Gene’s Yard

                                                

Bill

Gene was my first real friend in Hyde Park. If there are summer romances, this was a summer friendship. It only lasted a few years, a few summers.  I didn’t  play with Gene as much during the rest of the year.  His father was strict.  Lots of rules to follow at his house.  And he wouldn’t break any of them.  Gene went to a sister (parochial) school which meant getting home late in the afternoon with an evening of homework ahead. Summers for Gene likely meant as much to him as they did for me.

From that first summer in 1953 right through to the end of summer 1955, when Gene moved to Milton, he and I played, hung out, just quietly enjoyed being together on a hot summer’s afternoon.  He lived in a large house just a short walk up Prospect Street.  Gene’s house was the kind of sizable home you’d find in neighboring Milton. Three stories with porches and dormers, corners where the various roof angles met, windows everywhere.  I would not want to paint it.

I knew the house only from the outside.  I never went inside beyond a large playroom just off a back door where I would sometimes wait while Gene finished breakfast before he could come out to play.  His father was a dominating figure; you listened to him and did what he said.  End of story.  I didn’t want to put up with kids running around his grand mansion.  Gene’s mother always had his smaller siblings to deal with.  Every time I saw her she had a baby in her arms and another hanging on to her skirt. I didn’t know a lot about Catholic church doctrine relating to large families but whatever it was Gene’s parents espoused it. Looking back it’s more likely Gene’s father embraced it more than the mother.  She struck me as overburdened much of the time.

For me, then, going up to play at Gene’s house was all about his yard.  When my mother would ask where I was going, it was always, “Up to Gene’s yard.” Never, “Up to Gene’s house.”   Gene didn’t have a front yard in the usual sense. Mine was a few square feet of grass to fill in the space between the front stairs and the street.  Gene's house featured a front lawn which seemed the size of a football field. Years later when his house had been torn down after a fire and the lot sold to a developer, four or five medium sized houses were built in the space where Gene and I used to play.

It was great having that much room.  Most of it was grass save for a driveway leading up to the house from Prospect Street. On the lawn proper there were some large ornamental trees, spaced as if in a formal landscape, randomly but within sight of each other, blue spruce I recall, each about 50 to 75 feet tall.  These were not climbing trees; the inch long blue-green tightly packed needles precluded that.  It was bad enough that whenever I picked up one of the pine cones that would fall off I’d get that sticky resin all over my hands. Still the trees were great for shade, for hiding behind, to give character and dimension to the large yard.

Gene’s yard sloped down from the front of his house to the same woods that were in the back of my house. On the side of his house away from the street were more extensive woods replete with large climbable trees and a vast area of tall grass.  I called these Boyle’s woods named for the family that lived in a large house off Brush Hill Road.  While the woods behind my house were a safe place to play, Boyle’s woods were not.   The Boyle family had Dobermans, attack dogs really. While playing in his yard adjacent to those woods,  Gene and I would occasionally spot the pair of dogs walking in the woods, side by side, not as much as giving us a glance.  But if you were to step even a foot onto Boyle’s property they would come after you.  It happened to me a few times in the years after Gene moved.  I’d hear them before I could see them giving me just enough time to climb up a tree where I would wait until they were gone.  

We really didn’t need Boyle’s woods.  Gene’s expansive yard was more than enough space to make of it any world we wanted.  It was a fort in the middle of the desert, the wild west, a war zone, a jungle, the surface of another planet, anything our imaginations could conjure up. Gene’s yard is where we’d run from the Creature from the Black Lagoon or the giant ants from Them.  It’s where gun fights broke out. “I got you!”  “No, you missed.”  Down close to the woods was a large rock, a rock we would cling to for dear life when it became an overturned life boat in a storm-driven sea, or the cockpit of an airplane we had to fly low as we ran out of gas.  I did love that rock.  It was the only large rock in the whole neighborhood, rounded, a bit square on top, easy to climb onto but large enough so several of us could sit there.  I wonder where it came from? A glacial erratic? I wonder where it went to? Buried during the housing construction? Broken up? Carted away in some dump truck?  Maybe today it’s a decoration in someone else’s yard.

