilcoat and Mr. Valentine, two gentlemen who had seen their sons through scouting and swore to continue this propagation of child abuse on other callow youth. (Actually, they were great role models but, that would screw up the story.)

Now, I was not a stranger to away from home sleeping. I often was sent up to Wilmerding, PA, the birthplace of my parents and the home of my widowed grandmother, Lizzie Sullivan.

These summer vacations were designed to enable me to play in the damp, dirty, soot impacted brick alley that ran behind her flat. The soot was courtesy of Westinghous Air Brake, the towns biggest employer, and the one who signed paychecks for both my grandfathers and my Dad at one time or another.

The nightly hum of the wires and the whooshing sound the streetcars made as they passed the occasional parked cars on Middle Avenue below often served to lull me to sleep as I lay on my foldaway bed in the front room. Yeah, I was BIG!

Where I was obviously truly grown up, some of the other kids were not. The news of our delayed departure suggested we would run out of hankerchiefs before the Pea Soup disappeared.

The roads were opened early Sunday morning and I soon traipsed up Sumner Avenue in waist high snow, my duffle bag over my shoulder and burst through our front door, anxious to regale my parents with tales of my character building exploits.

Mom told me to take off my shoes as she finished putting down a mixed Canasta, discarded, and then "went out". This caused her opponent, my Dad, to throw down his remaining cards and complain about her incredible luck. I went upstairs to pick a fight with my brother.

(OK, I lied. They missed me. I didn't tell them about Kate.)