Reminiscing about Stanley Street

The first and only time I walked in my sleep was the evening before I received my First Holy Communion. I was so excited I was found holding my hands as if I was going to the altar rail.

The house on Stanley Street was very small but it did have three very small bedrooms and a bath upstairs. Downstairs there was a living room and the kitchen and a very small pantry. I first remember my mother cooking on a coal stove then a few years later the stove was converted to kerosene. Not far from the stove was a large glass bottle of kerosene that fed into the top stove burners. Looking back I think my mother was as health conscious as possible for those days; she would order whole grain cereal from some lady who would deliver it. As a treat she would make me pancakes and one day I remember eating thirteen, setting a new record for myself.

There was a cellar which had a coal burning furnace with just one very large heat register above it to the first floor that heated the whole house. Sometimes we would stand on that to dress in the morning. My Dad would shovel coal every morning and later I learned to do that also. Next to the furnace was a large room where the coal was kept. The coal trucks would deliver coal and send the coal down a shute through a cellar window into the coal room. At least once a year the furnace had to be throughly cleaned and the seams of the furnace had to be hand caulked with asbestos. After my Dad died when I was twelve or thirteen around 1934 or 1935 I took over the caulking job. The asbestos came in a large package which we hand mixed with water. I enjoyed doing this. I remember liking the smell of the asbestos powder as I mixed it.

The furnace would not burn the coal completely and my mother insisted that I take the buckets of embers out to the yard by the garage in back and sift the embers saving all the good pieces of coal which we used again. It was a dirty dusty job which I did not like. I remember at one time, when my father was alive that we had a coal conveyer going from the coal pile to the furnace electrically which supposedly omitted a person soveling the coal into the furnace. This system did not work too well and we had to regularly shovel coal anyway.

During those times we had a nice box I think on the porch where ice was delivered daily or whenever we would put a card board sign in the front window of the house with an arrow pointing to the number of pounds we wanted say 50 or 25. The ice man would come in with a chunk of ice over his shoulder in a burlap bag. He held the ice with ice tongs.

I remember Freihofer's horse and wagon coming down the street occasionally delivering fresh bread if you had a bread sign in your window. I remember a rag man coming down the street in a horse driven wagon yelling out "Rags, rags, rags." I think he sold and bought rags. I remember the milk man coming and delivering milk regularly to our porch where the milk would freeze and the cream would push the cap up a few inches while freezing and sometimes I would scrape the cream off and eat it.

We had various neighbors at various times. The neighbors on the right I remember first, Mr. and Mrs. Clute, who ran a fairly large taxi service out of their house and yard which had room to park several cars. There was also a large horse chestnut tree which some of us boys in the neighborhood, i.e. Mike McCullough, Johnny Santora, would climb as we thought of it as our tree house. As the horse chestnuts got ripe we would heat them and break the shells open and get the horse chestnut. We punched a hole in the middle of the horse chestnut with a nail with a two or three piece of cord or string through the hole, knotted one end of it and then we would see who could break the horse chestnut in a two person game. We would swing the horse chestnut at each other's nut and whose ever broke eventually, lost the game.

Eventually another tenant came to the Clute property, Nick Fuller and his wife and they ran Fuller's taxi. I believe his family or ancestors were wealthy at one time and he inherited 40 thousand dollars when he was 40 I believe and opened up a tavern on Hamilton Street near Albany Street corner. Nick Fuller talked me into giving him a rather extensive baseball card collection I had for a very small amount of money probably a dollar or two. I am sure that card collection would be worth a lot of money today. He moved away from Stanley Street and the property was taken over by Andy and Martha Primeau. They were a very nice family and Andy and a partner began a refrigerator repair business. Andy was from Tupper Lake, N.Y. and came to Schenectady to find employment. His brother Al also came and found a job as a helper at the American Locamotive Co. Foundry. We got our first refrigerator through Andy for 50 dollars. The refrigerator box was in the kitchen and the refrigerator motor was in the cellar! It worked very wel..

On the other side of our house there were very good neighbors. It was a two story house with one flat above the other. The first residents of the upstairs flat that I remember were the Lent family. I believe Mr. Lent and my father would make homemade grape wine in our celllar during Prohibition times. My Dad had a wine press which would press the grapes by hand. I was told that Mr. Lent and my Dad would sit on the cellar steps and enjoy the wine. My Dad enjoyed drinking and chewing tobacco. But I don't remember him actually getting "drunk". I remember as a kid asking my Dad for some chewing tobacco. He chewed Yara tobacco. He gave me a wad of tobacco which I began chewing. I became extremely nauseous and sick to my stomach and that cured me of chewing tobacco. I remember drinking wine once and feeling ill and laying under the cherry tree in the backyard till I felt better. That cured me of drinking for a long time.