Although we spent much of our time playing on Gene’s wide expanse of front lawn, there were other spots around his house that contributed to our sense of imagination.  There was a narrow yard between Prospect Street and his house which was scattered with shrubs and bushes along with a few white pines. This area offered additional opportunities for diversion. The tangled branches of several Forsythia bushes were great to hide in, rest in, play in.  No one paid too much attention to this side yard so the bushes in particular were overgrown.  Better for us. Forsythia was great for forts, the inside of submarines, or just a place to crawl into to get out of the sun.

The forsythia flowered dramatically early in the spring, bright yellow blossoms to smell. They also attracted wasps and bees.  I hated bee stings and went to foolish lengths if I even saw a bee near me, running and screaming like an idiot.  “Is it on me? Get it off!  Get it off!” My parents would always say, “If you don’t bother them, they won’t bother you.”  I tried everything not to bother them, really, but every summer one of them would get me.  And, as usual, the actual sting was less painful than you ever imagined it would be.

One bush in particular, the biggest one, easiest to get into, offered Gene and me a respite from the sunny expanse of the front lawn.  This was a place we could go to when we were hot, when the glare of the sun was too much, when we were tired of being cowboys or soldiers or gangsters. Inside, the branches woven around us like the interior of a giant basket, the dirt floor edgy with a pattern of shadows and flashes of sunlight, we’d just sit, talk, or not. The occasional bee dithered through looking for blossoms.  I was too relaxed to care.  It was summer.  I was with my friend. Anything of consequence seemed a long way off.

A day up to Gene’s yard would begin midmorning on a warm summer day with me coming out of my kitchen door, down the several back stairs, along our dirt driveway, up Prospect all the way to Gene’s back driveway. I’d either stand outside his back door and yell, “Hi Yo Gene.” or “Can Gene come out to play?” but as time went on, more and more I’d simply knock on his back door and wait. Sometimes his little brother, Brian, would open the door and stare at me, or his mother would appear holding a baby and give me a status report.  “Gene is having breakfast.” or “Gene has chores. He’ll be out later.”  Most of the time Gene would only be a few minutes. Sometimes I’d wait on his porch, become impatient, tell myself I’ll just wait another minute but usually ended up waiting until Gene was done with his chores or his breakfast.  I was anxious to play, to begin the day with my friend.

We loved role playing, characters we knew from TV or the movies, but often more generic approximations, soldiers, private detectives, cowboys.  But after a while I began to try for something more complex.  I went to the movies a lot, down to the Fairmount Theatre in Cleary Square. Saturday afternoon kids’ matinees. The westerns, the cartoons, Disney, most of it pretty bland.  But there were darker aspects as well.  The horror films, the creature films, the crime films.  These were the stories I wanted to emulate with Gene and the gang of kids we would gather to act out what I would call “my plays.” Not that you could add much depth to a play about a dinosaur loose in a city.  But we tried.

Gene and I were the producers.  We came up with a company name, Bast/Hick Pictures, which we would write inside a diamond shape with the Bast/Hick going down and Pictures going across, each sharing the middle T.  The name comprised the first several letters of our last names.  Our motto was, “Play a Play like a Play should be Played.” The implication being we ran a tight ship.  If you wanted to be in one of our movies, or plays, the names were interchangeable,  you had to do what we said, play the roles we gave you and say what we told you to say.  To a certain extent most of the kids involved went along with it.  The “studio” where the movies unfolded was Gene’s front lawn which we renamed Gene’s Studio Palace.  Apparently we were drunk with power.

Gene and I would keep lists of the names of the movies we would make.  Some we actually played through; many were in name only.  I still have some of these lists.  A representative sample: Bombs Away, Dinosaurs in the 20th Century, The Dalton Gang, Deadman’s Valley, The Frame Up, Cops in Action, Brats, Killer Cat.

I have the outlines Gene and I worked on for a couple of these titles.  Killer Cat is the story of a panther in Africa that has been killing all the birds.  (Birds!  Are they a source of food for big cats?)  We wrote that “the natives were getting together and were going to kill the panther.”  Some lucky neighborhood kids got some juicy roles as “natives” in this one. We added to the list of characters a young hunter and his wife who “came to the jungle to capture animals.” They met up with the panther-hunting natives where this conversation ensued.

Hunter: “What is going on?”

Native: “We are going to kill the panther that is killing all the birds.”

Hunter: “I’ll go too.”

Wife: “No, you must stay home. He will kill you.”

Hunter: “I must go.”

