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Gerry

Page history last edited by Gerry Hine 15 years, 1 month ago

 

                                                                                            Soapbox

               My sister Dolly was the person who guided all that went on in the household where I grew up. Nowadays you might have called my brothers and sisters latch key kids. Back in the sixties, it was “the way it is”.  We were a tight knit bunch of kids. Dolly is the oldest sister, two older brothers, Brother and Ronnie, and a younger brother and sister, Darryl and Anne made up the kids in my household. I was right in the middle.  It was always peaceful and my world existed within the length of Oronoque Road down to the Boston Post Road in one direction and up the big hill onto Zion Hill Road towards “Big Rock”, a truly monumental journey, in the other direction. A trip to Big Rock was not undertaken lightly, but the reward was seeing the faint markings on the far side of the rock that look like fossil footprints. We never could figure out what type of dinosaur left those footprints.  My neighborhood was built post- WWII out of an old sand quarry and my earliest memories are of Cape Cod houses on sand lots with no grass and a few small elm trees that the neighborhood dads dug out of the woods and transplanted into their front yards. There was a loop of road just to the south of our home called Joyce Court. The Court measured exactly one half mile when using the odometer of the family station wagon.

               All my friends lived on Joyce Court and we shared many summertime adventures either in the high grass bordering the north side of the development or on the street or in the yards of the Court. It is amazing how well organized the kids were back then. There were two gangs of kids, one gang lived on our side of the Court and the other group lived on the far side. I still remember how alien the far side of the Court seemed to me whenever I had occasion to be over there. One midsummer, the boys held a soapbox derby race. The object of the race was to make a cart that was strong enough to go down the steep side of the hill located towards the backside of Joyce Court and then travel the circumference of the Court to end up back at the starting line. To perform this task each driver of a cart had to have a team of pushers. You have to remember, Joyce Court is flat except for that hill at the back end of the loop, and you had to have someone push your cart if you expected to finish the race. There were few rules of conduct for this race other than only two people at a time could push the cart and the push that got the race started was clearly marked off so that the carts used gravity alone going down the hill until a specified point at the bottom where pushing commenced once again.

               The Scriappa’s are one of the families closest to my own. There were three boys, Mickey, who was Brother’s age, Tommy, who was Ronnie’s age and Carmine, who was the same age as my brother Darryl. Mickey was the gang leader for our side of the neighborhood. He did a great job organizing us into playing games like war, or planning bike and foot races. For the truly extravagant productions, the suggestions for things like circus and haunted house came from my sister Dolly. During the summer of 1964, there was a Little Rascals movie on the television one Saturday morning featuring a soapbox derby race where all the kids build these outlandish carts to go down Dead Man’s Hill.  Of course, after seeing that, we had to do it too. Teams were decided at a meeting held in the Scriappa’s backyard and Mickey gave a week for all contestants to build their carts. I remember playing over at Carmen’s house and seeing their cart one day while the older kids were not around to chase us away. It was a thing of beauty. The center piece of wood was a two inch by twelve inch by ten foot long weathered board with cross legs of two by six wood acting as axels to nail the wheels onto. The construction of the seat was angled scrap wood matching the width of the main frame. There was a pad nailed to the backrest. If you have ever seen those rail drag cars, you know what I mean. It was a thing of beauty and it looked fast! By contrast, the cart I helped to build with my brothers looked ugly and squat. While building our cart, my brother Ronnie took me with him to scavenge wheels off discarded stuff from the swamp bordering the new supermarket down by the Post Road. After mucking about in the mud all morning pulling all sorts of junk out of the ooze we ended up removing the wheels from our lawn mower, we had to make sure to replace them after the race.  We hoped that dad would not find out what we did.

               The day of the big race dawned bright and clear. The trees murmured with excitement as all the carts assembled at the starting line. It was like a parade seeing the kids push their soapboxes down the street towards the rallying point, with moms coming out of houses with their babies to wave and exclaim their enthusiasm. We produced five carts in total. There was so much individuality and ingenuity in the designs that to this day I am surprised no one from the hood ever became an engineer or designer for the big three automakers or at least NASA. My particular delight was observing the types of wheels used and how they attached to the carts. With our cart, we took great pains in trying to incorporate a metal axel on the front steering wheels. Power turns made at the bottom of the hill and the two corners where Joyce Court met Oronoque Road produced a high stress load on the front wheels. We finally settled on a long bolt hammered into the two by four inch axle with a nail alongside the bolt acting as a shim to keep the whole thing tight. Mechanically our soapbox car was a masterpiece of innovation. You can see we took this race seriously. We performed stress tests where Brother and Ronnie would kick the wheels as hard as they could three times each and not break them.

               Dolly was the flag waver. After getting the carts lined up, she quieted the crowd of children watching to go over the rules and to remind everyone that there were three judges located at different points along the racecourse to ensure no one cheated. With a countdown of “three, two, one” and a wave of her flag the race was on. You had to have been there to understand the excitement and the volume of screaming that took place the moment the carts started to move. Brother was driving our cart with Ronnie and me pushing. As we got to the release line, all the carts were even. The best part of the race was right here! Under their own power now, they had to steer and hold together for the thirty yards that the hill provided them to gain speed. Right off the bat, the Scriappa’s cart had to make a big swerve to avoid plowing into another racer. Mickey using his rope pulls could not control their movement accurately because his cart was too long. He could not use his feet to help control his steering. The front wheels tucked under and the front axle broke away from the rest of the cart. They were out of the race right at the start!

               Brother drove our cart like a champion shouting “better luck next time” as he left Mickey behind. At the bottom of the hill, Ronnie and I joined and started pushing. About every one hundred yards, the driver would jump out of the cart and one of the pushers would take his place. This is a good plan if you do not have a lot of family to help push. Before we arrived at the Oronoque Road halfway point another soapbox was out of the race due to a steering malfunction. The rope they used for steering broke and they ended up smashed into the curb. The Hine soapbox was in good position three quarters through the race but I was tiring badly. All of a sudden, I felt a hard tap on my shoulder and a voice say, “move over, I’m taking over”. Turning I saw Mickey Scriappa with a look of determination on his face that said, nothing is going to stop us now. The race was close but the long slow rise of the last hill was too much for our team. The Pyrch family beat us by three feet. We did not win but I gained a lot of respect for Mickey’s sense of fair play. The whole event made all the participants feel that they had accomplished something spectacular; we were kings of the world for the rest of the day.

 

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