ARMISTEAD GARDENS - CHAPTER D

The chapters which are numerical are factual. The chapters which are alphabetical are fiction, though in some instances the fiction modestly drapes what is factual. I will post one chapter a week, alternating factual and fiction.

Mr. William Fitch was an elder in the Presbyterian Church and a Freemason. He worked as a foreman at Hill-Chase Steel which was only a couple miles from Armistead Gardens. He had a son and a daughter. He had named the son John Calvin Fitch. His wife, a former Methodist named the daughter Susannah in honor of Susannah Wesley. The daughter was a diligent student, was faithful in attending Sunday School and Church, and had high moral standards. The son was in the last year of high school, but it was questionable whether he would graduate. He had not been to Church in years and was only interested in having a good time.

John Calvin owned a 1938 Buick. It was pretty shabby and rusty when he got it, but he worked hard sanding off the rust and cleaning it up. He had much mechanical work to do, but he had a lot of help from his friends. When all the rust had been sanded and the body wiped down, he painted it with a rag and a can of outdoor oil paint.

John Calvin was forming a gang. The car took them to a place of crime they had already chosen, and it carried them away when the mischief was complete. On occasion they would go to a festival in one of the ethnic neighborhoods. One boy would snatch a handbag, pass it off to another gang member who would put it in a shopping bag and walk the other way. The “snatcher” didn’t run away but stood there while all around him were yelling and looking around. Working in pairs, they would only take four purses before leaving and going to some other place where there was a crowd. Back home they took the money from the purses, then put the purses in a burn barrel, poured a cup of fuel oil on them, and burned them .

On other occasions they would all go into a store. All but one would go into the back of the store and create a commotion so as to draw the clerk away from the cash register. The one who was alone and near the register would open the register, grab the money and stroll out of the store. If anything, such as someone entering the store, would hinder him from opening the register and taking the money without being observed, he left the store. When he left the store, whether with the money or without it, that was the signal to stop the commotion and leave the store.

There were a half dozen or more other well planned schemes used by these thieves.  Since they were petty thefts and did not follow the same pattern each time, they did not draw much attention from the police.

In January most of the men in Armistead Gardens had been furloughed since mid-December and did not expect to be called back to work until March. The fuel oil barrels were empty and nearly every house was damp and chilly. As usual the oil barrels of the Freemasons, including Mr. Fitch and most of the other elders, were filled up by some oil company that usually did not service Armistead Gardens customers.

John decided to find a way to thumb his nose at the Church and the Freemasons. It was time for a Robbing Hood escapade. He took the members of his gang to several fuel oil companies and had them observe the daily routine. They noted that the trucks’ oil tanks were filled at the end of each day. The next day they scouted several other companies. They then waited for Sunday to carry out a carefully planned oil heist.

They found two oil companies whose trucks were not kept inside chain link fences. In the early hours of a Sabbath morning they went to these two companies, hot-wired several trucks at each location and drove them to Armistead Gardens. Each truck took one of the streets in the old section and went down the street filling every oil drum on the street. If anyone awoke and asked questions, they were told the oil was a gift from the Salvation Army. The trucks all finished their benevolence runs about the same time.

When the people arrived at the Presbyterian Church for Sunday School there was a lot of fussing. There was no place to park. Six fuel oil trucks were parked on the street in front and along the side of the church.

 About the time that church was over, the street was jammed with police cars and pickup trucks bearing the same logos as the oil trucks parked around the Church. The police dusted the trucks for fingerprints. There were none since John’s men had all worn work gloves, just like all the legitimate drivers of these trucks. It was mid-afternoon before drivers were found and the trucks were returned to where they belonged.

There were many homes in the old section of Armistead Gardens warm as toast in the following weeks thanks to the Robbing Hood merry men.

ARMISTEAD GARDENS - CHAPTER FOUR

The chapters which are numerical are factual. The chapters which are alphabetical are fiction, though in some instances the fiction modestly drapes what is factual. I will post one chapter a week, alternating factual and fiction.

The main thoroughfare in the new section was Wright Avenue. On the eastern end of Wright Avenue there was a large plot of land. One corner of it was designated for the rental and maintenance office buildings. About half of it was designated for a school. By the time my little brother started school there was an Armistead Gardens Elementary School.

About the same time the school building was begun, the Presbyterian Church gained the right to build a church on the ground which was designated for a church. Potomac Presbytery donated money for the building as did Glenn L. Martin, Bethlehem Steel, and the American Stores (which was owned by Scotch-Irish Presbyterians). Of course, the people of the church had a building fund. I remember the cornerstone laying ceremony. There was a huge crowd there. A Masonic Lodge had charge of the ceremony.

The building was large. A sanctuary that seated 200 people, two Sunday School rooms, a choir room (which was also used as the Session meeting room) and the pastor’s study were on the first floor. In the basement there were a fellowship hall which had a stage with curtains, a kitchen, and three additional Sunday School rooms. The building was made of concrete blocks with stucco on the outside and plastered inside walls. The sanctuary was Colonial style painted white with red maple trim. The chancel was divided with a pulpit on one side and a lectern on the other.

It was a very active church. The sanctuary was full every Sunday morning. At least once a year the church had a week of evangelistic services. During that week, members of the church would go out into the various streets in the project going door to door inviting the residents to come to the meetings. Several times, when I was in my teens, I was invited to visit homes with the evangelist.

In addition to the Sunday School, there were youth groups, an evening service, and a midweek prayer and Bible Study meeting. I joined the church when I was 12 years old. For young persons to join the church, they attended classes on the Westminster Shorter Catechism conducted by the pastor. After a year of classes, they were examined by the Session. An elder could ask a young person anything, but they mostly asked questions from the Catechism. The next Sunday the young people were asked the questions for membership from the Book of Order and then were admitted as members of the church. Those who had not been baptized as infants were baptized.