That’s as far as we got with the dialogue.  With Gene’s vast lawn representing a tropical forest we probably spent the rest of the play, hide and seek-style,  tracking down the panther.  Many probably died, fell down, got up again, were again clawed and bitten to death until the panther met his fate.  At least the birds were saved. 

There were a lot of monster movies produced up at the Studio Palace: The Mountain Monster, Monster in the Streets, The Space Monster, The Sea Monster, Greenland Monster.  I usually played the monster, very generically, chasing the other kids with my arms outstretched, screeching and roaring as best as an eight year-old kid turned monster could. 

We loved dinosaurs so they played important roles in many of our plays.  In fact they could pop up unexpectedly in the oddest situations. During a western shoot-out an allosaurus or even a diplodocus might appear out of the blue to eat someone.  It was all fun and games until someone was swallowed whole by a dinosaur. 

For our play, Dinosaurs in the 20th Century, we wrote a long outline in four scenes.  “Way down in Florida,” it begins, “where the jungle swamp is thick, one hundred and six eggs broke and allosauruses come out of them.”  (Why exactly 106?  Film scholars will be debating that for years.) The outline goes on to explain that sixteen years after the eggs cracked, the dinosaurs, now fully grown, “walked into  a banana plantation.”  It’s evident our geographical knowledge was a bit shaky but bananas in Florida was not the point.  Dino destruction was.  And this is long before Jurassic Park.  

There is a rush of dialogue as workers spot the pack of beasts.

First man: “Henry, look! What are they?”

Second man: “I…I…I don’t know.”

All that stuttering required some skilled acting by someone.  As I recall Gene actually did have the occasional stuttering problem.

The action heightened.

First man: “Look out!”

Sound: Crash. Tinkle.  (Tinkle!?  I have no idea.)

Help Arrives.

Third man: “What happened.”

First man: “Monsters came in here and one went through the banana house.  The wall fell on Henry.”

That may explain the tinkling.  The “banana house” must have been made of glass.

Then a pivotal bit of dialogue by the first man.

First man: “I just thought of something.  Miami is just five miles away.  That’s where they were headed.”

Third man: “I better warn them.”

First man: “You can use my car.”

What, all the telephones eaten by the dinosaurs?

Scene two begins with “The Dinosaurs headed for Miami.” That doesn’t sound good.

This from a cop who spots the “monsters.”

“Holy smoke! Monsters are coming.  They come from Mars. Help!”

A man approaches.

“What’s the matter?

Cop: “Look!  Get the atomic bomb.”

My old standby from my civil defense drills in Jamaica Plain.

The cop follows through by calling the army.  With them comes a character I called Professor Trilling.  We thought of the professor as the voice of reason, someone who could explain to everyone what was going on.  That was the idea even if his dialogue sounded as minimalist as everyone else’s. 

Professor Trilling: “Those beasts are dinosaurs.  One is smashing my house.”

“Get the guns!” commands a corporal from the army.  (A corporal?  Did I mean colonel?)

More sound effects.  Gunfire. Screams.  Roars. Tinkles. One dinosaur down.  The others escape. 

It gets worse.  Scene four is set in New York City, the dinosaurs “wrecking cities on their way.”  Not just a few show up, all 105.  The sound effects guy is very busy.  Lots of destruction. Lots of screaming. But, fortunately, “the Marines are waiting.” A dinosaur, “hit in the brain, goes through the R.C.A building.” Also known as the rock in Gene’s yard. 

There is a thrilling climax as the dinosaurs, the 19 that are left according to the script, are “rushed out of the city. Then a blinding flash struck the dinosaurs.  An A bomb struck.”   The End.  A Bast/Hick picture.

Whew.  That was close.

It’s likely our movie was based on The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms which had come out a year or two before and which some of us had seen at the Fairmount Theatre. To be fair, that movie was no less silly than mine. But I wanted more than running around and shooting, even though there was a lot of that. 

I’d try to tell kids how a civilian might react as opposed to a soldier when a dinosaur was spotted walking down the street.  My directions would be along the lines of, “Gene, you start shooting with your machine gun; Mary Ellen, you run and hide.” The response from Mary Ellen would likely be something like, “How come I have to hide.  I want a machine gun too.”

