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| A typical bungalow in the Morgandale neighborhood. |
When I was five years old [that would be about 1929, assessment records indicate 1927] mom and dad built a house on 12th Street. That was the end of the street car line at that time. It was 2 blocks off of Oklahoma. We had a great big field across the alley, and when we sat on the back porch, we had an awning there. What was nice about that was when thunder storms came up and it was lightening and banging away we could sit under the awning and watch the show. Part of that field across the alley was flat enough so that we could play baseball and we could pitch horseshoes there. I remember we got horseshoes from the local blacksmith who was about three blocks away. The only problem was that all of the horseshoes were different sizes. No two horseshoes were the same size. But any how, that’s the way we did things back then because nobody had a lot of money and you made due with what you had. That field led from the streetcar stop to the house. There was a low spot in the field at one end of if that was about ten feet lower than the rest of the field, and the water used to collect there. In the wintertime, that would freeze over. There wasn’t enough room to skate, but nobody had any skates at that time anyhow. We did have a few sleds around and there was some hills that led from the alley down into the pit where the ice was. We used to slide on cardboard, and a couple of kids had sleds, and we used to slide down those hills and go across the ice. After the ice first formed, we used to run across the ice. You’d get five or six kids running across the ice and sliding on their feet and pretty soon the ice would start cracking. Pretty soon the whole sheet of ice was like one big piece of rubber. And every time a kid would go on it, even by himself, you could see the ice bend. Of course, that called for a little game that we had. We would keep on running back and forth across the ice until somebody fell in. Of course, once you fell through the ice, it wasn’t deep, maybe knee deep, and your blue jeans would get wet and it was cold outside so they would freeze. Our jeans would get stiff and then we would go home for supper and, sooner or later, our mothers would notice these stiff jeans, and they would wonder what we were doing. We would tell them, we were playing on the ice. As I said it was no more than knee deep so nobody ever got hurt and nobody was ever in any danger. We had a lot of fun on that field.
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| The young Frank Ruswick, possibly in the Morgandale home. |
We used to play a lot of tricks on that alley, too. One of the tricks we did, a couple of times we.... everybody had an ash box that was emptied on the alley. They would take the ashes out of their stoves and put it in the ash box, and the guys from the city would come around with their horses and they would empty out the ash boxes at least once a week. We would go into the ash boxes and pick up a couple of tin cans and we would tie them together with about ten feet of black thread. Then, we would put one on one side of the alley and the other one on the other side of the alley and when people would come home after dark (it got dark about 4:30), they would get tangled in the black string because they couldn’t see it. Pretty soon, they would be dragging along a couple tin cans along. One time, I remember, we did this at night and there were two ladies that got tangled in the black thread, and I never heard such language in my life!
Of course now that’s all built up. There are houses there now too. There used to be a billboard on one end of that open field. We used to climb up and down that billboard. We picked a piece of pipe off the dump someplace and we nailed the piece of pipe across a couple of the braces so that we could use that as a chinning bar and whatnot. We’d crawl up around this billboard and we’d have a heck of a lot of fun.
When we played baseball in that field, as I said, it was partly flat, every so often someone would hit a ball that would go into the neighbor’s yard. He had a nice vegetable garden there with cucumbers growing, and he had a plum tree there, too. He used to make plum wine or plum brandy. Every time somebody hit a ball in the yard, we would go out and help ourselves to one of his cucumbers, even though they weren’t ripe enough to pick. It was just that we could get away with something. Eventually, he found out what was happening to all his cucumbers and he would wait for us, and every time someone would go in the garden, he would come down and shake his fist at us. We generally ignored him. He was an old guy and he couldn’t move too fast. He had a fence there that went along the alley that ran between the paved alley and his garden. The fence had a gate on it. It was a simple gate. You could lift it right off. Just gravity held it in place. One of the kids, I don’t know who it was, took the gate off the hinge and climbed up the telephone pole and he hung the thing on the telephone pole about halfway up the top because there were rungs up there that people could climb on. I don’t think they use them today. Now they use climbers that they strap on the leg. Anyhow, somebody went up there and they hung his gate up there about halfway up the telephone pole. One afternoon, I think my mother sent me to the store to run an errand, and I was coming back and this guy (he had a one-car garage) and he popped around the side of the garage and he grabbed me by the collar. He said to me in Polish, he looked up at the telephone pole and he said to me in Polish, “who put the gate up there.” I answered him in Polish, I said “nie wiem” (“don’t know”). "I nie było w domu " (“I wasn’t home.” ) So this guy’s jaw dropped. He didn’t realize I spoke Polish. About 5:30, when my dad was coming home, he got off the street car and he was walking up the alley to go to our home, this guy stopped him and he said to my dad, “I didn’t know your kid knew how to speak Polish” and my dad says “What?” And he walked in the house and he talked to my mother and he said, “since when did Frank start speaking Polish?” And she said “What?” Of course, all this time, she’d get together with her cronies and they used to gossip a lot when they sat around, she and her friends and they’d have coffee in the kitchen. For the most part they spoke English except when they’d get to the juicy parts and they didn’t want me to hear anything, then they’d switch over to Polish. Well, they didn’t bother doing that after a while, because they knew I knew everything that they were talking about.
For another memoir of the Morgandale neighborhood, see A Boy from Milwaukee.