During the summer, there were tent meetings in the suburbs of Baltimore. Our boys’ Sunday School teacher, Mr. Loudermilk, would sometimes take several of us boys and his son to a tent meeting. It was a different type of service and a different form of preaching than what we were used to in the Presbyterian Church.

When we started going to church in the community building the minister was Rev. Charles Browning. He was a mild-mannered person. I don’t think he was married.

While the church was still in the community building, the church acquired a parish visitor, Miss Hazel Himes. Her mother lived with her. My parents did not attend church, but they always made sure that we children attended Sunday School. After the services moved into the new church building, my sister and I began attending the morning worship services also.

Miss Himes was from Pennsylvania and was not a Presbyterian. She was a United Brethren. My mother was United Brethren. When we lived in Elkins we were sent to the Presbyterian Sunday School one Sunday, then the United Brethren Sunday School the next Sunday. The United Brethren won out on baptism. My sister and I were baptized in the United Brethren Church. When World War 2 broke out, the church changed its services from German to English. The elderly former pastor who had preached in German sat in one of the pulpit chairs in every service. He still performed the baptisms in German.

In the spring and summer Dad did a lot to fix up the outside of the house. One thing he did every year was build a lattice work across about half of the house. It had a lot of strings running up to the roof. He would plant castor beans. He had to cut into each one or it wouldn’t sprout. They came up quickly and grew rapidly. Soon there was a blanket of leaves stretching from the ground to the roof. In the hot Baltimore summers they did a lot to keep the house cooler.

Mom planted flowers. She planted hollyhocks on either side of the front door. After they bloomed, Beverly and her friends often amused themselves making dolls from the buds and the blooms. On the sidewalk leading to the street Mom planted a border of rose moss every year. Rose moss is a short plant with spike-like leaves and delicate flowers of many colors.

Baltimore was tearing down old row houses in a slum clearance endeavor. The bricks from these demolished houses were soon in demand for new houses. When these bricks of many hues, some blackened from fire or colored from painted graffiti were mixed up they made an attractive brick wall of many hues and colors.

Across Pulaski Highway on vacant lots beside and behind the row of shops, the unsalable refuse of these demolitions was being dumped. My father began taking me over there to retrieve the lath that was discarded. Lath from old houses is very rough wood about an inch wide and ¼ inch thick. We kept hauling the lath to our yard until there were piles of it.

Dad then began building a fence with posts about every six feet and runners. Then he began cutting pickets from pieces of lath. Each piece was pointed on top. The work of sawing hundreds of pickets is hard for me to understand as an adult. Once he began sawing, the task of salvaging lath fell upon me. I had to hustle to keep up with him. I started work after school. He had already worked eight hours at a lathe before he started sawing.

Dad not only built a picket fence but a gate and an archway. We couldn’t afford paint for the fence, so Dad bought a bag of lime. Like Tom  Sawyer I whitewashed the fence. The lath was thirsty after decades holding up plaster in the old houses. Sometimes it took two coats of whitewash before it was white.

My father’s father loved roses. He had well over a hundred bushes in his back yard. He would take cuttings from rose bushes he liked, put the cutting in sand with a canning jar over it. In about a month he could plant it in the yard. Dad learned a lot about roses from his father. After we had a fence, he planted a half dozen or more rose bushes which he also grew from cuttings.

Dad also made some Adirondack lawn chairs from wood he salvaged. For several years he made lawn ornaments – a little girl watering flowers, a momma duck with ducklings trailing behind her, etc. He would cut out the figures and paint the background color. Then Mom painted in the detail.

My sister took tap dancing lessons at the Fox Mansion. She made a number of good friends of girls who lived in our neighborhood. Some of them she continues to have as friends seventy years later.

I wanted to join the Cub Scouts. My father decided that I would have to memorize the multiplication table before he would sign the paper. I walked all over Armistead Gardens holding a composition notebook in front of me. It had the multiplication table printed on the back. I would think I had memorized it perfectly. He would ask me several problems, I’d make a mistake and have to go back to memorizing. When I had memorized the table perfectly, he signed the papers for me to join the Cub Scouts. I don’t remember anything from the Cub Scouts, but knowing the answer to the multiplication of two numbers, and knowing the factors in a large sum made algebra and trigonometry so much easier for me than for most of my fellow students.   

ARMISTEAD GARDENS - CHAPTER C

The chapters which are numerical are factual. The chapters which are alphabetical are fiction, though in some instances the fiction modestly drapes what is factual. I will post one chapter a week, alternating factual and fiction.

The Poole family lived on Frailey Way. Jimmy was ten. His sister Anna was nine and his brother Mike was four. They had a mother and father, but Jimmy was the designated adult.

There was a knock on the door of the Poole’s home. Mrs. Poole grabbed little Mike and whisked him to Anna’s room. Surprised by her sudden action, Mike stopped wailing.

“Anna, someone is at the door. Please watch Mike while they are here.”

“Yes, Mother.” They had to call her “Mother.” She said that only low class, ignorant people said “Ma” or “Mom.”

A change came over Mrs. Poole when she was in the presence of those whom she considered “people of quality.” Her bearing no longer had its usual weariness and despair. She stood straight and walked confidently. Her voice altered and she sounded like a completely different person. The children could see a change and hear the difference in her voice. They couldn’t know that she had stepped into a wholly different place and time, or so it seemed to her.

She opened the door. “Why, hello, Miss Himes. How nice it is to see you. Won’t you come in, please?” (Miss Himes was the Parish Visitor for the Armistead Gardens Presbyterian Church.)