There were times when Gene and I had a whole gang of kids in his yard.  There were three kids living on one side of me and three on the other.  Those kids, all girls except for one, and whoever else we could rope into the production, would gather down by the rock on Gene’s lawn. Sexism prevailed.  I’d play the dinosaurs, Gene a main character, the girls would be the ones who were chased, any boys would play the cops and the army guys. They were the ones with the guns.  All the girls could do was run.  Their speaking roles were usually relegated to, “Help, he’s after me.” After a short time the girls would become bored and tired after dashing around the yard with me charging after them, my arms outstretched.  I’d also be “directing.” Telling them where to run, how loud to scream, when to die.  

It wasn’t long before there were “creative differences.” The other kids would run out of energy, get sick of being chased, demand they be the dinosaurs or the soldiers.  

“I’m going home.” “I’m bored.” “Can we play jump rope?”  When it worked it was great, but mostly it was organized chaos.  

I have to admit though, my portrayal of a monster got better and better as time went on.  My favorite was as The Creature from the Black Lagoon, another movie of the time.  I put a lot into it. There were scenes from the movie where the creature would run along the deck of a boat and then dive off into the water.  Gene and I would practice running up on the rock and then jumping off into the “water” of his lawn.  When we acted it out as a play it was hard to tell if the screams of the girls I was chasing were pretend or real.  Everyone really got into it for a time.  We even had dialogue scenes on the “boat” discussing what to do if the creature showed up.  Then the boredom would set in, or mothers would start calling their kids to come home.  Gene and I would end up on his side porch to talk about the play, what went right, what we liked, how to make it better, more real.  We were sweaty and tired and happy too.

There were times when it was just Gene and me doing a play.  We’d bring a few chairs off his porch, set them up in the shade of a tree to make an office where we would sit as private detectives or I’d be a cop and Gene the robbery suspect I was trying to get a confession out of.  Many of those moments came straight out of Dragnet.  It was all new to Gene; his father didn’t let him watch TV.

On his porch we’d sit and write a little journal we called Film News.  One entry reads: “A two-million dollar picture is being released from Bast/Hick called Two Notches More. A picture of tornado winds, blazing guns and pretty women. A scene was so dangerous in the picture that we almost lost a cameraman.  The scene was of an exploding saloon and the camera got way too close.  Well, that’s all. See you.”

In another I mention that “Gene’s new play, Back in Time, is ready to be played.  The only thing is we don’t have the scenery.”  Also in the same issue, “Maryellen and Billy are shooting up the place in Bast/Hick’s new picture, Lovely Killers.”

I enjoyed the plays, gathering everyone together, putting on this elaborate spectacle, writing about it, trying to make it as real as possible, using Gene’s yard as our stage.  It was a wonderful way to spend summer days.

Odd things would happen.  Several times one of the girls, exhausted from being chased or just putting too much imagination into her role, would burst out crying.  Sobbing.  We’d gather around her. “What’s the matter? Did you hurt yourself?” More sobs.  Someone would get some water.  Usually there was some nearby as we’d use it for booze in a saloon scene. After we’d promise she could be another character the girl would calm down and we’d get back to the scene.

I wanted to go, go, go.  I hated stopping.  I was very much into it.  But lunch time would roll around and everyone would go home.  It wasn’t quite the same after.  Some kids wouldn’t come back or if they did they just wanted to lie on the grass, their mothers having told them about getting cramps if they ran around so soon after eating.  I’d try to do quieter stuff but the urge for action was always present.  “No, I don’t want to run to that tree. I just ate.” It was frustrating. 

Joey Boyle, one of the Boyle kids, about my age, would sometimes come out of the woods from his house into Gene’s yard.  Without his scary dogs.  He’d join in for a while then get bored.  Once he decided to liven things up with his own show.  He had us sit on the grass in Gene’s yard by the woods on Joey's property.  Joey came from behind a tree, started dancing, jumping around. Then he announced, “Ladies and Gentlemen, it’s time for the Naked Star.” No one knew exactly what this meant or what to expect next.  Joey had disappeared behind another tree.  All we heard were some rustling sounds.  A few moments later, Joey appeared, well, naked.  Not a stitch on.  He was only nine at the time so this was hardly provocative but still it wasn’t something any of the rest of us would do.  

Joey danced around some more, sang some songs, took a bow and then disappeared back into the woods.  I’m not sure what the other kids thought, the girls in particular, but I do remember we all clapped when it was over.  Just another hot afternoon’s entertainment at the Studio Palace.

