I lived on Barbara Lane for 13 years, from age 5 until age 18, and then for two summers at our Camp while I attended college in New York City during the school year.   After I escaped from New York, I enrolled at Syracuse University and I lived in Syracuse until I escaped from New York State and moved out West to Colorado in 1972.  I say "escaped" which will be explained along the way.

As I mentioned in Part I, after my family arrived on Barbara Lane there were very few children nearby, and none on "Middle" Barbara Lane.  We were the first settlers on this little frontier.   Charlie Viau was the closest in age and in location.  He lived just the other side of the woods.   My older brother was separated from me by a different school, and by four grades, and now the age difference came into play. In our new place he now had options other than spending all his free time with me.  In our Old Home neighbors were very far away.   Now my brother could go just up the road and play with older boys -  with Ralphie Pitcher, an only child, and Normie Danielson, who had two sisters, the youngest my age.    My brother never brought me along. I was too young, not that I would want to hang out with boys who were almost in High School. I was now "the kid brother", with all attendant honors bestowed

Charlie Viau was only a year ahead of me in school, but Charlie was an indoors kid, not like me and Gary, who were constantly roaming and exploring outdoors. Charlie would rather watch TV, and he never invited us inside his house, which, from what I could gather from a glance inside, his Mom kept very neat. It's perfectly understandable that Charlie's parents would not want a bunch of ragamuffins running around. Charlie mother worked at Clyde's Cakery on the Four Corners in Baldwinsville, and brought home bags of yummy day-old doughnuts and pastries. Once or twice Charlie shared some, but mostly he kept them to himself, from which he grew pudgy.

Then something happened that permanently closed off Upper Barbara Lane for me. Charlie started hanging out with a kid who lived farther up the hill, near the Main Road. I will call him J.R.   J.R. was a mean kid. Very mean. He had a much older brother who may have bullied him, because J.R. was a bully and bullies learn from other bullies. When Charlie and J.R. got together, it was bad news for me. They would gang up on me, threaten to beat me up, and play mean tricks. If Gary and I built a snow fort or a tree fort, they would smash it.  Gary and I could no longer play in that woods, but we had lots of other places to go. 

One day Charlie, J.R, and my older brother played the meanest trick that anyone has ever played on me - other than the time I was in college and my roommate Kirk Maurer impersonated a priest in the confessional and heard my confession.  That was the ultimate gutter rat move of all time. 
(My Woodstock Story).

My parents were away somewhere that day, and they had Gary and Marilyn with them, so they left me in the care of my older brother.  I was alone in the trailer. My older brother was already playing up at Charlie's house.  After my parents left I found my way up to Charlie's, where he and my brother and J.R. were hanging out.  For some reason the three of them coaxed me into putting my hands through the holes in a concrete masonry block.  Suddenly they grabbed my wrists and tied them together so I could not free myself of the concrete block handcuffs , which weighed about 15 pounds, which is heavy for a 6 or 7 year old.

I was terrified. I couldn't move, I couldn't run, tied to that weight.  They taunted me, and I cried in fear. My brother laughed along with them at my predicament. Finally they released me, and I ran home to our trailer. I was alone, betrayed, and sobbing, deep choking sobs of betrayal and humiliation.

Suddenly, and surprisingly my Mom's sister appeared. Aunt Lois, my prettiest and youngest Aunt, my Mom's youngest sister,   (whom we rarely got to see because she lived up North near Canada. Another Snow White.)  My Aunt Lois would have been in her early 20s and going to college in Oswego, a city about 25 miles away.  I believe my Mom might have asked her to come by and check on me and my older brother.

Aunt Lois just happened by and found me alone in the trailer and sobbing uncontrollably, so hard I couldn't speak about what had happened. Then in a very matter of fact way, Aunt Lois fixed me some toast with peanut butter and honey. She didn't hug me, as I desperately hoped she would. (My Mom and her family were not inclined to be physically affectionate, to my life's great disappointment.  We are all the product of our upbringing.)  Nevertheless her toast-and-honey kindness melted my heart and wiped away my tears, if only to leave me with sniffling and uncontrollable cry-hiccups. I managed to struggle out a few words about what had happened to me.    Then as quickly as she came, she left. 

This incident marked a break in my relationship with my older brother, as well as with the Charlie/J.R duo. From then on I remember bullying, tormenting, and threats, individually from my brother, and collectively from the other two.     I could do my best to avoid Charlie and J.R., but it was harder with my brother.  Gary and I spent a lot more time exploring, and pushing out to farther distances.    From then on my brother was someone to avoid.  

I was teased, name-called, criticized. Constantly. Charlie and J.R. would threaten and beat me if they caught me, and wreck anything of mine that they could find. If I was with Charlie by himself he would go so far as to cooperate in convincing neighborhood girls to pull their pants down, but if he was with J.R. it was danger. I avoided them completely. One day in the Elizabeth St. school yard as I changed buses for me to go to first grade at Catholic school, J.R. picked a fight and I had the first of only two fist fights in my life.  He didn't have Charlie with him this time, so I quickly landed a few punches to his face before he had time to think about it.. One, two, over and done. 

