A Picture Tells a Story - Part II

Old Manor Ridge photographs are, for me, a type of archaeology. When I see one I am instantly transported back to that time and place and I want to reconstruct as much of what can be known about that instant as I can, both from memory, and by piecing together the clues every photo offers.

Take this family photo from summer 1966. How do I know it was taken in the summer of 1966?

Well, I know I broke my leg that summer, so that is a pretty strong memory - confirmed by the cast on my leg.

And what a great Manor Ridge story that is!

I broke it at the Maple Grove pool one bright sunny summer day in June. We had just left for summer vacation and as I liked to do on days that were especially hot and especially boring, I begged my mom for the money to go to the pool. We were not members so I had to pay the admission. My mom gave me enough to get in and with the change; I always had enough for a soda and French Fries at lunch. What a treat! There is just nothing like the good taste of French Fries and chlorine. More on the Maple Grove pool days in a later post.

Anyway, I was walking along the edge of the pool – you know – the thing your parents tell you not to do at the pool or you will get yourself hurt (like running on the concrete)? Unlike getting cramps if you went in the water sooner than 30 minutes after you ate (which was one of those diabolical tricks your parents played on you to get you to stay out of the water with them for a few minutes), the “don’t walk along the edge of the pool!” warning was real! As I was about to found out.

I slipped and my left foot went into the water and all my weight landed on my ankle. This wouldn’t have been so bad if I was at the deep end of the pool, but I wasn’t – the water was shallow. I felt the pain of the snap of my ankle right away. I hobbled out of the water but a little thing like a broken ankle was not going to ruin my day at the pool! Or so I thought. I tried to tough it out for a while, but eventually I gave in to the pain and decided it was time to walk home.

That’s right – walk home, on a broken ankle.

Before the days when parents drove children everywhere, we got to where we wanted to go by bicycle, or by foot. As I was all of seven years old and would not get my first “real” bicycle (a Schwinn 3-speed) until my eighth birthday, it was hoofing it on foot for me. And as we lived on Hawthorne Drive – my walk to Maple Grove pool was just about as far as a Manor Ridge kid had to make back then. The journey was all the way down Hemlock and then left onto Stone Mill Road to Columbia Avenue, across the bridge at Boas, and in the main entrance to the pool. That was quite a hike for a seven year old on a good day, and this was decidedly not a good day. But somehow, I managed to hobble home on a broken ankle.

Back home in the very same living room where this picture was taken, my mom was mortified that I might have seriously damaged my leg. My dad took one look at it after he got home from work and pronounced me with a broken leg. So it was off to the hospital for the first time ever and a new cast. This was putting a serious damper on my summer vacation – the crutches sucked! Fortunately, after a week or so, they put a plastic heel on my cast (you can just see it on the bottom of the cast next to the one crutch), which allowed me to get around without crutches. This meant only one thing……..kick ball and wiffle ball were back!!! You could really clobber the ball kicking with that cast. My parents told me it was like I didn’t even have a cast on – I seldom if ever used the crutches after I got the heel. But one thing I could not do was get it wet – so no more Maple Grove pool trips for me that summer. Taking a bath was a real trick – my mom would wrap my cast in plastic bread bags and use rubber bands to try to create a waterproof seal (hah!). And there was no stopping a seven-year-old boy from playing in the grass at night – grass covered in dew or still wet from a summer rain. By the end of that summer my cast was in tatters and the heel appendage was hanging on by a few pieces of plaster of Paris. But it got me through.

Some more evidence of the age of this picture can be found seated next to me – my little brother and sister. My brother appears to be about a year and a half to two years old, which is just right for a kid born in January 1965. My little sister – the one with the most beautiful smile in the world, looks to be about the right age – five. So that makes me seven as I am two years older than her.

Note the summer pajamas we are all wearing. That’s right – even though it was sweltering hot and humid and we had no air-conditioning, we still wore pajamas to bed (but lighter weight and short sleeved compared to the winter variety). And speaking of no air-conditioning, note the Two Guys blue floor fan along the wall. Every Manor Ridge house came equipped with at least one of those floor fans – the only way to move the hot air in the summer. That and the ever-present window fans.