“Thank you, Mrs. Poole. It has been such a pleasure to have your three children in Sunday School. They are there every Sunday. I know that when children attend Sunday School so faithfully that it is because they have parents who know the importance of Christian teaching. You haven’t been coming with your children. We would love to have you take part in our women’s class.”

Miss Himes was dressed in an attractive cotton dress with a flowery print. She had added a white lace removable collar. She wore a white straw hat with a wide wavy brim decorated with a large daisy. She was wearing light beige nylon stockings; her shoes were low heels, white with blue trim.

Mrs. Poole was wearing a shabby cotton dress, thin with wear, whose pattern had been washed out. But she imagined that she too was in a summery dress. She could smell the rose water she fancied she had splashed on herself after a long relaxing bath. She was entertaining Miss Himes in genteel surrounding, not a house in a low-rent project. There would soon be a pitcher of lemonade and nice tall frosted glasses brought out by the maid. What was taking the maid so long?

“Mrs. Poole, you must have come from a Christian home and background yourself. What church did you gow up in?”

“My mother and her family were United Brethren. That is the church to which I belong; Jimmy and Anna were baptized in that church.”

“I am from Pennsylvania. I belonged to the United Brethren church all my life. The church I am working for in Armistead Gardens and where Jimmy, Anna, and Mike have been attending Sunday School is Presbyterian. It is the only Protestant church in this community.”

“My husband and his family are Presbyterians.”

“Invite him to take you to church with him.”

“Yes….you do that.”

The mention of her husband suddenly brought her back to reality. She felt uncomfortable. She was painfully aware and ashamed of her shabby dress and worn-out shoes.

“Where are the children?”

“Jimmy is at the library. He sometimes stays there until they close at 6:00 P.M. Anna has Mike back in her room entertaining him.”

“Well, I’ll run along. Please remember that you have a cordial invitation to the women’s Sunday School class at the Presbyterian Church. And your husband can come to the men’s class. Both classes meet while your children are in Sunday School.”

“Thank you for coming to see us, Miss Himes. Come again whenever you can.”

Glenda Poole went to the sofa torn between hope and despair. There was no food and no money in the house. Today is payday. If her husband comes home from work, they will go to the Acme Market and buy several bags of groceries. If he doesn’t come home…

Tom Poole would sometimes go on drinking sprees of two and three days. During that time, he would drink up or otherwise waste away his pay for two weeks work. They lived from payday to payday and by payday there was no food or money.

The next day there was fork toast for breakfast, one slice for each of the children. Mrs, Poole told them she wasn’t hungry. There was no bus fare so Jimmy and Anna couldn’t go to school that day. There was no food for the rest of the day. That afternoon Mrs. Poole found a dime while sorting the dirty clothes.

“Jimmy, I found a dime. I want you to take the bus to Monument and Kresson Streets and see if you father is in the saloon. If he is, tell him to come home. We need money for food before the store closes.”

“Yes, Mother.”

When Baltimore had streetcars, the terminus of several streetcar lines was at Monument and Kresson Streets. A block-long car barn was there. Half of the old car barn was now used by Baltimore Transit Company to park and maintain buses. The other half was now a very large saloon.

Jimmy was afraid to go on the bus alone at a time when mostly adults were on it. He was even more afraid to go into that big saloon. He had only seen it from the bus window. What would he do if his father wasn’t there? He didn’t have a dime to ride the bus back home and it was a very, very long walk along the highway to get back home. Jimmy knew that he couldn’t tell his mother how scared he was or ask her what to do if his father wasn’t there. She would just cry.

“Be careful, Jimmy.”

“Yes, Mother,”

He walked to the bus stop and waited for a bus to come.

“Jimmy, what are you doing, waiting on the bus?” It was a lady who he had seen at church, Mrs. Krantz. She was awfully nosy, but he was glad someone he knew would be on the bus with him. There might be bad people on the bus.

“Yes, ma’am, I have to run an errand for my mother.”

The bus came and they got onto it. Jimmy was glad that he could sit next to Mrs. Krantz. He was thankful that the noise of the bus engine made it impossible for her to ask any more questions. He was ashamed of his errand. Too soon the bus arrived at Monument and Kresson.

He went into the saloon. It was a very large room with heavy, dark wooden tables and chairs. The bar was on the wall opposite the entrance doors. It stretched the whole length of the room. Bottles of various colored spirits behind the bar sparkled like jewels.  Neon logos of different brands of beer hung on the walls providing the only illumination in the otherwise dark and dank room.

The air was cloudy with cigarette smoke. At the tables men were talking, drinking, and smoking, but none of them seemed happy or friendly. They were dressed in work clothes soiled from the day’s work. Their clothes gave off the odor of where they worked – grease and cinders from the railroaders, a garbage like smell from workers at the olive oil plant, and the smell of pickles from the men who worked in the pickle factory across Monument Street from the saloon.

One of the men challenged him, “Hey, kid, whatda yuz doin’ in here?”

Jimmy’s fright turned to terror. Then he saw that his father was seated alone at the bar. Jimmy hurried to the stool where his father was seated. His father turned his back away from him. He tugged at his father’s trouser leg.

“Hey, Tom, the old lady sent one of the brats to bring you home.” The men all laughed.

“What do you want?”

“Mother sent me to ask you to come home. We haven’t eaten all day and the store will close in a couple hours.”

“Here’s some money. Tell her I’ll come home when I am good and ready to come home.” Angrily grabbing some bills and change off the bar, he threw them on the floor. Jimmy was shaking so hard that it was with difficulty he picked up the money from the floor. Down at floor level there was the smell of beer, tobacco, urine and vomit in the drafts of air. He was afraid that he would throw up or cry.

