I got almost
to the Academy when I met kids coming back who were saying there was
no school. I started for home and stopped at the bridge over Sucker
Brook on Chapen Street. I went down under the bridge and ate my lunch.
My father and brother spent the next three days cutting up the trees
in our front yard. We kept warm because of the coal furnace but had no
electricity for days.
I still believe that we had more snow in those days than we do now.
One time we made a tunnel out from the back door about fifteen feet
before we got into the open and used it that way until it melted.
Another time Jack VanBrooker's car was stuck up on Thad Chapin and the
next day we went up to look for it digging holes in the snow until we
found the roof. My lunch time during my Senior year was an hour long
and I would run all the way from the high school to the west end of
Chapin Street, get a sandwich and run back to school. I ran down Main
Street and cut through Wilcox Lane, near where the Palmers lived,
across the railroad tracks and through the swamp where the Elementary
School was eventually built, then over Pearl Street. It was almost two
miles each way so if I had been on the track team I would have done
well. That swampy area below the tracks had enough water in it in the
winter time to make a hockey rink if you didn't mind a few bushes
growing up here and there. I was on a hockey team and played there a
couple of winters.
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