HISTORICAL COMMENTS BY GEORGE CHEVALLIER

Growing Up In Salisbury

I was born in 1943, so the 1950’s were the years of my youth. I don’t know how we managed without all the electronic gizmos they have today, but we did. My granddaughter, Lily, has something called a DS that is a handheld device with which she plays games. She is six and can run circles around me with it. Her little fingers fairly fly, and she has good enough hand/eye coordination to win occasionally. I wonder if I will live long enough to share my Methotraxate with her.

As seen by the above picture, I liked playing on the cannon down at the city park. It is still there and she likes to play on it, too – 62 years later. Some things never change.

Anyway, I had the standard equipment for a boy in the 1950’s – a bicycle, a baseball glove, a fishing rig and one football and one basketball. We played basketball with a hoop that my grandfather installed at the end of our driveway. The driveway was constructed of stone chip and tar and was really hard on a pair of Chuck Taylor’s (low cut black sneakers). Everybody wore them with white athletic socks. I can well remember that the driveway would wear them down to where they were almost slick. I used to take them to my grandfather’s shop and put them in a vise to saw new tread in them. You would have thought I had new shoes. They would really grip.

Of course there was always the Red Shield Boys Club. How many remember the director, Kenny Cathell? I still have my membership card. And Don Patterson manned the “cage” during football season handing out helmets, shoulder pads and uniforms. For boys 8-14 years old, their football and basketball programs were top-notch. It seemed like every boy got to play, no matter what his skill level. Of course, if you didn’t play well, you didn’t play much. That was the incentive to practice and get better.

The same mentality of thrift I used on my sneakers was exhibited by my mother. She had all kinds of ways to extend the life of an object, most of which are not even heard of in this era of a “throw away” world. When the collar or cuffs on a shirt would fray, she would “turn” them. We thought it was as good as new. It wasn’t that we couldn’t afford to buy something if we had to, but we got more out of things in those days.

Fishing in the Park was another favorite pastime in the summer. We used to fish for bass, pike and pickerel. If you didn’t have a lure to suit the occasion, the old fashioned worm came into play. We had a neat trick to obtain our worms. Have you ever observed a robin scurrying around on your lawn? What he is doing is looking for worms. He can feel them with his feet and digs down for them. We would soak a patch of our yard to get the worms moving and then wait for an accommodating robin to pull the worm half-way out. We would then shoo the robin away and proceed to extract the rest of the worm and have our bait. That seems mean to me now to have done that to the robin, but we didn’t think about that then. I have more than made up for it in the amount of peanuts I have given to the squirrels recently.

Along with the Saturday afternoon movie at the Ulman Theater, the only other diversions before television were board games, and we played them all. My father and mother never gave up their frequent game of Parcheesi. They were compatible. Pop always won, and Mom didn’t seem to mind. I think when he died in 1978; the score was something like Pop 10,000 – Mom 4.