I think the photo was taken closer to July than June. One reason is the tan my sister and I have. We are both pretty well tanned so we had been out in the sun playing for a couple of weeks already.

Another hint - we moved to our new house in Manor Ridge in November 1964. My first memory of that house was playing on that very carpet with my Army men. I pretended the edge of the carpet was land and the hardwood floor was the ocean. There was no other furniture in the living room – just that ugly old area carpet. Since we still had that carpet – this was an early photograph from soon after we moved in – so summer 1966 is just about right.

The living room furniture was classic mid 60’s Americana in a style then known as “S&H Green Stamp décor”. I love the ugly lamp, the hideous floral pattern drapes, the touch of seasonal color my mom added with the little white vase and plastic flowers, and especially, the groovy green sofa with the puke orange pillow. I’m guessing someone slept on the sofa the night before because there is a sheet on it – probably so hot they had to sleep in the living room. But that’s what you did back then, anything to try to beat back the heat and get a nights sleep (good luck!). The S&H Green Stamp catalog folding metal coffee table is at the end of the sofa.

Another form of confirmation is the Lancaster Sunday Newspaper at my feet. It had to have been tossed there by my dad, who loved the sofa. Obviously he plopped it there when he was done reading it (my mom always read the Sunday paper in her chair – as a matter of fact, she still does). You can just make out the Sunday supplement (in color) more proof that it was a Sunday paper. Also, the TV supplement for that weeks TV shows always came with the Sunday paper and you can see that on the floor too. It says “Daniel Boone” and “WGAL TV 8.”

This gives us another clue as to the date of this photo. The TV series Daniel Boone starring Fess Parker as the intrepid frontier explorer ran on NBC from September 24, 1964 to September 10, 1970 (isn’t Wikipedia amazing?). Of course WGAL was (and still is) an NBC affiliate, which carried Daniel Boone during that time period. So we know the photo had to have been taken between 1964 and 1970.

So I know the photo was taken on a Sunday – but which Sunday?

Well, I don’t know the date I broke my leg but I remember it was soon after school had let out – early summer vacation. I know this because I had to wear that stupid cast and use crutches for a whole summer! I got the cast off just before school restarted.

Judging by the amount of signatures I had on the cast, I must have had the cast on my leg for at least a couple of weeks to garner so many autographs. That puts us at June 19 or 26 at the earliest. But I am thinking this photo was probably taken the weekend of the Fourth of July Holiday – on Sunday July 3^rd 1966. Possibly a week later – Sunday July 10^th.

Mining Manor Ridge history – one photo at a time.

In Through the Side Door

If you grew up in a Manor Ridge house you knew there was one rule above all others: no one ever used the front door.

As odd as this sounds, it was a fact. Nobody ever went to anyone’s front door – you always went and knocked at the side door.

I had a friend named Greg and his family lived on Hemlock. His was one of the very few houses that did not have a proper side door. His side door was inside a screened-in porch. So I had to knock at his front door – which always seemed odd.

Another friend I had was Glenn who lived on Manor Ridge Drive. Glenn’s house had two front doors, but you knew which one to knock on - so it was a side door by default.

Yet another friend, Matt, also lived on Manor Ridge Drive and he had no side door but a back door. So that was where we knocked, the back.

But if the house had a side door – you went for it like a bee to honey.

There were two times per year where it was acceptable to knock on the front door of a Manor Ridge house.

The first was Halloween. What ever was the fastest, most expedient way to get to the adults handing out the candy, that was the door you went to. All rules were off on that glorious day of Trick-or-Treating.

The other was also seasonal – Christmas. To be precise - Christmas caroling. Caroling was something people often did at Christmas back then, but not anymore. I recall groups of carolers coming to our door most every Christmas, but by the 1980’s, you seldom saw or heard them, and then they stopped coming all together. The carolers did not have to memorize all the lyrics. It was common for carolers to have a cheat sheet - caroling sheets printed by WGAL TV 8. Channel 8 must have printed those caroling sheets every year – people always seemed to have them. How sad that caroling is almost gone as a Christmas ritual. Anyway, it was acceptable to go to a front door if you were caroling.