Underneath the Lent flat were Charlie and Loretta Lanahan. He worked in the GE company as an engineer and I remember he traveled to Russia for a long period of time for GE to help the Russians build something. They had no children and I think Loretta worked somewhere also. I would visit their house Sunday mornings while layiing on the floor. I would read the funny sheets. We did not subscribe to any paper because of the cost. I really enjoyed going to the Lanahan's Sunday mornings and I think they enjoyed my visits. I remember my Dad died about the same time the Lanahan's moved and they gave me a membership to the YMCA in lower State Street.

I remember in those early years that my Godfather Framk Boomhower and his wife Catherine O'Brien Boomhower would stop at the house just prior to Christmas and bring a very nice present for me. Once they brought a Columbia bicycle which was great. Mike McCullough and I would ride our bikes a lot arount the Pleasant Valley area which is now part of the route 890 as it goes from Michigan Avenue to Broadway and on. We once road to Thatcher Park where we slept overnight at Father Francis' camp on the Thatcher Park cliffs. It was very early spring I believe on that occasion and Mike and I decided to follow the Indian Ladder trail down the side of the cliff to a cave. The trail was quite icy and I slipped and went over the side of the cliff, grabbed onto a root or tree that was growing out of the cliff, got quite scratched up and bruised and was able to get back up the cliff with Mike's help. On Stanley Street I remember playing King of the Hill in winter time where we would try to be the king of the hill by getting to the top of the large snow bank. I remember one girl, Mary Crowley, who was a "tomboy" who could often become King or Queen of the hill. Her father was a policeman and she lived on Albany Street and went to St. Columba's school where most of us who lived in that area did go. At the school there was the boys' entrance and the girls' entrance. We used to sort of march into the school to our classrooms.

I remember having one party at our house with kids from the school coming. It was a Halloween party. We had fun ducking for apples, playing post office and games like that. I remember feeling very good when a girl named Mildred Jablonski said it was the best party she had ever gone to. We also played spin the bottle at the party. You spun a bottle in the middle of the floor with the kids sitting around and whoever the bottle spout pointed to you had to kiss the nearest kid of the other sex. Each boy and girl had a turn. Post office you were in a room or something if you were a boy somehow a girl would come in and you would get a kiss.

I remember waiting for my Dad to come home from work sitting by the large window of our living room in a rocking chair. He was an iron moulder in the foundry at the American Locomotive Co. on lower Erie Blvd, Schenectady. He walked to and from work. This must have been one of the worst and dirtiest jobs ever. He would breathe fumes all day long from the poured iron and the dust and dirt of the foundry plus he chewed tobacco. As he came home I could hear him coughing loudly probably to relieve his lungs of some of the pollution from the foundry. We were very happy to see each other after work. He did his best as a father going to various meetings with me for the Pictorial Review magazine, which I delivered. The meetings were held occasionally for father and son. He would also take me to his favorite neighborhood tavern on Albany Street near Craig Street, Schenectady where he would give me nickels to play the various slot machines while he had a drink or two at the bar. I would sometimes go to the foundry workers' annual picnic where there was heavy competition in a tug of rope pull which was excruciating to watch as the workers were strong and anxious to win over the opposing team. We would walk to church sometimes from Stanley Street to downtown St. John the Baptist Church. I remember one Christmas when my Dad was visit by a friend, a neighborhood policeman who lived on Craig Street. The policeman liked to drink and had a few at our house and then wanted to take target practice at some of the globes on the tree. My Dad put a stop to that.

When my Dad died at about age 52, he was laid to rest in our living room on Stanley Street and that room never seemed quite the same afterwards. My mother (Anna M. Woods), was a very strong person in faith and encouraged my father to attend church. After he died my mother rented a room out in our small house to a GE employee or two for a while. When my Grandmother Hesler died, my Aunt Elizaabeth who lived Grandmother Hesler on Hugh Street near Uncle Fred and Uncle John Hesler, came to live with us on Stanley Street. I imagine Aunt Elizabeth contributed to the household expenses. Aunt Elizabeth was secretary to the Vice President of the International General Electric Company. She took me several times to work with her and I drew pictures and roamed around her office while she worked. While living with us one evening while Aunt Elizabeth was crossing Craig Street on a rainy dark evening going to St. Columba's Church, she got struck by a car. She got a serious compound fracture of her leg. About that time she began getting a little confused I believe and started taking electroshock therapy at Ellis Hospital. Sometimes I would take her to the hospital and walk her back home to the house on Stanley Street. She was a lovely woman dedicated to St. Theresa and once said that her room on Stanley Stree was filled with the fragrance of roses.

There was some tension between Aunt Elizabeth and my mother mainly because of their personalities and the household situation with my mother, Aunt Elizabeth, my sister Helen and me with me being brought up in effect by three women, sometimes wearing knickers and a beret hat and I hated both of those articles of clothing. [Mary (Mom) adds that there is a darn cute picture of Dad as a boy somewhere in the knickers. however.]