Bear Canyon, the Lion's Cage, Clay Cliffs, Indian Rock, and White Bridge

One of the things about growing up in Canby Park was the nicknames for the various places we would play. Bear Canyon was sort of a crater in the woods near the train tracks. There was a huge rock sitting up at the top on the side. Bear Canyon was a place where we would ride out bikes down one side and of the crate and gather speed to zoom up the other side. If we went fast enough it was possible to get some air when you hit the top of the opposite side. Older kids hung out on the big rock and probably smoked pot.

If you went down the tracks towards Wilmington you would find the Lion's Cage on the west side of the tracks. It was the outlet for the storm sewers from the west side of Wilmington to empty out into the little creek that in turn dumped into the Little Mill Creek which dumped into the Christiana River. The Lion's Cage was a huge concrete box with one open side that had bars. Inside was three small platforms that looked like places a lion trainer would have the lions pose. In fact they were there to break up the flow of storm water in heavy rains. Kids in Canby Park all knew about the Lion's Cage and many of us had made our way through the storm sewers more than once. The storm sewer pipes were about 5 feet in diameter and ran for a long way. There were junctions and places where the sanitary sewer could overflow in the event of heavy rains. Imagine a eleven-year old kid wandering through the sewers. It happened in Canby Park.

Next was Clay Cliffs. They were just a place downstream from the storm sewer outlet where the water flow eroded the hillside revealing the large open face of clay. The water pooled there so it was a place to play in the water and to catch tadpoles, crayfish, minnows, and whatever else was unlucky enough to be found by us kids.

Indian Rock was a place on the Little Mill Creek where there were a bunch of rocks and some fall in the creek that caused the water to flow rather fast. It was a good place to sit and hang out in the woods and also to go into the creek to cool off. I remember more than once sitting in the fast moving water allowing it to flow right over me. One time we walked to the laundry mat on Germay Drive and bought a small box of laundry detergent for 25 cents, took it back to Indian Rocks, and dumped it in causing a huge amount of suds on the downstream side. It was probably not good for the environment but it was pretty exciting for a couple of kids.

If you went downstream from Indian Rocks you hit White Bridge. This was the nickname for the bridge where Maryland Avenue crossed the Little Mill Creek. The creek had some deep spots there and we sued to fish. One time Paul Schofield and I caught a catfish under the bridge. Paul and I also walked down the creek picking up soda and beer cans or bottles looking for eels. For some reason eels used to make their homes in these bits of litter. I don't remember what we ever did with them but I remember dumping out can after can and once in a while we'd find an eel.

Going the other way up the Little Mill Creek there was a deep spot where there were fish called mud suckers. My friend Mark Emory and I caught those and took them to an old man on Seneca Road who used to eat them. I can't remember the guys name.

Those days in the woods at Canby Park were pretty amazing times. Between parents not letting kids run the roads like we did back then and all of the electronics kids have today there is probably nobody doing those things we did. It was a special time and those days will always be a find memory. If I could do it all again I would in a heartbeat.

Going to Prices Corner

The first cool place I started to travel to on my own was Prices Corner shopping center. I was about 10-11 years old, I discovered that there was a dirt road that ran right along the tracks along side of the Wilsmere Rail Yard from Dupont Road to Centerville Road. The distance from my house to Prices Corner was about 2.5 miles, flat, and the dirt road was safe from automobile traffic. It was an easy ride for a young kid.

At Prices Corner there was everything a kid could want. Kiddie World was a great toy store, the gold standard of toy stores in the area. They had model trains, bicycle accessories, and all the other any kid would want. There was also Woolworth's which has a lunch counter with water ice, soft pretzels, hot dogs, and other great stuff. Woolworth's also had a pet section and a record section. Other stores were JC Penny and Sears. Both of those stores were not that appealing because of the lack of kid stuff.

I remember many times riding my bicycle to Woolworth's and picking up records. I always bought 45s because I had not really learned of the value of owning albums. Some of the ones I remember riding out and purchasing were Don't Give Up on Us by David Soul, Beast of Burden by the Rolling Stones, The Devil Went Down to Georgia by the Charlie Daniels Band, and various ones by Blondie.

I also discovered riding the DART bus in this part of my life. The fare to Prices Corner was 35 cents but if I got on with a group of people, I could quickly drop my money in a spilt second after the person in front of me and the money would drop down and it would be impossible to tell how much each of us put in. Or perhaps, the driver just trusted everyone, didn't care, or was cutting a kid a break. But for whatever reason, on days when I took the bus I was able to ride out for a few pennies on many occasions. It was a fun thing to do and I could put together enough money to buy a record, soft pretzel, or water ice.