In Manor Ridge - front doors were strictly for show. It was the side door that was utilitarian.

Even today – if someone comes and knocks on my front door, I think it is odd. But anyone who grew up with me in Manor Ridge, when they come to visit my house – they always go to the side door. It’s automatic.

Those exiting the house were also required to use any door but the front door. Really, think about it. How many times do you remember anyone exiting a Manor Ridge front door? How many times did you exit using your front door? Nope, you used the side door, and so did anyone else in your house. Again, it was automatic.

Only visitors from the outside world (non-Manor Ridgers) used front doors. It was almost as if Manor Ridge front doors were portals to another time and dimension - a Hawthorne Drive or Temple Avenue Star Gate.

Front doors were typically decorated by mom with seasonal stuff – a wreath or garland at Christmas, a turkey and cornucopia at Thanksgiving, Easter eggs and bunny rabbits at Easter, and so on. Being a kid you could tell the season of the year, the month of the year, simply by looking at what Manor Ridge mom's had placed on their front doors. There's Abe Lincoln? Must be mid to late January. Is that a four leaf clover? Must be mid March. And to add to the door decorations, the shrubbery and flowers next to the door were immaculately maintained.

Side and back doors were another thing entirely. There it was permissible to have to run the gauntlet of bicycles, sports equipment, and lawn mowers. This is where Bootsy the mailman brought your mail and the milkman brought your milk. A milkbox at the front door? Au contraire. If you want to see what a Manor Ridge side door looked like, circa 1968, take a look at my previous blog post.

A Picture Tells a Story - Part I

Perhaps you have old family photos of Manor Ridge from the 50;s, 60;s, or 70;s? If so, I'd be glad to have them and post them along with your stories right here.

Here's one of mine, taken about 1967-1968. I can guess the date accurately because I am holding my new glasses, which I started wearing that year. And my little brother looks to be about 2 or 3 years old, which would have been his age in 1967-1968.

The picture was taken, probably by my dad, of us standing in our carport. You can tell a lot about Manor Ridge life in those days just by carefully studying the image.

For example - note at our feet is chalk on the driveway for hopscotch. A perennial favorite for Manor Ridge kids. Sadly, a kids game that appears to be all but forgotten today.

In the background is the ever-present bicycle. That little red thing was a hand-me-down I rode after my older brother outgrew it. It had coaster brakes and I remember well learning the limitations of those brakes riding down "rabbit hill" towards the Conestoga Creek and the skeleton bridge. As I was cruising down that long hill just about where the apartments are, I tried to stop but the brakes had other ideas and I smacked right into the rear bumper on some old 1950’s American piece of steel car. My bike didn't even scratch the bumper and I went flying forward straddling the cross bar - leaving a huge purple bruise on my inner thigh. Lucky I didn't land a bit higher up on the anatomy.

The second bike is visible underneath the picnic table. That was my little brother’s tricycle. That too was a hand-me-down (new bikes were expensive and not something your parents went out and bought on a regular basis - so you got what was available). Unfortunately, soon after this picture was taken that tricycle met an untimely end as my dad crushed it with the 57 Chevy as he was backing out of the driveway. My little sister left it parked behind the rear wheel. A big no-no and she heard about it.

On the picnic table appears to be an assortment of tools and yard implements my dad always had at the ready - possibly a garden hose sprayer and an oil can nozzle/opener. Note the two cans of Quaker State oil on the top bench and the plastic milk bottle with some fluid in it. That fluid would be used oil. Back in those days, there were no Jiffy Lubes and 30-minute oil change stations. If you wanted to change the oil, your dad did it himself. You needed a catch pan, milk jugs to put the used oil, a new filter, a filter wrench (to pry the filter loose), a socket wrench (to crank open the drain plug) and a tool that has all but disappeared - the oil can opener/spout. This was a stout instrument that with an unmistakable sound would pierce the can along the edge and then allow the oil to come out the spout. Every house had one, but today with screw off caps for oil (plastic bottles, no more cans), the oil can opener/spout has gone the way of the carburetor.