The nonsense with my brother continued for years, until he finally left for college in the summer of 1963, which was one of the happiest days of my life. I was finally free, and left with only one bully to deal with, which was my father. Like the Charlie/J.R. team, in my own family it was my father and my older brother who teamed up to bully me. Again, I avoided them as much as I could. As luck would have it my brother had been gone a great deal of tthose years with school activities. He was involved with everything - sports and clubs and he was President of everything and blah de blah, and he was in the band playing the French Horn, because of course it was the hardest instrument to play, and yabba dabba doo.  

These unpleasant things about my brother, and about Charlie, are difficult memories   My feelings would eventually soften and be respectful, only after years, after I was out of High School.     Charlie owned and managed his own bar in the next County, and I know how difficult that is. I could never do it. Charlie's Bar we called it. He was one grade ahead of me, and he married one of the prettiest girls in my class, Nancy and had a whole bunch of kids. Charlie was a good kid, he had just hung been hanging out with a mean punk. As an adult he's a very decent fellow.  I'm sure he has no memory of unpleasantness.

My closest friend, my only real friend, was my younger brother Gary. He was the only person I could talk to about these things, and I know he grew tired of hearing me complain. Sometimes he would say so, which after all is what friends do.

Gary was my father's favorite. Like my Dad, he was the only left-handed kid of the 8 of us. Gary kept a low profile, so he avoided a lot of the crap that I caught from my father and my older brother. Gary teamed up with me to defend ourselves from the Charlie/J.R. duo, and a few years later when we each got a bow-and-arrows for Christmas, we made a big show of shooting them all over the place. It was the best Christmas present ever, and it did the trick. Charlie and J.R. didn't bother us any more, because I could hit a soup can at 100 feet with the damn thing and I made sure they saw me do it.  Or maybe they just got bored with being obnoxious bullies and went back to watching TV. Either way, it was a great weight off my mind.

The physical bullying from my brother stopped coincidentally when I was in High School and I grew bigger than he was. But the snotty sarcasm and criticizing continued. He never really dropped the attitude. I put it down to Short Man Syndrome..  There were other incidents I remember.  Once he had me hold my finger at the end of our BB gun to "see if it was working".  It was. The tip of my finger was black and blue.  Then he had me hold the spark plug wite while he pulled the lawn mower cord to see if there was a spark.  There was.  Nasty shock.  Funny?  Not then. Not really.

Gary and I were together all the time. We went all through school together - even part way through college - and we were only one year apart. Gary was always my best friend. It is a sad shame that in later years we grew estranged over political ideology. In those times I thought we would always be together, that we would always live near each other. I would have been lost without him in those days. We would have fights that drew blood, but then forget all about it. I was so greatly disappointed when I moved out West that I would no longer be near him.

Our earliest neighbors down the road didn't have kids our age.  Mr. Ford moved in right next door, right after us,  He ran a garage.   Mr. Ford would bring junk cars back from his garage.  I assumed he got them when people reneged on the repair costs.  He would stick them in his yard, right across the ditch from our kitchen window.  They were an eyesore.  After a while my Dad got fed up and planted a row of cedar trees to block the view.
Mr. Ford once had occasion to use his weedy back-back yard for a toilet, and he wiped himself with poison ivy leaves. This was considered a minor tragedy at the time, although hilarious. The Fords were the family to whom we sold the male billy goat, but the goat was too late on the scene to have helped Mr. Ford's poison ivy problem.  This was the goat goat that broke his chain & chased us up onto my Dad's new 1957 Studebaker.

The Fords had a son, Jimmy, who was older and not a playmate, and an even older daughter, who was around 18.   I was 6 and I found excuses to visit their house every day to flirt with her. She was married already, and had a baby boy  When she changed his diaper , the sight of the baby's genitalia was curious and off-putting. Out of proportion. One day she "had to go change" and headed to the back of their trailer, and I started to follow her back there to watch her change her clothes, but I was stopped short by her mother. Next day my Mom had a talk with me to tell me to stop hanging around their trailer. Oh well, nothing ventured. She already had the one baby and soon had another.  

One summer the Ford girl, her husband and two boys moved into the basement of the house they were building down the road a way.  They were still there during the winter, but then they ran out of money and abandoned it.    It was very sad. The unfinished basement sat empty for years and was finally deemed a menace and demolished, leaving a hole in the ground into which, years later, we would push the junk cars that Billy Jensen would buy for $10 and drive around a makeshift dirt track in the farmer's field until they finally blew an engine. But Im getting ahead of myself again.

This circumstance of basement shelter was the occasion of a sharp rebuke from my mother, who had received notice from Mrs. Ford that I had had a taunting exchangeof words with her two grandsons, during which I had said with a snotty tone that "Well you live in a basement". My Mom brought me up short. I was being a snob, with the poorest justification. I suppose even not-well-off kids can be snobby.  It's all relative..