“I won’t cry, not in front of my father, not ever!”

He kept a dime for the bus fare and stuffed the rest of the money in his jacket pocket and zippered it shut. He didn’t remember the bus ride home.

Jimmy handed his mother the bills and change.

“What did your father say?”

“He said he’d come home when he was good and ready to come home.”

She gave an angry response to her absent husband, slammed the money on the kitchen table, stomped into the living room, threw herself onto the sofa, and commenced intermittently screaming and sobbing. Anna turned and silently went to her room. Mike stood in the middle of the room wailing and looking confused.

Jimmy took a dollar from the money she had thrown on the table. He ran out the door to go to the Acme Market. Baked beans, macaroni and cheese, bread. Maybe there will be enough for oleo.

By the time they had eaten, it was nearly bed time. Jimmy went to the room he shared with Mike. While his mother was getting Mike ready for bed, he lay on his bed and cried through his pain and fear and confusion, muffling it with his pillow.

Sometime after he had gone to sleep, he was awakened by his father coming into the house and slamming the door. There was a loud argument. He could tell that his mother was being hit. She ran into his room and hid under the double bed. His father staggered through the house looking for her, then detoured into the bathroom to noisily expel two days of drinking.  After that, his father must have gone to sleep. The house was quiet again. His mother crawled out from under his bed. 

Jimmy waited for a while, then tiptoed up the hall to check on his mother. She was sitting at the chrome dinette set in the kitchen. One eye was swollen, her cheek had an angry red spot, and one of her lips was puffy. She was humming a French song she learned in high school.

Alouette, gentil alouette,

Alouette, je te plumerai.

 Je te plumerai la tete, je te plumerai la tete,

Et la tete, alouette.

He looked into the living room and saw a big smear of mustard on the wall. A bag with hot dogs was lying on the floor below it. They were still warm. They had chili, mustard, and onions! He put the bag in the refrigerator. In the bathroom he got a wet wash rag and tried to clean the mustard off the wall. Then he went back to bed.

ARMISTEAD GARDENS - CHAPTER THREE

The chapters which are numerical are factual. The chapters which are alphabetical are fiction, though in some instances the fiction modestly drapes what is factual. I will post one chapter a week, alternating factual and fiction.

At the end of my third grade in school, my brother would soon be three years old. The project by now was being operated by the Baltimore City Housing Authority. Rents were determined by your family income. Since our family had two boys and a girl we qualified for a three-bedroom house. We were put on a waiting list. We wondered where our next house would be located. There were some areas of Armistead Gardens that seemed like slums. Or maybe we would get a house in the new section.

The house we were given came as a happy surprise. It was at the beginning of Armistead Way, where it junctured with Pulaski Highway. There were single story duplex houses with gabled roofs in a column which followed Pulaski Highway down a hill to the northern end of the project. They were originally built to house the foremen at Glenn L. Martin.

There was a large grassy yard on three sides of the house. A street ran parallel to Pulaski Highway separating these houses from the cinder block two story row houses. These houses had asbestos shingles on the outside walls and drywall inside walls. There were three bedrooms, a bathroom, a living room, a kitchen/dining area. There was even a pantry off the kitchen.

Across Armistead Way there was a wooded and grassy area running alongside Pulaski Highway. Across Pulaski Highway from the wooded area was a large Acme Markets supermarket. The sidewalk in front of the house went to Pulaski Highway and there was a stop light so you could cross the highway safely. After you crossed the highway, there was a row of shops – a variety store, a drugstore, and a liquor store. Up the hill from these shops was the Acme Market and beyond it a Sunoco gas station.

That fall all the elementary school children living in Armistead Gardens were transferred from P.S. 231 to P.S. 83. It became known pretty quickly throughout the project that the parents in the neighborhood around Brehm’s Lane School had complained to the school board about busing children from the project to their school.

Another change was that there would no longer be school buses. We had to ride the city transit bus. The transit buses ran all through the project to Fox Mansion. That was the end of the line. P.S. 83 was in East Baltimore. It was situated between Fayette Street and Orleans Street. About a mile north of the school Fayette Street and Orleans Street merged and became Pulaski Highway. Entering the project, the first bus stop was in front of our house. Leaving, it stopped at the corner diagonally across Armistead Way from our house.

I think the first year the school gave us tokens. That changed and we had to pay 10 cents fare. There were many, many days that if I wanted to go to school I had to walk because my parents didn’t have 40 cents that day for Beverly and me to go to school and come back on the bus. I have always wanted to measure the distance from where we lived to P.S.83. I’m sure it was over two miles.

One aspect of the new school that I particularly liked were the libraries. There was a school library from which I borrowed many books. At home, unless I had some chore to do, I could be found lying on my bed reading a book. Beverly made many friends in our new neighborhood, but I didn’t. At school the school librarian noticed that when we were out on the playground, I would be off by myself or getting beat up by some other boy. I couldn’t and wouldn’t fight back. I tried to protect myself from the blows, but my attempts were ineffectual.

One day when I was in the library, the librarian said, “I need someone to help me by shelving the books that are returned and by repairing the books. If you are interested, you could come to the library during recess or at lunchtime if you are free.” I jumped at the chance to stay away from the playground bullies. Shelving books was easy. Repairing books took a great deal of learning, but the librarian taught me to do one stage at a time. Until I learned that stage I couldn’t go any further and had to leave the book for the librarian to complete. By the end of that school year, which was my fourth grade, I could repair a book as well as the librarian and could letter the titles on the spine as neatly as she could.

During the next school year, I began to go to the Enoch Pratt Free Library branch on Fayette Street about two blocks north of the school. I began to carry as many as six books home at a time and would read them all in a week. Once I read through all the books by Roy Chapman Andrews, a paleontologist. Then I read all the books by Ray Bradbury and Robert Heinlein.