Also on the top of the picnic bench you can see my dad's shoes alongside one other thing that all Manor Ridge houses had, but which today, sadly, is gone - the milk box. Everyone had milk delivered to their home by one of the multiple local dairies. Glass bottles of milk, not cardboard or plastic. If you have never had milk in a glass bottle, there is no substitute. When you needed more milk, you simply put the empties in the milk box and the delivery man would replace them with fresh milk. Of course the delivery man brought more than just regular milk, he could also bring chocolate milk (if your parents could afford it). When you went away on vacation (something you did once per year - for one week), you put a note in the milk box telling the delivery man to not deliver that week. Amazingly, that was all the communication needed, no emails were required. And the delivery man never screwed up.

In the 1960's and perhaps even into the 1970's, you could also have baked goods delivered to your house, especially bread. Now the bread delivery man had something very special he would bring with him - the "goodie caddie". This was an amazing box he would carry and the box would open with all these cool fold-out drawers. Inside these drawers were magical stuff your parents could seldom afford to buy - but when they did, what a treat! Pastries and raison bread and all kinds of baked delights.

Some of the real Manor Ridge old-timers remember (though I don't) a man who would come around in a horse-drawn wagon selling meat. That's right, a freaking horse-drawn wagon! How cool was that?!

Back to the photo - my dad's ever present wood step ladder is planted onto the side of the house next to his trusty rake. Note the asbestos shingles on the house. Many Manor Ridge houses were built with these durable asbestos/asphalt/cement shingles. It was the vinyl siding of the day. I remember very well when my dad took these shingles off the house to replace them with siding. I had to carry box after heavy box of old shingles to the curb and place a box or two each week by the trash cans for the trash collectors to pick up. Back then the trash collectors would dispose of asbestos shingles no questions asked.

Also - note what is running up the side of the house. That is a piece of black antennae wire. This was not coaxial cable for cable TV - that was a good decade in the future. No - what you are looking at was the antennae wire my dad ran from the antennae on the roof, down the side of the house, and into the basement (so we could watch TV in the basement as well as the upper floors). All Manor Ridge roof tops had one form of TV antennae or another. The Manor Ridge skyline looked like a NASA tracking station. But if you wanted to get anything more than Channel 8, you needed an antennae on the roof. Really advanced household TV systems had antennae that would rotate. To rotate the antenna you would turn this really cool dial, which was usually located on top of the TV. This then mechanically turned the antennae in the direction you wanted it. If you wanted to tune in the Philadelphia TV stations like Channel 3, Channel 6, Channel 4, or Channel 17 or 29 (UHF), point the antenna east. Want to pull in Channel 11 from Baltimore? Turn it south.

My dad loved college basketball and most of all he loved watching the Big Five games out of the Philadelphia Palestra arena. But to see these games in anything other than complete static fuzz and snow on the black and white TV, he needed a better antennae. He got one and placed it up on the roof (risking ones life to erect an antennae on the house roof was well worth it to get better TV reception for Philadelphia sports). A great side development from our new rooftop antennae was we could now (pretty) clearly see channel 17 (Wee Willy Weber and his cartoons!) and Channel 29 (Flyers hockey!) for the first time. My dad ran antennae wire into the second and first floors and the basement so we were one of the few families back then that had three, even four TV's going at the same time. I spent many hours in the basement watching cartoons on the little black and white TV.

The fact that the picnic table is stacked in the carport and not out in the back yard meant it had to be either fall or spring when the photo was taken. Judging by the hoodie sweatshirts my brother and I have on, and the low angle of the lighting it could be either. However, I spot what appear to be bare tree branches reflecting in the doorway glass. If so - then that means the photo was taken probably in the spring - March or April.

Fourth of July and Manor Ridge Pyro's

Boom!

What would the Fourth of July in Manor Ridge have been without fireworks?

In a word - unthinkable.

