I haven’t thought much about the summer of 1961 in recent years, quite possibly because there have been so many intervening years. This is the 46th year since the most interesting summer of my life, at least in the years before my high school graduation. It wasn’t a bad summer at all. I think it would have been worse if we had stayed in the Villanova, Pennsylvania area very long, because we were a working class family and could never have fit in there easily. We were from a totally different background than the old money aristocracy represented by the mansions on Spring Mill Road and on the Main Line in general. People drive by the mansions of the wealthy all the time and wonder what it would be like to live in them, but how many of the wealthy ever drive through the poor neighborhoods and think anything about what those people are like and what their lives are like. But still it was an interesting, adventurous summer, full of new experiences and fun for a young teenager such as I was then, and shall never be again.
My father had worked 20 years at Treadwell Engineering, a large iron and steel foundry on South 25th Street in Palmer Township, just west of Wilson, Pa. Twenty years of working in a hot, dirty foundry, coupled with working as a landscaper and the economic downturn in the late 50s, had gotten him thinking about getting out of foundry work all together, though it paid well when it was steady. In 1957 he had been diagnosed as borderline anemic and had switch to first shift from second shift in the foundry and given up most of his landscaping business in order to regain his health. He retained a few jobs, and these sometimes were all we had to eat supper on when his work in the foundry was tanking. He would have to cut someone’s grass many a night before we could eat. To this day I don’t like Campbell’s soup.
He had decided that he really wanted to work as a caretaker on a large estate and subsequently began searching newspaper want ads for such offers. Dad was about 47-48 when he started looking. The first one I remember him answering was for an estate outside of Blairstown, New Jersey. I don’t remember much about going there, except that we would have been living in a renovated section of an old stone barn, and that we got a flat tire on the road between Oxford and Buttzville, New Jersey. Mom wouldn’t get out of the car and he had to change the tire with her in the car as he jacked it up. Not very safe. I do remember that the man’s name was Rhoades and that he didn’t have a family. My father didn’t take the job, partly because he had a strange feeling the man was involved with organized crime. I guess I can’t blame him for thinking that way. He was trying to protect his family. I’m not even sure if Dad ever knew what business the man was supposed to be in.
The job in Villanova was on the estate of Dwight Perkins, who at the time was the chairman of Strawbridge and Clothier Stores in Philadelphia. We used to get the Philadelphia Bulletin Sunday edition at the time, so I guess he saw the ad there. Dad and I went down there on a Sunday in March of 1961. In those days for the most part you went thru all the towns enroute. There were few bypasses around populated areas then. We turned off of 202 several miles east of the present location of the King of Prussia Mall. Eventually we found a shorter way through West Conshohocken.
Few hired help worked on the estate. Percy, an elderly black gentleman, and his wife were the house servants. Percy had a beautiful 1958 white Chevy Impala convertible. It looked like he spent all his waking hours working on the car. Ray Burroughs was the other groundskeeper, though I think Perkins was trying to edge him out. He had a bad habit of being drunk on the job. He used to claim his was the same family that owned the Burroughs adding machine company, but he seemed a bit too crude to have come from that background. A member of a family that owns an adding machine business working as a groundskeeper just doesn’t add up! (pardon the pun) If I was in the main house, I don’t remember it now. The garage and the area where all the groundskeeper’s tools were kept had been the carriage house on the estate many years ago. There was a pool behind the main house and a large wooded area that wasn’t maintained in any way. For a large estate there really wasn’t that much grassy area to be cut.
The house intended for us had been a stagecoach stop before the American Revolution, at least the older part had been. There were non-functional fireplaces on all 3 floors and the beams were all exposed in the living room. I know because at age 14 I was tall enough to have to duck when I walked through the living room. The eastern part of the house had been added on and had higher ceilings.
I was taken out of 9th grade a few days before the end of school. They didn’t give us a problem about that and Dad had a complete copy of my school records to take to the new school, which would have been Lower Merion. I remember going into Haverford to register and that the school where the district office was had the WWII memorabilia of General Henry Arnold, who had graduated from that school. Looking back, I am glad I didn’t go to Lower Merion, with all the snooty, snobbish people who lived in that area. I wouldn’t have fit in with that sort of student body, having been raised up to that point in a working class neighborhood.
What made our stay in that area so brief (7 weeks) was that my parents were unable to sell our house in South Easton, and Dad wasn’t making enough on this job to keep the Easton house up. If they had sold the house, I guess I would be writing this from somewhere in Southeastern Pa. rather than southeast of Hazleton. It must have been a hard decision to go back to Easton, but looking back, I respect my father for having at least tried to follow his dream. It may not have worked out but at least he tried. In truth I don’t believe he ever regretted moving us to Villanova for that summer, and to me it was an adventure anyway, so it really was a fun way to spend a summer.
We were so close to the TV stations in Philly that for the first few weeks our antenna was 6 feet of bare copper wire strung on a wash line in the side yard. Later on we got a rabbit ears antenna for the top of the TV. I bought that at a TV shop on Fayette Street, the main drag across the bridge in Conshohocken. I wanted to make sure I didn’t miss the last few episodes of the Wyatt Earp TV series, which was ended by the Gunfight at the OK Corral. Funny how the series said nothing about the real reasons for the gunfight, one of which was a dispute between the Earp brothers and the Clanton gang over who would control the whorehouses in Tombstone, Arizona. In reality, the Earp brothers were not the saints of the sanitized Hugh O’Brien TV drama. I think I could still recite most of the words of the theme song.