In the fifth grade I started and edited a homeroom newspaper called Class Gossip. Members of the class would write out riddles, jokes, innocent bits of gossip, news about upcoming events in their clubs or neighborhood. Some drew sketches or cartoons. I would organize the pieces. One girl in the class was very artistic. She would make a cover with a piece of colored paper and crayons. Another girl, Gloria Mosca took the material home and her mother typed it onto typing paper, pasted in the cartoons and pictures, and put holes in the pages with a three-hole punch. The cover and pages were put together with brads. The newspaper was kept on the teacher’s desk. Students who finished their work ahead of the class could take it from the teacher’s desk and read it.

 The years living in Armistead Gardens were mostly financially hard years. We would receive boxes of clothes and sometimes food from the Church. Several times at least Grandad Pritt would find out that someone he knew well was going to Baltimore. He would send us a bushel of potatoes and some home-canned food.

Many, many times I went out with my wagon with a Kotex cardboard box in it. The box was so big that only one side fit in the wagon. The other side was propped on the other wagon side. That worked out fine. There was still room in the wagon for any soda bottles I found. I went up and down the streets in the old section looking in the garbage cans for newspaper or cardboard. After a while, people would stack their newspapers and put them beside the can. I was also looking for soda bottles that I could take to the Acme Market for the deposit. When the big box was full, I went across the highway and pulled the wagon almost a half mile down the highway to the salvage yard. They would buy the box of paper from me. Including the box, I would get 15 or 20 cents. I would wash out the bottles and take them with me to the store. I think the deposit was 1 cent per bottle. For 25 cents I could get a box of macaroni and cheese and a can of Manning’s beans. If I had 35 cents I could also get a loaf of day old bread.

Other times my mother would send me to Ginny’s house on the bus. She would send me with a note to Ginny asking if she could spare some food. Ginny would always send me back with a bag containing some potatoes, and a few cans of food.

We only had meat on Sundays and on payday (every two weeks). One time a man who lived across the street came back from a hunting trip in West Virginia. He had killed quite a few ground hogs and they were in the trunk of his car. His wife absolutely refused to clean them. He asked Mom if she would clean them and he would let her keep two of them. She worked several hours cleaning the groundhogs. Then she went to work on the two she had earned. She boiled them three times in water, maybe it was salt water, and threw the water down the sink. Then she fried them in lard. The meat was very dark and it looked like parts of a dog, but it was delicious and tasted like fried chicken.

I have painful memories of Mom standing at the door and taking verbal abuse from aggressive bill collectors. She had no money to give them. She would answer them politely. When they left she came into the house and cried. Other times she would have to ask the milk man to continue delivering milk and bread another two weeks and she promised she would pay him then. Afterward, she cried.

Too many years, I went all winter with holes in the soles of my shoes. Every evening I would have to cut a piece of cardboard to fit inside each of my shoes for the next day.

I read a lot of books, not so I could be smart in school, but so I could pretend I was living in other places and other times. I don’t have many happy memories of my childhood and teen years living in Armistead Gardens. Is that because I am morose by nature or did those years of my life make me that way?

ARMISTEAD GARDENS - CHAPTER B

The chapters which are numerical are factual. The chapters which are alphabetical are fiction, though in some instances the fiction modestly drapes what is factual. I will post one chapter a week, alternating factual and fiction.

Marvin Thompson was probably ten years old. I was nine years old and he wasn’t in my class at school. He must have been a year older. He lived on Quantril Way. Across Armistead Way from our house on Newcomb Way was the beginning of the woods. That is where the creek began. There was a culvert that ran under Armistead Way and water came out of it into the creek. Where did the water come from?

The creek and the woods held a fascination for a group of us kids – mostly boys. I liked to pretend that I was an explorer and was making my way through the jungle. Other times I imagined that I was out West. Perhaps I thought I would come upon a settlement of Indians, or at least discover the remains of one.

For Marvin the appeal of the creek and the woods was his quest for “specimens.” That was his word for them. He found a skin that a snake had shed. Inside a hole at the base of a tree he came upon a bunch of baby mice – less than an inch long with their tails. He took them home in a discarded tin can he found. After that he carried a couple tin cans from home. From the creek he captured a baby turtle and a frog. Marvin’s mother was proud of her budding scientist but sometimes she had to discard his specimens when they began to smell.

Marvin’s prize acquisitions were his collection of bird eggs. When he found a nest, he would watch it until the mother bird flew away. Then he would reach in the nest and take a few eggs. He borrowed a book from the library to identify the birds. After that he could say, “That one is a robin’s egg. This one is a wren’s egg.”

When his teacher heard of his collection of bird eggs she asked him to bring them to class and give a presentation to the class. Marvin was very careful because he had to ride the bus to school. His gave him a shoe box and a box of cotton. He rolled each egg in cotton before placing it in the box. He made an excellent presentation and the teacher gave him extra credit.

Marvin had a good friend, Roland. Roland was always eating and his nickname was Roly-Poly Roland. “I’m going down to the woods and try to find a bird’s nest with eggs in it. Do you want to go with me, Roland?” Roland agreed but went back in his house for a candy bar.

Marvin did not see any nests along the path that he had not already robbed. He plunged into the area where I often went exploring. It was thick with brush and trees. In the midst of the seemingly impenetrable brush, there was a sycamore tree. On one of its higher limbs he spied the nest of a cardinal. He didn't have any cardinal eggs.

Marvin climbed up the tree as soon as the mother bird flew off on an errand. When he reached the nest, he saw that there were four baby birds inside the nest. He decided to take the entire nest, baby birds and all. Carrying the nest in one hand he awkwardly climbed down the tree using only one hand.