Occasionally someone would get hurt when our playing would get too reckless. During our fights we liked to throw cardboard boxes at each other, pretending they were furniture during a saloon brawl.  Every once in a while a corner of one of the boxes would hit someone in the face.  “You okay?  Sorry, I was aiming for your legs.”  After a few minutes the tears would stop and we’d get back to whatever scene we were involved with.  

It was rough and tumble but never intentional.  One afternoon I got a taste of what intentional meant.  It was just Gene and me in his yard.  He had mentioned some of his cousins were coming later.  I didn’t think much about it until a car pulled up and several wild kids poured out.  They were bigger than I was, a bit older, and definitely crazier. The first thing one of them did was tackle me.  What!  I flopped on the ground with this bigger kid on top of me pining my arms.  That was the trend of the next few hours they spent rough housing.

Gene and I liked to run around in character.  His cousins wanted to play football or soccer, or a combination, I’m not sure what.  Several red balls suddenly appeared.  They started running with them.  I was supposed to chase them but all they did was turn around and fire the ball at me, or tackle me, or push me down, and once or twice take a swing at me.  

His cousins didn’t seem to have any boundaries.  “Gene, I gotta get home,” I told him trying to come up with an excuse after another hard landing on the ground.  Gene didn’t particularly like what was going on either but implored me to stay. Trying to stay away from his crazy cousins as much as I could, I avoided some of their mayhem.  Eventually, their parents, or trainers maybe, came out of Gene’s house, gathered them all up and they were gone. Worse for wear, Gene and I were glad to have his yard to ourselves again. 

Gene put up with his cousins in ways I didn’t.  He didn’t like their behavior but dealt with it, trying to get me to go along too.  “They’re just playing,” he’d say as a ball came flying at my head.  I was alternately scared of them and angry at them.  Gene was more accepting, more conciliatory in some ways. There were definite differences in our personalities.  He’d rarely get as frustrated as I would during some of our plays.  I’d want everything to be perfect. I loved being in “the zone” when I played, a place of absolute involvement in what I was doing.  Gene had a milder temperament.  I was the worldly one of the two of us.  Hard to believe.  It was likely because I was a little older impressing Gene with my flawed knowledge of the world picked up mostly through television, movies and comic books, things heavily restricted in Gene’s life.

Gene did have an odd quirk.  He was afraid of worms. How about terrified! If someone dangled a worm in front of him he would panic, scream, run as fast as he could in the opposite direction.  When word got around there was this kid on the street who was afraid of worms, a couple of the older kids would go out of their way to taunt Gene by holding up a worm in front of him.  Gene did not disappoint them, displaying instant panic mode.  That made things worse.  Some bully would toss a worm at him or threaten to make him eat it.  I tried to help but  “Leave my friend alone,” was often the best I could do.    

  

Summers in Boston could be cloudy, occasionally cool, rainy, great weather for all the worms.  Then there were the heat waves usually showing  up from late July to August, the dog days. During that time in the summer many of the kids in the neighborhood were away on vacation. I remember some of them telling me they spent a week at  White Horse Beach in Plymouth.  I liked the name.  There were times when it was just Gene and me, his huge yard all to ourselves.  During one particularly hot day Gene’s mother told us it was important we stay out of the sun. Something about heat stroke. “Keep to the shade,” she told us.  We took her seriously, and literally.  I’m not sure what we thought might happen if we stayed in the sun too long, burst into flames maybe, so we decided any sun was the enemy, not a ray of it would touch our skin.  After a little while we also realized this meant we were trapped on the porch.

“What if we run as fast as we can to the shade of the tree down by the rock,” one of us suggested.  It was decided.  By running, we would spend less time in the sun than if we casually walked over to the tree.

Bolting off the porch we charged over to the shade of one of the spruces. Lying in the shadow of the tree we caught our breath before one of us exclaimed, ”What if this tree catches on fire.  We’ve got to get to the one across the yard.”  So for the next hour or so we ran from patches of shade to patches of shade becoming hot and sweaty and overheated.  The ridiculous thing is we were convinced we were heeding Gene’s mother’s advice to stay out of the sun.

Parents at the time had more more worries for their kids’ safety than heat and humidity.  Every summer there was a new polio scare. There had been more than two hundred thousand cases of the crippling and often fatal disease since the end of the war.  A cure was being tested during the mid-fifties but with another fifty-eight thousand new cases in 1953, the year I moved to Hyde Park, “polio hysteria” manifested itself.