Back to riding my bike. In those days I would leave the bike out in from of Woolworth's or Kiddie World without a lock and it was never an issue. The ride through the rail yard was always fun and I would get to see the car shop working on freight cars and the locomotive servicing area and whatever locomotives were there. There was always locomotives switching freight cars around, sometimes a through train would roll through, and once in a while I would see something special like the circus train, a weed sprayer train, or other work train. Most of the time the bike rides to Prices Corner were with my buddy Mark Emory, he liked a lot of the same things and we did a lot of bike riding together. Other places we would ride were to Rockford Park, Banning Park, and the Wilmington Riverfront. A lot of the time we didn't have money and just rode out and back or did a little window shopping. When we rode to other places we often stopped along the way at a 7-11 store and bought Slurpees. If we didn't have money it was never an issue to stop and get a drink from someone's garden hose.

Prices Corner was a good first destination but it didn't take long before I wanted to ride my bicycle or the bus to further, more interesting places. To this day I'm always looking for new and exciting destinations.

Hobby House

We always went shopping at the Pathmark on Kirkwood Highway and one of the things I liked to do was wander over to the nearby hobby store called Hobby House, this was located about 1/2 mile away at Midway Shopping Center and was two doors down from Hobby Art. I always figured that the two stores were related but I never really cared about Hobby Art because it was more arts and crafts while Hobby House was trains, slot cars, and other models. Those were the important hobbies anyway.

One of the remarkably different things from today is that it was not unusual for a kid to wander off to another store, much less one 1/2 mile away, and the trip involved crossing the busy and dangerous Limestone Road. This was common and a parent was not thought of as awful for allowing their child to do so at the age of 11 or 12. Even more so was Chris, three years younger would tag along and be in my charge. The times were so different back then.

One of the ways I earned money was by helping people with groceries and the trips to Pathmark offered me an opportunity to do so. Since Hobby House was a bit if a hike it was a bit of a math challenge to calculate the amount of money I earned against the time it would take to walk to Hobby House select a product and return without delaying my mom. I have always been a math person and naturally just took to doing mental math in the moment. As I got older, I also learned to constantly calculate arrival time based upon how far we had to go, the current time, and the speed that we were traveling.

Hobby House was the second best hobby store around, the gold standard was Mitchells on Concord Pike but we just didn't get up there very often. Even so, Hobby House had all of the things a young empire builder wanted. I could buy a freight car for 99 cents. I also bought non-train model kits as well. Some of my favorites were a WWII Landing Ship, a four-plan set of the Blue Angels, the USS Enterprise, Squad 51, and the Batmobile. There was also a time when Chris and I were were into slot cars and Hobby House had lots of those. One thing I always wanted to do was to buy the coveted slot car / model train crossing and combine the two but there was always something else and it never happened.

As far as I can remember we always made it back on time even though I didn't have a watch. I never liked wearing a watch, rings, or necklaces so I got really good at finding clocks around my environs or catching glances of people watches as they we close. Today, since I always have a cell phone I've lost the knack for checking other people's wrist watches.

Hobby House has been gone for decades, Mitchell's is gone from Concord Pike, and I still play with model trains.

Dave Garman

One of the great guys I used to work with at the chemical factory was David L. Garman. Dave was from Virginia and moved to Delaware sometime in his early adulthood. Dave was a mechanic assigned to the chemical plant and I came to know him when he was reassigned to the power house. It did not take long to figure out that he was an amazing mechanic.

He served in the Korean War as a Private First Class in the Marine Corps. Like many of the other war veterans I knew, he never liked to talk about his time in the war. Once in a while he would say a few things. I did learn that his time in the Marines was really rough and he told of some really ugly fighting. He spoke of fighting waves of soldiers who came charging without gun. They we ordered to just keep coming and coming picking up guns form fallen soldiers as they charged. Since then I've seen this sort of thing portrayed very graphically in the cinema, I can't imagine how that must have felt.

Whenever there was a problem Dave could fix it. He was an old-time mechanic that knew more tricks than any mechanical person I've ever met. He knew tricks to take apart things that seemed permanently stuck together, he could remove a broken off pipe from a piece of equipment without any trouble, he could solve problems that seemed hopeless. This is the guy you want in a power house because the name of the game is to stay running all the time. Our factory made a million dollars of product a day so shutting down to fix something was frowned upon by the management because shutting down the power house meant shutting down the plant.

