CHAPTER
THREE: AUTUMN IN DENTDALE
BY
ANONYMOUS
DENT
Spanky Trenton and I were sitting at The Rail over
on Clements Bridge Road the other night.
We were talking about some of the things that triggered our best
memories in Dentdale. There were ball
games, and parades, berry festivals, fireworks, weddings and funerals that were
all memorable. We got to talking about
the Boy Scout’s newspaper drives, and how we’d get up early on Saturday morning
to load up whatever pickup truck, or station wagon with Dentdale’s used
newspapers. The Courier Post, The
Suburban, The Penny Saver, they were all welcome additions to our recycling efforts. But the mother-load of newspaper recycling
resided at the homes of Dentdale citizens who had their Philadelphia Inquirer
delivered daily with the super bonus of: THE SUNDAY EDITION!!!
It was one of those moments where we both (Spanky
and I) said:
“You
know you’re old, when you can remember newspapers!”
Followed quickly by: "Jinx"
Well, I can remember both ends of the newspaper
business. I remember myself (Anonymous Dent), Toot
Barrington, and Scooter Reamer, going down to Third Avenue to load up on the Camden
Courier Posts! The smell of rubber
bands, newsprint, and on a rainy day; the smell of wet newspaper going into
plastic wraps! We’d load up those big
canvas bags with our load of newspapers and hit the road. Keeping our bikes on the road, and perfecting
your paper toss was about as much multi-tasking as we were gonna do in those
days, and frankly, over the course of time, I haven’t gotten much better at
that multi-tasking thing!
Most of the folks in Dentdale knew that the Boy Scouts
or some other organization would have a paper recycling drive, and so they’d
just stack up their papers in the garage, or put them in the paper bags that
they brought their groceries home in!
Way back then (the 1960s) we didn’t have little plastic bags for
groceries, and no self-respecting citizen of Dentdale would even think of
bringing their own reusable, canvas tote to the grocery. I remember when Frisky Barrington came back
from his first trip to Paris. He had
gone to the ‘Super Marché’ and stood there like a fool waiting for it to be
bagged! All the other Parisians thought
he was a fool for not knowing that you brought your own bags…. Hehehe!
Back in the United States every super market had bag
boys (and later bag girls) and for the most part, your groceries were taken out
to the car for you. Eventually the
insurance companies tired of paying out claims for scratched and dented cars,
and the supermarkets got tired of herding their carts from blocks or miles
away. That’s when those big barricades
were put in place so that the bag boy held your cart at the front door while
you pulled the car up to be loaded. Of
course, if you shopped at the A&P over in Denton Heights (which was in a
really weird location), you had your coffee freshly ground at the
register. Man, did that smell good.
Well, you’ve probably noticed that this Chapter
started off with Spanky and me chatting about the newspaper drive, and pretty
quickly moving over to the smell of fresh ground coffee. Smokey Haines was sitting with her friend
Fluffy Nassau at the end of the bar having her Budweiser with her always
present Parliament Light 100’s with the recessed filters. It really isn’t too difficult to figure out how
a nice girl named Karen Haines became known as Smokey Haines. Anyway, Smokey and Fluffy chirp in about
their favorite Dentdale scents! Not
surprisingly Smokey remembers her Mom’s first cigarette of the day and the
smell of that, mixing with coffee and hairspray.
I don’t smoke, but I have to admit that on occasion, a freshly lit
cigarette does take me back to the good-old-days when you’d walk into the VFW, Dentdale Firehouse, or Cinelli's Restaurant to find a thick haze of cigarette smoke. Some writers describe that as a ‘fog’, but I
recently saw that haze described as a ‘fug’!
A ‘fug’ seems to be a more apt description!
In that regard, nobody could forget the stanky
stank, of Jake Barrington’s cigars. Jake’s
son Frisky told me that he’s gonna send old Jake to the crematorium with a box
of El Producto Cigars so that Jake can have one last smoke!
Carol Barrington allegedly gave Dr. Judson
$10 cash to ban Jake from smoking inside the house! They had the place on Barrington Avenue that’s
just a few doors down from The Rail.
It’s the blue house with the big porch.
On a rainy day, while the rest of Dentdale smelled clean and fresh (that is, when the prevailing wind sent the
Fiberglas smoke the other way) you could be at the corner of Clements
Bridge Road and still smell Jake Barrington’s cigars as he puffed away in his
forced exile on that porch!
Fluffy mentioned the smell of Imprevu by Coty, which
of course led to someone else mentioning Chantilly (which is still available at
the Lady Fifth Avenue Boutique). Mitch
Edwards brought up the scent of Brylcreem and Old Spice that his old man used
to wear. Then Rusty Moore mentioned Hai
Karate and Pet Rocks. Of course you
can’t smell a Pet Rock, but Hai Karate and Pet Rocks were pretty much what
most of our Dad's got for Christmas back in 1975!
