Now Dad’s back working for them I don’t know if we’ll start buying J.I. things again or not. J.I. stands for Jersey Industries. Dad told me it’s not like a Jersey cow but Jersey like the state. We live in Philadelphia but Dad works for J.I. That’s where the main plant is, New Jersey. I still don’t understand why he went back working for them. Also coming down the front street summers selling things is the ice-cream truck, and the man with the tiny merry-go-round for little kids.
One thing we have a lot of in our neighborhood is kids. There are almost more kids than there are dogs and cats. Most of the dogs and cats don’t belong to anybody but usually the kids do.
I like the alley better than the front street. There’s something secret about it, everything’s so real back there. Nobody’s putting out bird baths without water or planting flowers. It’s just the way it is and I like it. The front porches are mostly all painted and some people even have enclosed front porches. We have one of the only trees on our street. It’s actually in the middle of the lawn we share with the Robins next door. The Reynolds on our other side have a tree, too, they share with the Fennimores next to them; it’s not quite as tall as our tree. These trees are the kind that grow up straight; they’re the tallest things around our neighborhood. Taller than the telly poles, even. Any other kind of tree, like the kind that sends out side branches, wouldn’t find any space. Everything’s jammed in awfully tight around us in Stonehurst.
The highest part of the hill we’re on, starts up at Clifton Road, which is on the high side of Radbourne Road. Then, after Radbourne, it’s Clover Lane, below us is Greenwood Avenue. The other side of Greenwood Avenue opens up on a big open lot where we look for snakes, break bottles, burn Christmas trees, those kinds of things.
The street that actually goes down the hill, just five houses toward Long Lane from our house, is Copely Road. It’s the best sledding hill close by. For real sledding, we go over to the golf course by Upper Darby Junior High School. There are some good hills there. But Copely Road’s fine for ordinary sledding. When the snow’s packed hard you can go all the way from Clifton Road alley way down past the end of the vacant lot, almost to where Copely Road turns up toward Guilford Road and out to Long Lane again. Long Lane is where most of the stores are; that is, except for the Little Store.
Not everybody in our neighborhood has cars, so a lot of the garages are empty. Some people use them to store extra stuff and some men have workshops in them. The Hershafts built the Little Store in their garage. It’s one of the only places you can buy food or milk with only a piece of paper you sign and no real money.
But you have to live in the neighborhood for Mrs Hershaft to let you do that. My mother says everything is always more expensive at the Little Store, but a lot of times we buy food there, especially things like milk or soap or cans of soup or sugar. It’s a place my mother can send Laurel or me to buy something and not worry.
My mom worries a lot; that’s the way she is.
We do the real shopping up on Long Lane in the A & P or the American Store. Saturdays we go to the Giant Tiger on Baltimore Pike, when Dad drives us over there.
My father has a car. It’s a car that was in a crash and wasn’t running. Mr Carlson sold it to him for five dollars. He worked on it in our garage and got it running again. He cut off the crushed back, made it into a kind of truck, and painted it gray with some of our porch paint. It’s a Ford Model A car but it doesn’t look like any ordinary car. We use it to haul the wood for building porches.
My father and I build porches on weekends to pay off our back rent. For a long time Dad didn’t have any job because of the Depression. When the Depression came, J.I. laid off everybody, with only two weeks’ notice, including my father. There was nothing he could do about it. Most of the people on our street didn’t have jobs either. Everybody was on relief or working for the WPA.
During that Depression time, we got three years behind in our rent. Mr Marsden, who collects the rents, let us stay on in the house because there was nobody with any money to move in if we left. If a house is left empty in our neighborhood, all the windows get broken and even the front-porch railings get stolen for firewood. Some people move out in the night without paying the back rent.
When somebody moves, everybody helps. They’ll have an old truck or a bunch of cars and they’ll move away all the furniture in the dark. A lot of people have their electricity and gas cut off because they can’t pay those either, so they can’t live in the house any more.
My dad helped people like the O’Haras across the street and the Sullivans move. Even if anybody knew where these people moved to, they wouldn’t say, so Mr Marsden wouldn’t find out. I don’t know what the police could do to those people if they did catch them. Nobody has much money except rich people, and you can’t throw everybody in jail.
It was a couple years ago when my dad got the idea of building a new porch on our place. Mom was scared to go out on our old little rotten wooden porch to hang our clothes. Dad got the Reynolds next door to pay for the wood, by promising he’d do the work himself. Mr Reynolds works in a drugstore. We call him a pharmacist because it’s a nice idea to think you live next door to a real pharmacist, but he only works in a store in Media selling things like lipstick and corn plasters. But he has a job.
Dad built one straight porch across our two places, without any steps. It was a regular deck like the deck of a ship. He put down new posts to hold it up further out than the old posts but it still didn’t go as far out into the alley as the old steps did. This new porch is ten times bigger than the old one. It’s almost’s big as the front porch and has sun on it in the morning. On our side of the street there’s never any sun on our front porch, even in summer.
Now, with our big porch, Mom isn’t afraid when she hangs out clothes; and we go downstairs through the cellar.
She and Mrs Reynolds made Dad put wire on the railing so nobody could fall off. Little Jimmy Reynolds is only three and Mrs Reynolds can have him out there in the sun and watch him from the kitchen while she’s cooking and washing dishes.
Of course, Dad had to get Mr Marsden’s permission so he could build this porch, but since the old one was falling apart anyway he said O.K.
When Mr Marsden saw it finished, he asked Dad how much it would cost to have porches like that one built on other houses. I was right there. I’d never seen Mr Marsden before. He was driving a new Dodge car, and wore a suit with a tie. I think it might be the first time I ever saw anybody dressed like that in the daytime, except in the movies.
Dad looked up at the porch, then at me. He said to Mr Marsden, ‘I can build a porch like this, materials included, for sixteen dollars.’
Mr Marsden looked at the porch again.
‘I’ll tell you what, Mr Kettleson. I’ll knock twenty dollars off your back rent for every porch you build me.’
The materials cost less than seven dollars, so Dad could make thirteen dollars’ profit for every porch he built. Our rent is twenty-eight dollars a month so he could pay off our back rent pretty fast building porches on Saturdays. Only, somehow, we had to save that seven dollars for the wood, nails and paint.
Dad explained all this to me afterward because he wanted me to help him. I’d watched him build the first porch but I didn’t help.
This is the way we’d do it. First, we’d buy our wood at the big lumber yard on Marshall Road. Dad’d buy enough at one time to build three porches. Mom wasn’t too happy because he was using the emergency money they’d saved for doctor bills, but Dad wanted to get that back rent paid; it really bothered him, owing money.
Then, we’d go down in the cellar. Dad had all the measurements for everything, even the railings. I’d mark the wood from his measurements and hold the long ends while