Growing up, or at least spending the years from 3 to 21 in Wynantskill, N.Y., gave way to many small-town customs that apparently have not gone away with modern technology so prevalent and available.
This is a satellite view from here of the ball fields on Main Avenue where the Wynantskill School once was and became the Town Offices and Public Library. Back when I was living there it was just known as the “school field.”
It was where the best playground in town was. There were swings of varying height and seat style. I preferred the wooden seat because the ones that were flexible rubber were too tight on my tiny ass. Why that was, I don’t really know because if the chains were let’s say, 16″ apart at the top, my bony butt certainly didn’t spread them further than that. But that’s how I remember it.
There were see-saws, we called teeter-totters, 2 sets of monkey bars with one set that I felt I mastered quickly and the other one, mostly square units of cubes that were capped at the top with another smaller cube like a smaller present on top of a larger one. These monkey bars were tougher for me becasue the bars were farther apart and I had trouble navigating them because I was so small.
Two giant slides stood side by side. There were great rails on both sides of the ladder so I climbed with confidence and I could propel myself down the slide by pushing off at the top and getting a little more speed. Newton had proven a few years earlier that I wouldn’t go any faster down that slide than any kid twice my size but that’s not how my mind worked then. Finally, there was a tennis court with a basketball hoop at each end. On rare occasions, there was actually a net strung across the court but mostly, it was where we played half-court basketball. Sometimes bigger kids and younger adults would play full-court but I lacked the skills required back then.
This Mecca was built solidly on a macadam (black-top) surface except where the slides emptied onto the grass but you started climbing from the macadam. No thought was given to the odds that somebody, somewhere, at sometime was going to fall off one of these apparatus and bruise their noggin, break a limb, or worse, split their god-damned head open. Of course all of these would come to pass and be my early learning experiences about the nature of gravity, the unforgiving quality of asphalt and it’s inherent abrasiveness against soft tissue and bone and an introduction to biology and first-aid.
This whole area was located on the backside of the school and the building formed a 90 degree angle that faced our house across the field. So I knew when these unfortunates that were getting their first lessons in these subjects because the school formed a perfect amphitheatre of all the sounds next to it. Sitting at the dinner table with the windows open on a summer’s eve, came the normal clanking and clinking of the chains on the swings, the bonk of the teeter-totter and the occasional, “Ungh!” – pause- and the crying. We kind of had an innate knowledge of when to get up from the table or stop watching TV if the pitch, volume and urgency of the clamor signaled the real life show that would begin with the arrival of the North Greenbush Ambulance.
When we would run out of the house, my mother would ask us where we were going and if just going across the street, we would just yell, “The school.” One of the greatest features of the “school,” was next to the the daunting set of monkey bars sat an incinerator. The school janitors, Winnie Coons and Tom Derby who double-dutied as district bus drivers, would take the trash and burn it every day. In those days, it was a scorched earth philosophy. Everything burned if you got it hot enough from the cardboard, test papers, colored construction paper chains to the trash from the cafeteria. The incinerator was made of diamond plate steel on a concrete slab. It had a lid that had a big concrete counterweight to aid opening it but let it close on its own. There was a chimney and a little slanted roof covering it.
The incinerator held a kind of spell on me. I have always been a fan of fire. My father was a local volunteer fireman, as was I when I turned 18. He held several officer posts with the fire department and ultimately became an elected fire commissioner of the town. My brother and I always had fires going, in the barrel in the back yard, the fireplace off the patio, and sometimes under the wooden front porch. We never set them malisciously or on anyone else’s property. I mean, we respected fire; we controlled it. We used it for good. Like blowing up cherry bombs to create a shower of ash or explode an aerosol can. We ignored the ‘Do not incinerate’ instructions on such things. There a lot of pine trees in our yard. When you cut the bark it ran with pitch, pitch that burned. So we had the odd controlled ‘burning tree’ from time to time. They never got out of control.
Our parents trusted us. One, because my of our dad’s positions in town and the education it provided us on the subject and two, because we learned how to stay ahead of any problems. Once though, we were under the front porch just burning pine needles which caused a lot of smoke, and our mother came out and caught us. She put an end to our fun. The matches were then always to be accounted for and our focus moved on to other things.
I still love fire. I cook over open flame when we go camping. I make the fires too. I love having a fire in our fireplace and we also enjoy tremendously having a fire in “Maddening Heights,” our corner of our yard now where we go to relax. I have passed on my skills to Richie as well. So he can build one while I’m at work and we don’t have to do it by flashlight when I get home.
I remember one night in Wynantskill, I was “sleeping out” with my friend, Donny. It couldn’t have been too late at night because I would always fall asleep early. So we heard all this noise coming from the school. There was breaking glass and laughing. We went to investigate. There were two guys running along the school building breaking the windows as they went. It wasn’t too hard to recognize who they were. Donny and I went back to the sleep-out and tried to decide what we would do. We couldn’t tell anyone. At that point in history justice moved rather slowly. It was better not to say anything. However, the next morning when people started noticing all the broken windows a crowd began to form. Donny and I went over and just in conversation with another kid from our neighborhood, mentioned who we saw doing it. HE went and told his father who, in turn, informed the school authorities.
Somehow it got back to the two guys who did it that Donny and I had witnessed the whole thing. What they failed to acknowledge was it was the other kid’s father who ratted them out and not us. That didn’t matter. My life in Wynantskill for the next few years until I entered high school would be hell, looking over my shoulder and always trying to keep in mind where those two guys were. Not what you want to spend your spare time doing as a kid. Years later I would wind up drinking beer and smoking pot with those guys but in the meantime, I was a bullied kid.
The “school field” was also the site of many nights watching the Wynantskill Fire Department softball games. I loved softball. After years of being a shrimp and a terrible Little Leaguer, I still loved the game and there was also the romance of beer drinking before during and after games that had its allure. The Fire Department would play other fire teams and Longo’s Restaurant had a team made up of the guys who hung out there regularly. The Longo’s/Fire Department rivalry was the stuff of legend. There were so many real characters on these teams. In the middle of it all was one guy who was always the umpire, Eddie Margosian. Eddie relished his role and played it to the hilt. He was also at times, not a very good umpire.
You had 20 guys playing with grace and sometimes not and the colorful by-play that familiarity breeds. Then you had Eddie. He was the wild card and the 11th man. You never knew which team he would actually represent until it was over. I loved those games.
When I was finally old enough to play beer league softball, we formed a team that generally were the guys from Panichi’s Atlantic gas station which was also next to my house and looked out on the school field. When they got the team shirts, they had gone to Pressman’s Army-Navy in Troy to get the appliques applied. The one Donny Panichi and Tom Kehn chose was a guy on a hot-rod tractor called, “Sodbuster.” That’s who we were, the Sodbusters. We played for years and rarely won a game but it was fun and we were joining the guys we had seen play for years as almost contemporaries.
One year, we finally got to play the Firemen in a local tournament held in the field. I was so excited, I could barely sleep the night before. If I did, I was dreaming of the next day’s game. It finally came and we took the field. We got our asses kicked by the Firemen and it was so bad, at one point our outfielders took to throwing a football back and forth causing Eddie to call a halt to game.
Back to quaint traditions. It would appear from the satellite photo that even in the age of the Internets and video games, someone still gets some kind of pleasure from doing late-night doughnuts in the school field. Or, as I have always thought, perhaps that field would make a perfect landing spot for a space ship.