Our equipment was old, mostly from the mid 1950s when the Dupont Company built the "new" power house back then. Some of the equipment was so old that I think it may have been some of the last of its type in the entire state. One of the things was the Copes Thermostatic Tube automatic feed water control. This was the last automatic control system that was not based on some sort of electronic or pneumatic controller. Dave could handle maintaining it and I knew how to operate it. I knew the system was as old as the steam locomotives that I so loved and I also knew most power plant workers at the time never saw one, much less knew how to operate it. We also had the last plant whistle in Delaware and I was the guy who blew it last when one of the supervisors made us stop blowing it.

Dave seemed a little rough at first but was indeed a very kind man. He often had great stories and he somewhat liked trains. he told me stories about the big steam locomotives of the Norfolk & Western Railway hauling long coal trains over the mountains in Virginia and the modern electric locomotives of the Virginian Railway that competed with the N&W.

Dave passed on in January 4, 2000, shortly after retiring. This was the case for so many of the men who worked at the chemical plant. The retirement age was 58 and many didn't make it much longer. I'm glad I got out of the chemical plant when I did but I value all I learned from him. When I find myself with something broken and seemingly unfixable, I think about Dave Garman and what he would do.

My First Real Dance with a Real Girl

I high school I was involved in a leadership and skills club called VICA, the Vocational and Industrial Clubs of America. Today the club continues on as SkillsUSA. It was a great experience and I learned a lot of stuff that I carry with me to this day. There was an annual VICA leadership retreat weekend at National Guard Barracks in Bethany Beach. There was a lot of leadership related related classes. On Saturday night the was a dance. Now I always loved music, girls, and dancing but in high school I was often shy to ask girls to dance with me. Being away from most of my peers and feeling the juices of leadership flowing through my veins had me confident enough to ask girls to dance with me. I danced with several to faster songs and it was fantastic. I felt really confident, which I didn't really feel around girls at that time in my life. I was dancing with a girl named Elizabeth Plumber, a girl from one of the downstate schools, when a slow song came on. The song was Bonnie Tyler's Total Eclipse of the Heart. With all of the confidence a teenage boy ever had I reached for Elizabeth's hand and took it for the slow dance. She came up close to me and we danced. Her hands were like sandpaper, it turns out she was a masonry student and had coarse man hands. I was a little surprised but that didn't stop me from enjoying the dance. I never asked for her number and I never saw her again. In 1982 there was no internet, no cell phones, and I didn't have a car so it was not possible to try to go on any dates with a girl who lived downstate. Even calling her would have been long distance which would have not gone over well with my mom. Kids today have not idea what long distance phone service is. That was my first slow dance with a girl, each time I hear that song I always remember Elizabeth and her mason hands.

One Night a Busboy

As a teenager I never really wanted to have a job working at a place. I was an entrepreneur, really a hustler and an idea man. I made my money helping people carrying groceries, cutting grass, raking leaves, painting, moving furniture, and selling trinkets. I always found a way to make enough money for the things I wanted. I also picked up a newspaper route in about 1977. I know it was 1977 because I remember delivering the newspaper that carried the headline "The King is Dead."

In the newspaper business I quickly learned that service paid. I was the kid that put the paper between the storm door and the main door so people didn't have to go outside to pick it up. This made me a lot of money in tips. The weekly price was about $1.35 and I often got $2.00 and was told to keep the change. At Christmas the tips were really big. It was a great gig. I was a successful businessman. Not only that but I also figured out the system set up by the News Journal Company. They rewarded paperboys for getting new customers with points. And again because it was 1977 the points were called "Spacebucks" honoring the groundbreaking movie Star Wars that had just come out. If someone quit the route I didn't call it in and would keep an extra paper or two on my route. This was always helpful because most days someone would stop me and say "hey kid, do you have an extra paper?" This was always good becauseI never carried change and that normally meant they gave me fifty cents or a dollar and I got to keep the change for a thirty-five cent paper. When I would pick up a new customer I would use one of my surplus papers to service them and call it on one of the special windows of time when they offered double Spacebucks to paperboys as an incentive.

This continued throughout my time as a paper boy and I carried extra papers and sold them to people stopping me on the street and I would also drop them at the DelCampo bakery which was the last stop on my route. They got one paper but the guys there never minded extras and if they didn't get sold they were put to good use getting in with the bakery guys who then loaded me up with fresh-from-the-oven rolls. The place always smelled fantastic and the hot rolls tasted better than candy. When my mom understood my business practices she called me a hustler.

Also working around the neighborhood got me plenty of work and money. I cut grass in Canby Park and all of the neighborhoods in the area. I would push the mower as far as St. Elizabeth to cut grass because the folks over there had bigger lawns. I remember a woman over there named Irene once asked me if I wanted to buy pot with the money I had earned. I thanked her and told her no. I never told anyone about the offer but it was way wrong to bring it up to a young teenager.