He was holding on to a limb with one hand, holding the nest with the other hand and kicking around with his feet trying to find a limb or something on the trunk where he could get a foothold. Just then Roland started screaming. “The momma bird is flying back!... She is going crazy looking for the nest… Watch out!” The mother bird saw the nest clutched in Marvin’s hand. She started diving at him. He had no hand free to swat at her.

The bird made one last desperate dive at the burglar who had stolen her babies. She aimed at his eyes. In a panic Marvin let go of the limb and fell to the ground. His head hit a rock or hard ground. Blood was coming out his ears. “I made a mistake, Roland…Can I have a bite of your candy bar?”

When supper time came and he had not returned, Marvin’s parents checked with Roland’s parents and found out that he also had not returned. They started for the woods. Along the way others joined them. They walked way out on the path and back with no success. Then the men went into the dense brush. The searchers located the boys by the sound of Roland sobbing. By then he was in shock. He kept repeating, “He asked for a piece of my candy bar. I gave it to him, but he didn’t eat it.”

The bird’s nest had landed near the dead body of Marvin. The baby birds were still cheeping, but he was silent forever.  

ARMISTEAD GARDENS - CHAPTER TWO

The chapters which are numerical are factual. The chapters which are alphabetical are fiction, though in some instances the fiction modestly drapes what is factual. I will post one chapter a week, alternating factual and fiction.

Across the playground from our front door, Armistead Way was a boundary of sorts. On the other side of it there was undeveloped land going north from where Newcomb Way came into it. Going across Armistead Way there was a steep path down into a wooded area with a stream coming out of a culvert and going east. That stream was another boundary to the project. After about a city block of woods there was an open field. The summers we lived on Newcomb Way my father made a garden in that area. We had no plow so he had to use a spade to turn over the soil in the area he planted. I helped in the garden, planting seeds after he prepared the rows.

Following the stream a bit further, it became wider and deeper at one place. There was more water sometimes than other times. When it was deep enough the children would go swimming. I don’t remember, but my sister insists that once she and I went “skinny-dipping” there.

Further north along Armistead Way, it was dense with bushes and trees. One time I found a butcher knife and went hacking a path through the brush and low hanging tree limbs. Maybe I thought I was a jungle explorer and the knife was a machete. Something went wrong. I hacked into the top of my wrist. It was a very nasty cut. I don’t know what I did, other than run home. I’m sure my mother was scared to death. I don’t know if she took me to the doctor or bandaged it herself. I do know that it left a distinct “F” shaped scar which was duly noted in my military records years later. 

When we first moved into Armistead Gardens, the Presbyterian church was the only Protestant church. It met in the community building. The building was built of concrete block. The ground on which it was built was on a steep slope. The front of the building faced Armistead Way and was almost on street level, but the back, which faced Horner’s Lane, looked like it was more than a story to the beginning of the main floor. The church services and adult Sunday School classes were held on the main floor, a few steps up from street level. The children’s Sunday School classes were held a million steps down in the “basement.” The rooms in the basement were gloomy. It seemed like a dungeon.

I remember a Hallowe’en Party in the basement of the Community Center. I think the Presbyterian Church organized it, but it was for any of the children in the project. The organizers decorated the room with flickering red lights, fake cobwebs, cardboard skeletons, witches hanging with black thread from the ceiling so it looked like they were flying on brooms. There was punch made of red Kool-Aid, large grapes made to look like eyeballs. After we ate the obligatory cup cakes, washed down with Kool-Aid, there was a costume contest and bobbing for apples.

The Catholic Church met in Fox Mansion, a real mansion with a rich history dating from before the War of 1812. After the new section was built it became the community center for that area.

The new section had been built long before we moved to Armistead Gardens. The houses were much more attractive both inside and out. Some of the houses were brick, while many were row houses built of cinder block. They all had pitched roofs. Their houses faced streets with sidewalks rather than narrow alleys. They had hardwood floors and drywall walls. They were heated by coal furnaces instead of fuel oil which had to be carried into the house every day.

The summer after we moved onto Newcomb Way we had visitors. My Grandad and Grandmom Pritt came from Elkins in a new Ford. My Uncle Donald and his new wife Delania came with them. Beverly and I had been living with Grandad and Grandmom when Donald returned from the War. We had learned to love Uncle Don, but Dad had not seen Don since he was drafted into the Army.. Delania lived out in the country and the road to her parents’ farm was paved with large stones. Tires at that time were not good quality and Donald had a number of “blow outs.” I remember Grandad saying, “If you don’t marry that girl soon, you are going to go broke buying tires for the car.”

They had loaded the car with home canned food and some dishes and other treasures Mom had left with them. Strapped to the back of the car was a bicycle they brought for me! They were not selling bicycles in the stores at that time. This was an old pre-war bicycle. It was made of steel so it was heavy. Don had sanded it and painted it royal blue (The paint used by Western Maryland Railway on its passenger coaches). He had shined up the chrome spokes and wheels. It looked brand new. That bicycle opened a whole new world for me.

I think they were only with us two days. They must have stayed in a motel for several nights. I guess they also went to Washington to visit Myrtle (one of my father’s sisters} and Gene before their long trip back to West Virginia. The second day they took us on a picnic to Bay Shore Park. The trip out to the park was across a long bridge. What I remember was hunting for shade. There was plenty of beach but no trees. With red hair I sun burned easily.

After they left I rode that bicycle on every street in Armistead Gardens. I had to learn how to fix a flat tire, put the chain back when it came off, and other mechanical skills. The bicycle took me to every place in the Gardens and I made a lot of new friends.