Polio struck kids more than any one else.  To see a healthy active kid wind up in a wheelchair, or worse, an iron lung, would understandably put people in panic mode.  Just how a kid contracted the disease was unclear underscoring the uncertainty and fear.  (Now it’s regarded that a virus in feces was the cause of most infections among typically unhygienic kids.) Guidelines included keeping kids well-bathed, well-rested, well-fed and away from crowds.   One common instruction was not to drink from a public bubbler.  Even swimming pools were closed.  As it turned out none of these precautions were effective.  All you really had to do was wash your hands a few times during the day.  Like most kids, I never did.

Many kids had the polio virus without being aware of it. The great majority may have had the ubiquitous “flu-like symptoms” for a few days but because of a healthy immune system the disease wasn’t strong enough to inflame the spinal cord which could lead to paralysis. Most kids eventually became naturally immune. Still enough kids were seriously affected that when news came of a vaccine the relief was palpable.

During the summer of 1955, the last summer before the disease was contained, I had been made aware of polio and its consequences by my parents.  One thing they told me was not to get overheated. How could I be a dinosaur and still stay cool?  So I’d run a little bit, find some shade, switch personas to Professor Trilling for a while, then run around some more.  As it turned out the only person I ever heard of that had polio was President Roosevelt. By the next summer we all had our polio shots.  Thank you Drs. Salk and Sabin.

The continuing heatwave began to sap the energy required to play our plays, so one afternoon Gene and I decided to go down to our local branch library to see if they had any books on dinosaurs. The Hyde Park library was a small building, classically styled, with a formal reading room in one wing and the kids section in the other. The children’s room with its high ceilings, walls full of books, and large tables proved to be an inviting place for Gene and me to learn as much as we could about the creatures we so inaccurately portrayed in our movies.

Maybe it was the heat or we didn’t have library cards but instead of taking books home with us we found several that had lots of pictures and, propping ourselves up at one of the tables, copied out some of the illustrations using thin tracing paper.  When we got back to Gene’s house, using the tracing paper as a guide, we’d transfer the pictures of dinosaurs, their eggs, early mammals, even fossils and dinosaurs tracks, onto the pages of a couple of small notebooks which we titled the First Dinosaur Book and The Second Dinosaur Book.  

Saber-toothed tigers shared pages with triceratops and pterodactyls.  One drawing I was particularly proud of showed a T-rex taking a large bite out of a brontosaurus.  I colored the brontosaurus brown, the rex greenish, using lots of red crayon to show the blood streaming down the brontosaurus’  back.  Gruesome and scientific at the same time.

I began an essay about dinosaurs of which I still have the first page. The penmanship is childish but I got a few things right. “Dinosaur means ‘terrible lizard.’”  Also, “When the caveman came many people believe they saw real dinosaurs.  No. Man has never seen a dinosaur face to face and no man will I don’t think.”  There were some theories expressed.  “How the dinosaurs died is an interesting story too. The dinosaurs died because the water dried up.  One dinosaur took to the sea.  That dinosaur is the whale.” 

I also started a little notebook on geology which I titled simply and elegantly, “Meet the Earth.” It was full of artfully colored pictures of rocks and minerals.

Another project we worked on for a few weeks in July of ’55 was a neighborhood newspaper.  I suppose Gene and I were sitting in the shade of one of his trees one afternoon when one of us said to the other, “We lead such interesting lives we should put the details in a newspaper that we could then sell to people.”  It sounds reasonable.  The headline in the first two page issue screamed, “Billy finds baby bird.” It continued, “Boston. July 6. Billy B found a baby bird which was found today under a tree in Gene’s yard.  Lucky (A neighborhood dog ), that mutt, was killing the bird when Billy saw it. Gene’s grandmother told him to let it go.  He did.”

I remember finding a number of birds which I would cradle in my hands for a while before putting them up on the limb of a tree.  Gene and I would search for their nests but were never successful in finding one.  Poor birds. (Better than being eaten by a killer panther though.)

I did the news on the first page while Gene worked on the features page.  Sample. “Hollywood. A new play was made today named Volcano starring Gene and Billy.”  I guess that is all you needed to know.  Another issue reported how Gene’s brother Brian, playing alone in the family car, released the parking brake  causing the vehicle to roll down the driveway hitting a tree.  The headline, quite in the tabloid style we were aiming for, stated, “Boy releases brake. Kills tree.”  Simple and succinct.

