Bob

Batz

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September 15, 2008

The Adventures of the Oak Street Gang

I was sitting around the other day not doing anything in particular, and loving every minute of it, when my favorite mail carrier handed me a stack of 10 bills and one lonely little letter that suddenly brought fond memories of my youthful days at Oak Street Elementary School in Flint, Michigan.

The letter was written by Joel Rash, who now lives in the neighborhood where I grew up.

Rash sent the letter after reading one of my Senior Moments columns about playing marbles while I was growing up in Flint in the 1940s and attending Oak Street School. The column was published in a Michigan newspaper.

“Bob,” Rash wrote, “I’m not much of a marble player, but I do live on Oak Street. The neighborhood has had its ups and downs over the last 30 years (OK, mostly downs) but it has a solid core of committed residents.”

Then he added, “Oak School is now in the hands of the Genesee County Land Bank, which is looking for a developer to convert it into a residential property.

I read that line again and I felt sad that the elementary school where I kissed my first girl and learned to play Red Rover, Come Over would soon be gone.

When I was a kid growing up in Flint, we were really into pranks. You name a prank and Butchie Bostator, Kenny Krewson, myself and the rest of the gang probably tried it on some poor unsuspecting soul.

We weren’t really a “gang,” of course, I mean not like the Jesse James Gang, or those gangs that terrorized Chicago and lots of other cities during Prohibition.

Our pranks were more on the innocent side. We’d thumb through the telephone directory for the number of a grocery store and then dial it up, and when someone answered we’d ask “Do you have pop in the bottle?” and they’d say “Yes, we do,” and we’d say, “Well, you better let him out because his wife wants him home for supper.” And then we’d hang up the phone and laugh our heads off.

In a variation to that prank, we’d call a store and ask “Do you have Prince Albert in the can?” and if the store person said “Yes, we do,” we’d say “Well you better let him out because his wife wants him home for supper.”

We were a zany bunch back then, that’s for sure.

One of the best places to test new pranks was the Michigan Theater where we could be found every Saturday watching 25-cent double features with six cartoons and a half-dozen or so news shorts.

We always sat in the balcony, and armed with 10-cent containers of popcorn that were roughly the same size as Rhode Island, we had great times at the movie house.

If a film got boring – and they often did – we’d amuse ourselves by flipping kernels of popcorn over the balcony railing and down on the poor, unsuspecting movie-goers below.

Yes, we were rather evil back then.

Another prank we enjoyed involved attaching a small mirror to one of our shoes and then wearing the device out to recess.

The purpose of the mirror was to enable us to look up girl’s dresses on the playground during recess.

Many years later we all realized how silly that was because we didn’t even know what we were looking for.

If our parents had only known what mischief we found to get into, I’m sure there would have been many more spankings doled out in my neighborhood of boxy, pre-World War II houses and streets that were paved with dirt.

Contact Bob at bbatz@woh.rr.com

© 2008 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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