For me, it was the one time per year our next door neighbor, Mr McGaw would bring out his carbide canon. For those unfamiliar with this especially cool instrument of destruction - it was (is) a small iron or steel canon that is primed with carbide powder and then ignited with a spark. The resulting Boom! was very cool and I always looked forward to Mr McGaw bringing it out on the Fourth and firing away.

For us kids, it was sparklers. And I am not talking about the crappy, impossible to light, wimpy sparklers they sell today. No sir. The sparklers we had were like welding rods! Light one of those and it was all you could do to hang on! The sparks were hot, bright, lasted a long time, and were awesome. Run around and make a tracer with one. Or better yet, toss a sparkler high into the air and watch it streak across the sky. Then try to pick it up without touching the "business end". And of course there was always the danger of a sparkler ending up in someones head, or even - in their eye! Of course objects taking out ones eye was a widely believed fact by all Manor Ridge mothers, yet in all my years of sparkler throwing (or shooting BB guns, or throwing lawn jarts, or the thousands of other things we did involving projectiles) I never witnessed or even heard of anyone losing an eye. Still, our mothers warned us "you'll put someones eye out with that ________."

But I digress. Sparklers were just one of the many Fourth of July traditions we held. Another was concocting our own cap bombs. These were made by taking an ordinary roll of caps for a cap gun, and unrolling them and overlapping each "dot" of powder on the cap roll onto a pin. The key was to pierce each and every dot of powder with the pin, then slowly pull out the pin without setting off the entire roll of caps in your hand (something I did several times - always leaving a nice black burn mark on my thumb or finger). Once the pin was extracted, you had an accordion of punctured caps in your hand. This would then be squeezed tight and you would wrap it with Scotch tape to hold it together. A match was placed on the top and taped into place as a fuse. Light the end of the match and when it burned its way up to the top of the match bomb - Boom! (well, a loud pop was more like it, but it was still cool).

Later we would move on to bigger and better home-made pyrotechnics.

A very nice smoke grenade could be fashioned by taking an entire box or two of Ohio Blue Tip matches (bought at Wagners of course) and breaking off each and every match head. This took some time but if you had 3-4 Manor Ridge pyro's working together, it could be done in about an hour. Then you would customize one of the boxes by taping the striking surfaces of the other box onto the inside of the box (so then match heads had something to strike when it was thrown). Then all of the match heads would be crammed into the prepared box. The box would be heavily taped shut and when thrown with great force against the ground (preferably macadam or concrete), at least one match inside the box would strike the ignitor surface, and then ignite all of the other matches inside the box creating a classic Manor Ridge chain reaction. The resulting white smoke billowing from the box was impressive.

Later we moved on to chemical engineering of our smoke bombs.

This required two primary ingredients - saltpeter (ammonium nitrate) and sugar. The one was readily available at no cost in moms kitchen. The other required a purchase at Wagners. Yes, the Wagners always had a box of saltpeter ready for us (located behind the penny candy counter on the shelf of household items and groceries). We always wondered what the Wagners were thinking when we would buy them out of saltpeter, but they never asked and always sold it to us.

Mix the saltpeter and sugar in the proper ratio, wrap a measured portion of the mixture in tissue paper, light the tissue paper with a match and throw it. Very cool. Of course you could do so much more, especially if you could get your hands on sulfur and charcoal (which of course we did). Then you could try to make your own homemade gun powder!

Now this being the days before the Internet, learning how to make saltpeter and sugar bombs, let alone real gunpowder, took some actual research (as in, reading books). Us being the pyro's that we were, this was no obstacle. We found the proper ratios of ammonium nitrate, sulfur, and charcoal, and set about hand grinding each ingredient into as fine a powder as we could make them. Mix the powders into the proper ratios, and you had something close to actual gunpowder. This could be used in all manner of explosive devices. In fact, we kept a book of our pyrotechnic inventions, giving them clever names such as "the green grenade" or the "saltpeter eater".