In those days, there wasn’t near the availability of U-Haul and similar move yourself trucks, at least not in Easton, so Mom and Dad hired Frick Transfer, a local mover, to provide the moving services we needed. I don’t remember the exact day we moved, but what I do remember is that I got to ride with the movers because I knew how to get to our new home. It was the first time I had ever ridden in a truck that large. It wasn’t really large at all, but bigger than the pickups I had been in. I had never formed many close friendships in Easton, so I don’t think I was real sad about leaving, but in truth I don’t remember for sure.
I think we moved on a Saturday because I remember spending a whole Sunday morning helping my father clean the kitchen, which was left in a terrible state by the previous occupants. They must have cooked and never cleaned at all. Even if you clean regular, there are surfaces in any kitchen that accumulate grease and dirt. The kitchen and the rooms over it were the only ones I could stand up in without hitting my head, due to the low ceilings in the old part of the house.
I have to digress for a moment. We had listed our house with a local realtor whose office consisted of basically the realtor and his girlfriend. They didn’t show it to one prospective buyer in the seven weeks we were gone that they ever told Mom and Dad about, and to top that, there were several cases of china closet items, stored in the attic in a cubbyhole, that were missing when we came back. Looking back on that, it wasn’t very smart of my parents to leave anything there that had any value or that they didn’t want to lose.
It was on this estate that I first got paid an hourly wage for work. I used to help my father on the estate for $0.65 an hour, and the owner said I could work 20 hours a week. It wasn’t much, but I bought a radio with it and went to a few movies in the 7 weeks we were there. The grassy area that had to be cut, as I said, wasn’t that large for a large estate , but it was hilly, so one had to be careful with the riding mower. For that reason, the owner didn’t want me running the rider, but I did anyway when he wasn’t there. I helped my father install a drain field for the owner. There are two basic ways to install a sanitary sewer drain field, using orangeburg pipe and with terra cotta. Orangeburg pipe is a long section of 4 inch pipe that you put in a trench, dug below the frost line and provided with several inches of gravel in the bottom. The orangeburg pipe has a row of holes in it that get put face down when the pipe is installed in the trench. Waste trickles out the holes, through the gravel, and gets carried away and supposedly purified .
The same function can be done with terra cotta pipe sections, about one foot long, laid tight against each other in the trench. The sections are not sealed together and the waste trickles out the separations between the sections. The problem with either method is that the pores and voids in the subsurface soil eventually fill up and you have to install a new system, which is what we were doing. We used terracotta, although the orangeburg pipe would have been a lot faster to install, because the sections were on the order of 8 ft. in length.
We used to pick up the owner’s mail at the Bryn Mawr post office and it was there I saw a real test of the honesty of folks. There used to be a pile of newspapers on the outside steps of the post office every morning, along with a pile of change in a dish. You helped yourself and made your own change. If the weather was bad, it would be on a chair inside the door. I seriously doubt the change or the papers would last long nowadays. Another time we went to get gas for the mowers on the estate, and someone had managed to spill a quantity of gas large enough to cover the entire apron of the station. A tossed match or cigarette at that time and the whole area would have gone up, like the scene from ’The Birds’ where Jesse White (later famous as the lonely Maytag repairman) throws a cigar into a pool of gas surrounding his car.
And then there was the adventure we had with the baby raccoons. Dad and I had found 3 baby raccoons up a tree along the edge of the large wooded area behind the swimming at the very back of the built up part of the estate. He decided we would take them up close to the house. After Dad climbed the tree and gave them a push out , we managed to get them into a large burlap sack and carried them back to our house. To say that these cute little raccoons came out of the bag with an attitude would be an understatement. They tried to fully vent their fury on Dad and I, so we managed to get them back into the bag, all the while keeping all of our blood inside our bodies. We took them back to where we had gotten them, dumped them out of the bag, and bade them a very fond farewell.
Mr. And Mrs. Perkins had several children, but I am not sure how many or their names anymore. One daughter lived at home and worked for TV Guide, which had their offices in Radnor, just a few miles up US30, which intersected with the western end of Spring Mill Road. I remember that daughter as not getting along well with her father, sort of a free spirit I think. She had 2 cars, a 1928 Model A that had been rebuilt, and a rare 1953 Oldsmobile Fiesta convertible. She would take the A to work if it wasn’t supposed to rain that day. I’m not sure I ever spoke to her. She had a married brother who had a large family, 8 or 9 children as I recall. He was told by his father to not bring all the kids there at one time. Some grandfather!
Fortunately, my father hadn’t put all of his eggs in Dwight Perkins’ basket. Before we had left for Villanova, he had been seeking a position as groundskeeper at the new Easton High School, then being built west of 25th St. between Route 22 and the William Penn Highway. He had done lawn work years before and one of his clients from those days, Maskell Ewing, was on the school board. Dad wasn’t above using his knowing Ewing to try to advance his candidacy, but it would have been against Dad’s character to pay for a position. Besides, in those days we were poor as church mice. When we got back he found out the position had yet to be filled, so he managed to work there for 12 1/2 years until retirement forced by a heart attack.