The paper only lasted a few weeks.  We’d write it inside one of the Forsythia bushes, our newsroom, make two or three copies which we would then hand out to other kids.  Since we only had a few copies we’d stand around until they read it and then give the copy to someone else.  Each copy had 5 cents printed on it but we never charged; literally we didn’t make a nickel on this project.

But it was exciting, something to look forward to.  Finding news, writing about it, having someone else read it. “Our paper came out today,” we’d say to each other, a bit proud of our effort.  Having projects like doing the newspaper gave us a sense of community living on top of the hill. 

We weren’t writing a newspaper in 1954 when Hurricane Carol swept into Boston. What a headline that would have made.  “Crazy Winds Destroy Gene’s Yard.” Gene’s yard did take a hit.  Going up there after the storm, I could see several of the blue spruces had been toppled over.  In the sunshine, the storm danger over, it was fun to walk around one of the trees, to touch their top branches, to gather up fallen pine cones that we then threw at one another.  Lots of sticky hands that day.

One morning I heard a loud noise coming from the direction of Gene’s house.  Running up there I watched as Gene’s father, shirtless, wielding a chain saw, lobbed off branches to one of the downed trees like he was Paul Bunyan. I rarely saw him at all so seeing him like this was odd. 

I did miss the trees as time went on. The stumps wept sap for a while before drying up. The next summer there was just a couple of circles in the yard where years of dropped needles had burnt out the grass.

During the best of times, Gene’s yard was idyllic. Because of its size and seclusion, it struck me as picturesque, like parts of Franklin Park, a lovely sylvan space.  It was a place where my imagination had all that room in which to expand.  We ran and played, yelled and laughed.  During quieter times we liked just to walk around in the yard, along the edges where the grass ended and the woods started.  Sometimes we’d sneak onto the Boyle’s property to climb a tree. Or we would walk down Gene's driveway to the granite posts on Prospect Street, sit on them, watch cars go by. Each day was different yet my idealized view of Gene’s yard ensured me that it would also be the same. More than anything else, that sense of his yard as our special place, never changing, always there for us, gave me a wonderful sense of contentment.

It wasn’t just the yard. It was also my friendship with Gene that made those summers special.  I had something to look forward to every morning when I woke up, a sense of purpose, whether it was putting on the plays, writing about dinosaurs, or just going up to Gene’s yard and lolling around in the shade of a tree. I liked Gene.  He was my best friend.  I looked forward to being with him. Then one day in early August of 1955 he told me he was moving.

I didn’t deal with it well.  It came as such a surprise.  Gene said he had just been told that day as well. His father had bought a house over in the adjacent town of Milton. Gene’s new house was just a few miles away as the crow flew. But I had no means to visit him there.  I didn’t have a bike yet, wouldn’t for a year or so.  Even if I did have a bike, as a young kid it’s unlikely I would have been allowed to cross the several busy highways between my house and Gene’s new one. He might as well have been moving to California.

My reaction to all of this was careless detachment. I’m in the middle of this great friendship and abruptly it’s in jeopardy  The day he moved I avoided him.  I didn’t go up to his house to say goodbye. Was I angry about him moving?  Did I have a glimpse of how my life would change? I’m sure he and I talked about the move, how we would miss each other, how somehow I could visit him at his new house, but for one reason or another I did not want to be there the day he left.

Instead, on the Saturday Gene moved, I went  down to the Fairmount Theatre to see Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier, a compilation of the episodes that had been shown on the Disneyland TV show the previous several months  On TV the episodes had been broadcast in black and white.  On the big screen they were in color.  It was like watching an entirely different series.  Maybe it took my mind off things. Coming home I walked down Prospect Street past Gene’s. The moving truck was gone.  There was no one around.  Gene’s yard was empty.  

A number of people lived in Gene’s old house after he moved, none of them with kids. As the years passed the house began to deteriorate.  It became a sort of rooming house for a while until it eventually stood empty. One night someone reported smoke.  Gene’s yard was full of fire apparatus. The demolition of the house followed.  The yard where we played our plays, sat in the shade of his great trees and lived our summer lives as only kids can, was now rutted and scarred from the tires of the huge trucks hauling away the walls and ceilings and floors of my friend’s childhood home. 

As it came to pass, from the day he moved, I never played in Gene’s yard again.