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Little Boys

"Sugar and Spice and all things nice,

That's what little girls are made of.

Snakes and Snails and puppy dog tails,

That's what little boys are made of".

Or so goes an old nursery rhyme. As a little boy, I certainly lived up to the description in the nursery rhyme. Worms, bugs, grasshoppers, spiders, and snakes. They were so very much a part of my world at that time. I was fascinated with anything that leaped, creeped, slithered, wiggled, or crawled.

Once I found a peculiar looking twig. I don't remember what it was that caught my attention, but I do remember setting it down, and it started moving. I would pick it up, set it back down, and it would move again. When I looked closer, I could make out several legs, some antennas, and what had to be two tiny eyes. Years later I found out it was what they call a Walking Stick. It is an insect common to the Eastern and Central United States. The way nature camouflaged it is to make it look like a stick, a common twig. I put it in a jar, took it home with me, and kept it in the house for a week or more. As long as it was just a twig, a small piece of wood, it was all right. But when Mom found out it was actually alive, and that it moved all by itself, that was the end of it. Out it went.

The same thing happened to a couple of my pet snakes and to the turtle I found. And that puppy dog that I got for FREE, why Mom wouldn't even let me in the house with it. I had to give it back. Sometimes parents can be so cruel and unreasonable.

By and by, Dad rented a house on Osceola Avenue on Chicago's West Side. I was just ten or so at the time. Technically, the house was within the city limits of Chicago, but in reality, we were way out in the sticks. I had to have the worlds largest paper route (geographically speaking) with the smallest number of papers. My route covered a very large housing development that went bust in the crash of 1929. There were some streets that were paved, and some that were not. One thing peculiar to this area of over fifty square blocks was that the sidewalks were completed in very block. Some blocks had two or three houses, and many blocks had none. But they all had sidewalks. The ratio was fourteen houses in twenty square blocks, something like that. I did not have that paper route for very long. You can understand why. It was a huge area, a lot of prairie grass, and a lot of snakes. These were garden-variety snakes, non-poisonous and quite harmless. Even if they bit you, it didn't hurt….much.

About a mile from our house was Indian Boundary Drive. It was a road built on the boundary line of the Indian Territory as it was established back in the eighteen hundreds. It was the Pottowatomie tribe I think. About four miles further west was the forest preserve and the Des Plaines River. I spent a lot of time in those woods just exploring, looking around, and walking the banks of the river. It was great. Close by was Indian Boundary golf course. I would often walk in the woods adjacent to the fairways looking for lost golf balls. I had a keen eye as a kid and I found many golf balls that way. Then on a lazy Sunday afternoon, I would take all that I had found the previous week, sit off to the side of the number seven fairway, and peddle them to the players as they passed by. That provided spending money for me while at the same time it kept me out of trouble.

Looking back, I actually had a lot of freedom as a kid. Dad was always working it seemed. Mom was always busy with the siblings and so long as I showed up in time for meals, was not brought home by the truant office or the cops, I could do pretty much as I pleased. And I did just that. In the evenings I was permitted to stay out providing I got home at a reasonable hour. But I have to tell you that after 10:00 PM, all reason ceased to exist in our house.

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