The saltpeter eater was my design and I was quite proud of the result. The saltpeter eater was our homemade gunpowder stuffed into a steel soda can with a hole punched in either end of the can. Into each hole went a sparkler (as a fuse). The idea was - by lighting each sparkler, you could get the can to spin wildly (in theory) as each sparkler burned its way into the can from either end. I envisioned a spinning whirly gig of flaming joy. What we got was something unexpected, and very cool (and dangerous, but that's what made it cool).

At my friend Matt's backyard driveway/basketball court, we set the saltpeter eater on the macadam, and Matt and I each lit a sparkler. We stepped back (good idea) to watch and wait. The sparklers did their job and burned like a fuse into the can. Then there was a bang, and the saltpeter eater simply disappeared in a cloud of smoke! Where did it go? We had not the slightest clue until a moment or two later when the can came clanking back down to earth in his backyard. We blasted it into the atmosphere! Far more cool then something that simply spun around emitting sparks and smoke.

The use of saltpeter and sugar and homemade gunpowder was common knowledge all over Manor Ridge. Once we went and visited our friend Norm who lived in Fairway Park. At that time, there was an open field next to the Manor Animal Hospital (what is today apartments). On a hot summer day, Norm and his friends had concocted their own device - essentially a pipe bomb. One end of this pipe filled with homemade gunpowder was shoved into the dirt in the middle of this open field, and the other end was lit with, as always, a homemade fuse. We stepped back (very good idea this time) to watch and wait. Boom! And I mean Boom! It blew a hole into the ground and it is fortunate none of us was hit by steel pipe shrapnel.

Improvised fuse using sparklers, matches, and all kinds of other homemade inventions worked, but there was nothing like actual fuse. You know - a real fuse - the kind that Mr Phelps lit at the opening of every episode of the Mission Impossible TV show. And we had real fuse on occasion, thanks to another mainstay of the Manor Ridge community - Smitties Hobbies over at the Manor Shopping Center. Real fuse was precious and seldom used but was cool as anything to watch. My friend Jim still has some actual fuse from Smitties, and not just any fuse - fuse that burns underwater! How cool is that?! Of course today you could never buy real fuse, let alone underwater fuse, but back then, in the hay days of rocketry, fuse was very available for hobbyists. Or for Pyro's.

Another pyro tool was lighter fluid, also widely available back when 70% of the adult population smoked. Wagners was also the stop for this essential tool of the trade. Once we fashioned a tennis ball cannon out of soda cans (see "Glass, Steel, and Aluminum") which required lighter fluid as the ignition source and accelerant. After blasting many tennis balls high into the air, one failed to ignite. We placed the match at the end of the canon......nothing. Did we forget to add lighter fluid? My friend Glenn decided to have a look (literally) and peered into the business end of the canon and Boom! Out blasted the tennis ball, just missing his head! The flame did manage to singe away his eyebrows and part of his long blond bangs. In other words - "we almost put out Glenn's eye!"

As you can see, the use of pyrotechnics was a year-round vocation for us, but there was nothing like the Fourth of July to make it .......sanctioned.

Of course Fourth of July's in Manor Ridge were also known for picnics. Every house had one and on the Fourth of July Manor Ridge backyards would be filled with families. Picnic tables were set up under trees to get some shade and out would come food prepared by your mom, your aunts, and your grandmothers. Dad would slave over the charcoal grille (no propane grills in those days just good old Kingsford charcoal and lighter fluid). Dad made the hot dogs and burgers which the flies and bees feasted upon along with the people in the hot summer sun. There was no point eating inside "to get out of the heat" because the inside of the house was just as hot as the backyard.

Then that evening it would be off to Mountville for the annual fireworks display. You had to get there early to lay out your blanket on the grass and get a spot. It seemed like forever until it was dark enough for the fireworks to start. After the show all the cars would leave and there would be a massive traffic jam - one of the few such traffic jams we ever experienced because there was so little traffic on the roads in those days.

Back at the house there would be more sparklers and cap bombs and of course, blasts from Mr McGaw's carbide canon as the lightning bugs lit up the July evening.

As soon as it had started, the Fourth of July gave way to the Fifth of July and unused fireworks as we returned to the tedium and routine of summer vacation.