One of the most amazing things about Woodsdale was for every kid who lived there it was the center of the universe. We lived on Poplar and knew the name of every person who lived on our street. All our parents knew each other and every mother went to school with your mother so there was little chance of getting away with anything.
If you lived on Upper Poplar you were okay, but anyone above Heiskell Avenue was a bit iffy and dangerous and above Edgington Lane was "Canada". If you lived past Orchard Road or Hamilton Avenue...you were a foreigner too.....perhaps that was "Mexico". There were other neighborhoods we would associate with like Claytor or Washington Avenue, but even then kids were considered tougher and more dangerous. Walking to our neighborhood theater The Mayfair through the shortcut by Kenwood Place (the old trolley path) was okay in the evening when it was still light out, but NOBODY went that way after dark....especially after a horror movie....who knew whether the Blob or the Giant Praying Mantis was lurking there behind the bushes? So it was up Chicken Neck Hill instead...the safe way home.
Despite the Edgington Lane gang, that street was sort of declare neutral territory because that is where you could get Wizards at the Colonel's store and buy cheap toys at Jakes. Those Lane kids called a War at Stratford Hill once and the fighting only ended when one kid got hit in the head by a BB. They had THEIR end of the hill and we had ours....ours was a lot tamer with a neat path, the big rock, numerous forts, vine swings, etc. Time passed in a dream there. You could spend the whole day and not come home til dark...and best of all...your parents were not worried...they may or may not even know where you were. Ahhhhh, the good old days!
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I never realized that the Kenwood Path had been a trolley car route. The Mantis movie at the Mayfair was responsible for my getting spanked because I took my younger sister to the matinee and she had nightmares. (Those horror movies were my favorites.) A big draw for the Upper Maple, Pine Ave., and Upper Popular crowd was the Fulton mansion at the top of Chicken Neck Hill. When no one was home, the caretaker would let us in to gawk. Of course, the game room (as in African safari animal trophies) was awesome. The yard was filled with wonderful trees which provided endless opportunities for climbing and hiding. What a shame that the land was sold for condos. Having the St. John ballfield across the street was also a big plus, especially at the Strawberry Festival time. At the corner of Upper Maple and Heiskell were two magnificent buckeye trees which went the way of so much of our neighborhood arboreal cover. The din of cicadas on those incredibly hot summer nights is a sound of Wheeling I will always remember. Here in NH we rarely hear locusts. But you're right about our being allowed to range far and wide without too much parental concern, unless darkness fell and you hadn't called. Although neither of my parents were native West Virginians, they were accepted by the neighborhood immediately, and like me, considered Wheeling their true home, even when they returned to New England. Up here people don't sit out on their porches, unless the porches are screened in, and the houses are so much farther apart that there are no neighborly gossip exchanges. We were everybodies' kids and couldn't get away with too much!
ReplyDeleteI remember sneeking pennies from my mother's penny jar (actually a glass bear jar w/ a slotted lid for coins, gotten from a local bank that I still have w/ a bandaid covering a broken ear) and running thru Kenwood Path to Jakes to purchase Disney figurines for 10 cents a piece.
ReplyDeleteThere was a large , sprawling fur ? tree on Fulton Estate that we used as a treehouse/lookout fort. Does anyone have a photo of that tree? I was sad to see it gone a few years back when sister Lee and I took my son, Zach, to visit our childhood home.
And the sound of locusts! Zach couldn't believe how loud they were-I loved that sound! We called a friend in Massachusetts and held the cell phone out so she could hear them.
One summer @ Nature Camp they (locusts) were so loud we couldn't hear the dining hall bell gong-think that was the 7 year locusts?
It took years to get used to screened in porches up here in the North.
And I still miss the alleys...