There was a Maintenance Office for the project. There were men who would repair plumbing, the furnace, or other problems in the house. They also loaned tools for the lawn and gardens. They gave out grass seed. They would also give paint for doors and screen doors. Automobiles were scarce, but some people in the project were finding old pre-war cars and fixing them up. Some of these old clunkers sported new paint jobs using screen door paint from the Maintenance Office applied to the cars with rags.

Most of the people in the old section lived on the edge of poverty. I remember one day when there was a knock on the door. When my mother opened the door there was a little boy dressed only in his underwear. “Lady could you gimme a piece of bread?” She took a slice from the loaf. “Is this all right?” “Well, do you have some oleo or jelly you could put on it?” All the time he was shivering. As soon as she handed him the sandwich, he devoured it and ran off, barefoot, up the street.

From Christmas time until the end of February many of the men were laid off and had no income. Either the coal miners were on strike, the steelworkers were on strike, the longshoremen were on strike – always some reason to lay off the workers in the dead of winter. That was when the weather was cold. The fuel oil tanks were soon empty and unless some money could be borrowed at the loan company or from relatives, concrete block houses with concrete floors were miserably cold and damp. My parents’ first stop for Christmas shopping was at the two loan companies where they had accounts to see how much they could borrow and add to their account.

During this time, we would see oil trucks that did not usually deliver oil in Armistead Gardens. When I was older I learned that they were delivering oil to Freemasons who were out of work.

My sister and I enrolled in P.S. 231, Brehm’s Lane Elementary School. A school bus came for us and carried us to a brick school building in a very nice neighborhood. In later years everyone I knew who lived in that neighborhood were upper middle class – the manager of an upscale leather goods store, an executive of American Stores grocery chain, a banker, a manager in an industrial plant, a lawyer.

We attended that school the rest of the school year and all of the following school year. I have my report cards from those years. They show an unusual number of absences. I am surprised that I passed.

ARMISTEAD GARDENS - CHAPTER A

The chapters which are numerical are factual. The chapters which are alphabetical are fiction, though in some instances the fiction modestly drapes what is factual. I will post one chapter a week, alternating factual and fiction.

As the Second World War was drawing to a close, many Germans could see that defeat was inevitable. Those who held positions of authority in the government or the National Socialist Party knew that if/when the Axis powers were defeated, they and their families would both be vulnerable to arrest by the ruling power installed by the conquering armies and to revenge by disgruntled fellow Germans.

Some of them sent their families out of Germany to Switzerland or to Turkey or Morocco. From there they made their way to Uruguay and Argentina. Some of the fathers were subsequently killed in the waning months or weeks of the War. Others used that time to collect as much money, gold, jewels, or other portable booty and then fled themselves. Whether any high ranking Nazis evaded arrest and made their way to these two South American countries has been material for many articles, documentaries, and stories. The undisputable fact is that following the War there were large colonies of Germans and Ukrainians in Argentina and Uruguay.

In Baltimore there were many first, second, and third generation German-Americans. Before the War started, the German Bundt brought together thousands of Germans who supported Hitler. Their building in downtown Baltimore was a classical Greek structure whose auditorium held at least 2000. Many dropped their support when they found out what Hitler was doing to the Jews or when their own sons were being killed in the War. The Bundt was outlawed after our country entered the War. There were still a sizeable number who silently maintained their allegiance to Nazi Germany.

Several of these Nazi sympathizers secured jobs in the Rental Office and the Maintenance Office in Armistead Gardens. They worked hard and gradually worked themselves into supervisory positions. Mr. Wieneger became the Manager of the Rental Office. Mr. Schwartz became the Supervisor in the Maintenance Office.

During the War good workers were being bled away by the draft. Every time there was a job opening Mr. Wieneger and Mr. Schwartz hired only men or women who were supporters of their cause. By the time the War ended, all of the workers belonged to their Cause.

They recognized that the column of duplex houses which ran along Pulaski Highway might be useful to them some day because a road running parallel to Pulaski Highway was an innocent and unobtrusive passive barrier to the other residents of the project.

When the project was turned over to the Baltimore City Housing Authority there were some anxious weeks and months worrying about whether the Authority might send in some of their own people. As time went by their worries were laid to rest, because Armistead Gardens was run more efficiently than any of their other projects.

Mr. Schwartz had a short-wave radio in his office. There was a sophisticated antenna array on the roof of the garage where the trucks and equipment of the Maintenance Department were stored. In the evening after the offices were closed, Mr. Schwartz was occupied with his amateur radio. The radio hams he was contacting were in Argentina and Uruguay.

Now that wealthy ex-pat Germans had reached the relative safety of South America, their next goal was to reach the United States and settle there under a new identity. There were many less wealthy German immigrants who would have to adjust and content themselves living in a Latin society that was less developed, less modern, less cultured than Germany had been before the War.

The leaders of the Noble Cause had decided to establish Kamp Armistead in that row of duplexes along Pulaski Highway. The duplex facing Armistead Way was unsuitable for their use because of the heavy vehicle and pedestrian traffic- too many people with too many eyes and too many brains and too many mouths.

As for the other duplexes, if a family moved out, the Cause sent one of their followers, who had an apartment or house elsewhere in Baltimore, to occupy that unit until it was needed by the Cause. Other families were gradually moved to units in the new section with the excuse that the State wanted to widen Pulaski Highway. In six months they had control of all the duplexes except the one facing Armistead Way. Kamp Armistead was ready to open. There were twenty three-bedroom units.