My dad thought I should try working a job. He was a part-time bartender at a neighborhood Italian restaurant and bar called Picciotti's on 4th street. He set it up for me to be a busboy and I reported to work in a pair of black pants and white shirt. They showed me the ropes of clearing tables and wiping them down. It sucked. I hated it from the first table. It is not that the work was below me but I knew I didn't need to clean up dirty tables to make money. I had my own ways and they suited me fine and I worked hard and always made enough money for my needs. One time, before the paper route, I was carrying groceries for people and I made enough money to buy a Welcome Back Kotter record player. It was awesome to own such an amazing piece of musical equipment. I also made enough money to sustain my model train habit and play some occasional games of pinball. Why did I need to clean off tables? I especially hated emptying and wiping out the ashtrays. That was totally disgusting.

After a couple of hours and manager came to see me and asked how it was going. I told him okay but in a voice that said otherwise. He said, "you don't really like this do you?" I shook my head in agreement and he asked if I wanted to go home and I said yes. He said okay and thanked me and I left and never worked another day in the food industry. I never got paid for those couple of hours and never cared, I was just glad I didn't have to keep doing it.

A Starry Night in Inner Mongolia

Spring break of 2004 was my first trip to China. Alan, Don and traveled there to see the last mainline steam railroad in the world. China is a place I have come to know and love. As of this moment I've been there 5 times for up to three weeks. I've seen more of China than most Chinese people. This first trip was epic and magical because it was my first experience in China. The steam trains operated in the far north, Inner Mongolia, near the Mongolian border. The whole trip was just a culture shock because our senses were overwhelmed with new sensations, new smells, sounds, tastes, and sights. Every waking moment was sensory overload.

We hit the ground in Beijing with no reservations and only a handful of things I printed off the internet. We found our way to the main train station and bought a ticket on an overnight train to Shenyang (pronounced Shen Ya). There we found a taxi to first location for steam trains, the town of Tieling which was the base for the Tiefa Coal Railway, Tiefa was named for Tieling and Faku which are along the railway. At Tiefa we experienced the steam era as it mush have been in the 1940s in the US. There were frequent trains and nearly every one was hauled by steam locomotive. The last two steam locomotives built for commercial freight service anywhere in the world were operating at Tiefa. They were built in 1999! We got rides in the locomotives cabs and toured the shop facilities and saw countless steam-powered trains come and go. It was heaven for train nuts like us.

After a few days there we went to a town called Tongliao which was the end point for the 600-mile-long JiTong Railway. The railway ran from Togliao to Jining, all in the province of Inner Mongolia. The in the very rural northern part of China. We attracted a crowd most everywhere we went because people didn't really see Westerners in these parts of China. We met some nice girls who worked in the station at Tongliao, I don't know what job they had but they wore very formal uniforms and they were excited and interested to have Western visitors to their station. My favorite was a 6-foot tall girl named Ya Ya. There were lots of jokes about taking Ya Ya home during the rest of the trip.

We had a funny episode that involved buying a ticket. Nobody on the staff knew any English and we knew about five words of Chinese. We point to a train ticket from a previous trip, then pointed to the map to Tongliao, and then pointed to the town of Reshui which was the town closest to Jing Peng Pass where we wanted to see mainline steam trains cross a mountain range. We were trying to determine which window to use to buy a train ticket. The girl seemed to understand our request and she took Don off for a walk and guided him to the bathroom. He stopped and shook his head no and they both laughed. So much for communication.

Another neat thing was each time we opened our map a crowd of people would gather around. They would peer over our shoulders and have entire conversations in Chinese while we were making our travel plans in English. Nobody knew what the other was saying.

We got on the train the next day and headed to Reshui. The entire trip was through agricultural areas and the fields went on as far as the eye could see. When you looked closely you would see there were people everywhere working the fields by hand. We passed houses of mud where these people lived. The trip was about 300 miles and we got to Reshui late at night. Getting off the train was a mind blowing experience because first we were immersed in near sensory overload culture shock of just being in China, second, the sky was the most amazing night sky any of us had ever seen. I don't know how to describe it other than take the number of stars you see here and multiply it by that number and that is how many stars there were. At the same moment there was a double-headed steam train getting ready to leave so there was also the smells and sounds of seeming living, breathing steam locomotives. The steam crew saw us and were shining their flashlights at us and calling for us to come ride with them. We couldn't because we were dead tired and it was last and we still needed to find a hotel.

That single experience is one of the ones that will always be with me. I've seen some nice starry nights, impressive ones in Africa, South America, in the Western US, and on the water, but no starry night has ever matched that night in Reshui, Inner Mongolia China.