Pretty soon, the whole bar started chatting about
this scent; that stank; this odor; that smell!
Which of course led to about ten of us marching out the front door to
enjoy the exhaust from The Rail’s air conditioning system. Between The Rail, and Mrs. Irwin's house was a patch of grass, and this is where the air conditioning always vented itself. Whether it was a window fan, or window air conditioner, or the now existing central air conditioning that smell hadn't changed in at least forty years! Seemed we couldn’t decide whether it smelled
more of old beer, oregano, cigarettes, or pee from the guys (we assume it was the
guys???) who decided it was time to take a wiz on the wall of the bar….
We kind of came to a consensus… which I have since
forgotten, but the next time we ran into each other (which was a SOONER ,
rather than LATER event) we all had a list of scents that took us back to
memories old, memories not-so-old, and possibly a few memories that were quite mistaken!
At the second convening of the
Great-Scents-of-Dentdale-Club, Snookey Albertson came in the front door wearing
that Chantilly that was mentioned the previous week. Actually, Snookey was about half a block away
from the open front door of The Rail, and her Chantilly announced her imminent
arrival. By the second or third beer, we were all just shouting out and
tumbling all over one another with our lists of great smells. Just when I thought we had exhausted the
entire list, someone would come up with something new, and we’d be back at it
again.
Most of us did conclude that autumn in Dentdale was
the best smelling season. It was agreed
that autumn in Dentdale did not necessarily align properly with the Autumnal
Equinox. The smells of autumn began in
August with the scent of fresh school supplies:
·
Brand new #2 Dixon Ticonderoga pencils
and the smell of their fresh shavings from the first sharpening.
The first sharpening of those Dixon Ticonderoga’s happening about three
weeks before the start of school!
·
A fresh box of Crayola crayons! Only the Tavistock Hills kids had the 64
count box!
·
Being selected to clap the chalkboard
erasers outside of Kingston School, and the resulting “Death-by-Chalk” that soon
followed.
·
The smell of that Pink Pearl eraser,
that you swore you’d keep clean.
Probably one of the only promises that we kept… because we lost the
eraser, or just never bothered to use it!
·
Construction paper… all colors. But best smelling when freshly cut and
bonded with Rubber cement or that glue paste stuff!
·
Rubber cement
·
Elmer’s Glue
·
Glue paste that you could eat…… well,
you shouldn’t have, but some of us did.
A quick hand-count of those attending this particular meeting of The
Great Scents Club indicated that 100% of us had eaten Glue Paste at one time or
another. It was further determined that
the eating of this paste had nothing to do with us ending up at The Rail for
more nights then we could count!
·
Ditto machines. Those early-day photo copiers that printed
all of our tests, quizzes and other handouts!
·
Play-Doh: again, 100% of us had eaten Play-Doh; and
again, no correlation could be found between Play-Doh ingestion, and
alcoholism!
·
Saw dust that the janitors used to sweep
the floors at Kingston School, Avon School, or Woodland School This saw dust was especially useful after an unexpected
bout of projectile vomiting (also known as 'P.V'. by children; or 'A.P.V.' in adults)..
As several of the adults at the table had (just last Friday night) been afflicted with A.P.V.; an investigation was immediately launched into its causation and possible cure. It was unanimously agreed (by the group) that the
ingestion of large amounts of beer and wine, in combination with tequila
chasers, and vodka stingers would be declared as an ‘unexpected’ and possibly ‘an always
surprising’ precursor to Adult Projectile Vomiting (the accursed A.P.V.). However, ‘room-spinning’ and ‘toilet-hugging’
were not declared as “Unexpected” or “Always Surprising” results of such
consumption/behavior.
Stryder Newton had just walked into the bar to begin
his shift as a mixologist at The Rail.
It was determined that Stryder was the designated driver for the field
trip that had been voted on just minutes earlier. This was a fortuitous choice, as Stryder had
just emptied his Chevy Surburban of the equipment needed for his earlier
commitment at the Softball Fields on Shreve Avenue.
The committee
had decided that a scavenger hunt needed to be organized and immediately acted
upon. Each participant was given one of
the items on the sniff-list, (not snuff list -after all, this is South Jersey, not South Philly) and it was determined that a quick drive down
Clements Bridge Road to the Target store in Deptford would provide the group
with the immediate satisfaction that the participants demanded.
So, onward they go:
On Dasher, on Dancer....
on Smokey, on Fluffy...
on Spanky, on Michael...
on Stryder...