Mr. Schwartz kept in communication with the Noble Cause each evening. When encryption was necessary, they used some book with 365 pages or more. This year it was Moby Dick. The page for that day was ruled off in rows and columns. The first 26 lines stood for letters, the 27^th line was space and the 28^th line was “period.” In this manner Mr. Schwartz communicated to Argentinian and Uruguayan collaborators that Kamp Armistead was ready to receive twenty families.

These families could not fly to Baltimore or travel by commercial ships because they did not have valid passports and visas. Travel was on yachts. The amount of baggage they could take with them was limited. The captains of the yachts were cautious concerning the weather. It was a long trip to travel by yacht in the Atlantic Ocean. They had to stop often to refuel. Most of the passengers were seasick at least part of the time.

When the yacht reached the Chesapeake Bay, it steered for Back Creek. There was a yacht club there with some members who were loyal to the Cause. One of them would take one family and its baggage to Kamp Armistead at night. The next night he would take another family. In six months’ time, only ten families had been moved into Kamp Armistead. Then winter halted any further travel.

There were some families who tried other ways to get into the United States: through Mexico and into Texas or Arizona or through Cuba flying to Canada and from there into Detroit or New York. None of them made it without being arrested. The location of Kamp Armistead was kept secret, even the fact it was in Baltimore. It was thought that they might be followed and the existence and location of Kamp Armistead would be discovered.

When a family arrived, the person who had been house-sitting would stay with the family a week, helping them get settled. They all had learned basic English beforehand. He showed them the Acme Market and went with them on their first trip. They were encouraged to walk up the sidewalk along Pulaski Highway so as not to be noticed by the residents of Armistead Gardens.

Mr. Schwartz would buy a car for them (with their money). A Cause volunteer would coach them in learning the highway laws. Most could drive but they needed a few practice drives before taking their test. A driver’s license was an important identity document. A volunteer also took them on the city bus. They would go with them to the center of Baltimore and go through the department stores with them. They showed them the German neighborhoods.

The whole elaborate set-up was almost shattered. One of the German  undocumented immigrant families in Kamp Armistead, the Krachts, had a teen age son. He was in Fox’s 5&10 when Mr. & Mrs. Fox were heatedly arguing about something. Mr. Fox used some rough language in Yiddish. The boy may have thought Mrs. Fox was Aryan because of her blonde hair.

That night the boy returned with a can of black spray paint. He sprayed a giant swastika on one window and KIKE in giant letters. He probably would have put more, but a young man driving by saw him and yelled. He stopped his car and gave pursuit but the offender got away. Mr. Schwartz had a good idea who had done it. The family was put into a station wagon, driven up into the mountains and left to fend for themselves and die. Too much was at stake.

The enforcers for the Cause did not reckon on “mountain people.” A man in an old pickup truck came upon the family huddling in a shelter of snow and fir branches by the side of the road. He picked them up, took them home and his wife fixed them a hot meal of cornbread and beans. She gave them old ragged blankets with which to wrap themselves. The foreign people did not know where they had been living. Their teenage son was sick with a bad fever. The mountain folk had no extra beds and no telephone but they made the people as comfortable as they could.

The next day the mountain man drove into town and told the storekeeper who called the sheriff for him. The sheriff took the three foreigners to the hospital. Since they could give no address and had no identity papers the sheriff called the FBI.

The wheels of justice grind slow but exceedingly fine. The family was kept as long as questioning them was yielding useable information. Just the names “Fox’s 5&10”, “Kamp Armistead” and “Mr. Schwartz” helped to pin down the location of this camp for undocumented aliens. When the FBI was finished with them, the family was sent to their last legal residence, which was now in East Germany. The entire staff at Armistead Gardens was sent to various other projects and was replaced by other Housing Authority employees. Mr. Schwartz was fired and was indicted on several Federal charges. The remaining residents of Kamp Armistead were deported to Germany.

Mr. Schwartz was able to warn two important residents before the authorities arrived. Mr. Karl Bruning and Mr. Eisen Schultz had been in high administrative posts at the Dachau death camp. If they were arrested and deported they would face prosecution at the Nurenberg War Crimes trials. Both men took off on foot for Horners Lane. They entered the National Bohemian Cemetery. One of the graves had a concrete covering on the grave. The concrete had cracked. It was only an inch thick. Its purpose was to disguise a metal door the size of the “grave.” They lifted the door. Its hinges were rusted and protested with a loud squeak.

This bunker had been put in place about five years before America became involved in World War II. The Bundt had built it as a refuge for spies who might be sent from Germany. There were a number of attempts during the War to infiltrate spies into the U.S.A. but they were all unsuccessful and the bunker had been unused for its original purpose.

When it was built, the bunker contained a shortwave radio which had a telescoping antenna which used the metal cover to reflect its signal while transmitting. It had half a dozen beds with wool blankets. Storeable food and water in sealed cans, and a cache of American money were all part of the bunker’s contents. There was a latrine connected to a septic tank.

When Bruning and Schultz entered the underground retreat, they discovered that it had been plundered. The radio was gone. The mattresses and blankets were gone, all the food and all the money had been taken. Someone who had been involved in building and stocking the hideout, and knew how to get into it, had returned at a later time and liberated the contents.

They were in a real jam. They would have to remain in the bunker at least until tomorrow. Maybe the authorities would be gone by then. They could go back to their now vacated homes and scavenge whatever food or clothes remained in them. If their cars were still there, they could get away in them.

They spent the night lying on metal cots with no mattresses, shivering in the cold. The next morning, they broke open a couple cans of water. It tasted awful. They used the latrine and then lifted the hatch to exit. As they did, they found themselves facing two Federal marshalls.

“We knew about this hideout. When we saw the broken pieces of concrete scattered on the ground we knew for sure you were inside. We have been waiting here for you. There are some people in Nurenberg who want to hold you accountable for your roles in killing hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children.”