The Winters moved their trailer directly across the street soon after we moved to our new house.    Bobby Winters was even older than my brother.  We never interacted, although Bobby was the catalyst for an episode with the Reinhart girls later on.   

When Al Day moved in down the road, he already had a house built without living in a trailer. Mr. Day had two daughters, Mary Ann and Nancy. A nice little girl, Mary Ann was my first love interest who was my own age.  Occasionally I would coax her into pulling her pants down.   One day her Mom came to visit my Mom, and I was really scared.  I  wonder now if they didn't discuss my precocious interest in her daughter, but apparently they were oblivious. There were no repercussions after the visit, so maybe the coast was clear. Mom announced we were having spaghetti that night, so that clinched it,  I was off the hook. If anything was up I wouldn't be eating spaghetti.   I could resume trying to get Mary Ann to pull down her pants, albeit discreetly.

My Dad would go fishing with Al Day on Cayuga Lake (one of the Finger Lakes) for Lake Trout   (Mackinaw is what they call them out West).  One day he caught a 10-pounder, which is a whopper, and he went down to Baldwinsville and had his picture taken for the village newspaper, the Messenger, which is one of the newspapers I delivered when I got older.  This is the biggest smile I have ever seen on my Dad's face. He cut off a big chunk of the fish and made me deliver it up to Charlie Viau's house, which I was very reluctant to do, but he yelled at me, and so I ran up there and got it over with.  I think my Dad was bragging a bit with this gift.   Not long after Dad got his own boat, our first one.  It was fiberglass, but it had a wood deck and trim, and the varnish would weather and peel, which meant we had to scrape it and re-varnish it in the hot sun. 

In Part III I will have more to tell about The Camp and our adventures there, and later on about my time when The Camp became my home.

I'm not clear when the Reinharts moved in next to the Winters across the street, but I think it was fairly early in the process of settling Barbara Lane because of a particular memory.    Charlie Viau's sister.Claudette had been agitating to get a pony, and her father finally caved in  and bought her a little Shetland pony, and built the pony a little shed in their back yard, which was surrounded by big trees, very near the one that had earlier almost killed me.   There was really no place to exercise the little horse, even though we lived in between two huge farms with open fields, it was private property, and kids might run around in the fields, but a horse?  In any event I don't reall Claudette ever riding the little beast.  And of course taking care of a horse is not something little girls want to do, and her Dad probably didn't want to either, he was probably tired from working at Carrier Air Conditioning Company in Syracuse, so within a short time there was no longer a pony and the little shed became something of a clubhouse.  We called it The Shack.  

The Shack was not frequently used, it had no windows and it was dark, but on one occasion it was used.  The two Reinhart girls, Patty and Penny, were amenable to being naughty, and so one day Charlie and I and convinced them to come with us to The Shack and play doctor, which we did.  Unfortunately for us, Johnny Winters burst into the middle of the proceedings and announced that we had all better go home right away.     Somehow he had gotten wind of what was going on and he had ratted the girls and me out to our parents.  I don't think he had time to rat on Charlie Viau, but we all skedaddled and I ran home to find my mother in a rage.  She pulled down my pants and whipped me bare-assed with a belt.  That was the only time that ever happened to me and it was really scary. That was the last time I ever played doctor.  My perfect record as an amateur seducer was ended forever.   Every sin has a price.  It would be a long, long time until I could afford to be a sinner. 

I hated Johnny Winters after he ratted me out.  I had never spoken to him before or after   .A couple of years after this I acquired a cheap little telescope, maybe for Christmas, through which I would reconnoiter Buffalo Valley. whose trees lay behind and beyond the Winters' trailer.  One time my sight lowered and fell upon their window, and I spied Johnny Winters looking back at me with binoculars.  He must have thought  I was spying on him.  What a dope.

The other memory I have of the Reinharts was the tragic one I mentioned earlier.  One summer day a bunch of us kids, including Patty and Penny Reinhart and some others were playing in the back yard between our house and our old trailer, when suddenly Mrs. Winters came running and screaming from her trailer across the street,  and toward the Reinhart' s trailer, which was directly across the street from our old trailer.  As she ran I could see that the car behind the Reinhart's trailer was rolling down the incline on which their trailer was set,   toward the low spot in between the two trailers.  In a flash we learned that the Reinhart's little 2-year old had somehow climbed into their car and shifter the gears or something, and started the car rolling down the incline, and had then jumped out of the car, which rolled over her and killed her right then and there.  Mrs. Winters was screaming and sobbing.  We were all stunned, unspeaking.  It had all happened so quickly, right in front of our eyes.   We all went home and were quiet and sad for a while. 

The Reinharts stayed maybe a couple of years after that, and then they moved away, but not before taking in a foster kid for a while, who turned out to be a dangerous and volatile psychopath to whom I will devote another section - Kenny Beals.