Anyway:
Tweety Timber and Queenie Lenton had walked into the bar just moments after the group left! After asking Sam Trinity (the remaining bar-meister) where everyone had gone, they jumped in Tweety’s Camaro and sped down to Target to find everyone! They didn’t see Stryder’s Suburban in the parking lot, but they had no trouble finding the group. They just followed the scent of Chantilly mixed with Parliaments, and voila: eight adults having a huffing party in the kid's school supply section of Target.
On Dasher, on Dancer....
on Smokey, on Fluffy...
on Spanky, on Michael...
on Stryder...
Anyway:
Tweety Timber and Queenie Lenton had walked into the bar just moments after the group left! After asking Sam Trinity (the remaining bar-meister) where everyone had gone, they jumped in Tweety’s Camaro and sped down to Target to find everyone! They didn’t see Stryder’s Suburban in the parking lot, but they had no trouble finding the group. They just followed the scent of Chantilly mixed with Parliaments, and voila: eight adults having a huffing party in the kid's school supply section of Target.
Everyone gathers the items on their list, and heads
to the check-out! One item per person
was the rule, which led to eleven slightly tipsy customers creating an urgent
need for extra cashiers at Target.
However, Stryder did stop to stock up on tampons for
the bar. He also bought a fresh supply
of felt tipped pens and markers, so that he could make fresh signs for the
commodes in the ladies room (signs that would remind ‘the ladies’ that the
aforementioned tampons really weren’t supposed to be flushed). Stryder imagined using the vividly colored construction
paper for his signs – but he knew that even hot pink paper was just another
round in his losing battle against toilet back-up. As a special surprise, Stryder used The Rail’s
petty cash account to purchase some nicotine patches for Smokey Haines. He figured that the less she smoked, the
more she drank, and that all-in-all it was a good investment for the bar to
make!
Back to the bar went everyone! It can be safely said that The Rail has
pretty much seen everything under the sun!
Whether it was Willie Mosconi making some incredible shots on the
billiard table, or Jake Barrington taking some incredible verbal shots at
Richard Nixon on The Rail’s television screen, there’s very little that hasn’t
been done at The Rail. However, The Rail
had never hosted a Kindergarten Huffing Party.
These folks were acting like idiots!
“Here, smell
this!”
“No, smell that…”
…one after the other!
Eventually, everyone had a bite to eat, and things
started calming down. More than a few
people mentioned that the smell of Fiberglas was a nice(ish) smell, but only
when mixed with the scent of the fall leaves.
Dentdale’s deciduous trees are mostly Maple, and Oaks. Here and there you'll a
couple of Mimosa trees (like the big one in Dr. Judson's yard), some pine, and in some spots where weeds grow tall,
there’s a scent of dried grass. Even those little burrs that collected on your
socks have a smell. It was a unanimous decision that
the smell of fresh-cut grass in mid-October was always a nostalgic smell, and
for some, it was the smell of a burning pile of leaves that brought them back
to a time that ‘once was’.
There’s a smell to football weather. For those Dentdale citizens who played brass
instruments in the Denton High School band, the smell of Noxon Metal Cleaner
meant the beginning of autumn to them!
Even those who weren’t in the band knew the smell of that product,
because their Mom’s used it to clean ‘The Good Silver’ for the Thanksgiving
dinner.
It was too late for Webber’s Hardware to be open,
and no one was particularly motivated to run over to Home Depot for some Noxon
Metal Polish. Of course, mentioning
Home Depot brought about a reflection from Frisky Barrington about his brother
Toot working at Channel Lumber, and Two Guys Department Store when they first
opened.
Well, you can’t mention Two Guys without mentioning
the White Horse Drive-in that the Two Guys store was built upon. With this, a bunch of remembrances about our
folks putting us in pajamas to go to the White Horse Drive-in (or worse, making
us change in the car), and the smells of the back of the car as we all
struggled to (stay awake) and watch the featured film.
Going to the White Horse Drive-In you immediately
jumped out of the family car and ran to the playground. The Drive-In’s popcorn and hotdog stands'
vent system filled the air with the sweet treats, and delicacies that were to
be had (for a price). This was probably
the first lesson that the kids had on how to keep ‘on-budget’. Mom always loaded the car with snacks. We didn’t have a lot of money, so the
Drive-In offered us a budget-conscious way to have a family outing. I trusted my Mom on a lot of things. But, even as a kid, I knew that the
fresh-made, Drive-in popcorn was ten thousand times better than the Jiffy Pop
we had brought with us! Why? Because it just smelled better! Sometimes, Moms are just plain stupid!
It’s getting late at The Rail, and we all make
promises that The Great Scents of Dentdale club was adjourning for the evening!
By this point, we had all sobered up, and as we
headed to our cars, or walked the few blocks to our homes, we could smell the
best smell(s) of all:
Freshly
fallen maple leaves, mixed with oak leaves, in piles small and large.
The
remembrance of line dried sheets on a cool but sunny Dentdale afternoon.
