Beyond the Hedge of Thorns: A Boyhood in Pottsville, Pennsylvania

By John S. Barrett

Beyond the Hedge of Thorns recounts the small moments in the everyday life of a boy growing up in a Pennsylvania mining town during the vanished era when the butcher, grocer, and milkman delivered right to the house, television had not yet arrived, and kids played softball on vacant lots, cruised the woods, and got into more or less innocent trouble.

Set against the backgrounds of the Second World War, illnesses not yet banished, and anthracite coal mining, with its machinery, scarred landscapes, profoundly influencing the town’s inhabitants, the boyhood described here was nevertheless a happy one, full of modest adventures in unlikely places. John S. Barrett brings it back to life in these pages with a unique voice and a grand gift for remembering the details, colors, and emotions of those times.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Dec 16, 2022
• ISBN: 9781649792150

John S. Barrett

John S. Barrett is a native of Pottsville, Pennsylvania, and a graduate of Haverford College and Harvard Medical School. After internship and specialty training at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, he practiced as a cardiologist in Philadelphia and Reading, PA. In retirement, he has translated a number of German and Austrian authors and has provided reviews to newspapers and journals. He lives with his wife in New Hampshire.

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About the Author

John S. Barrett is a native of Pottsville, Pennsylvania, and a graduate of Haverford College and Harvard Medical School. After internship and specialty training at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, he practiced as a cardiologist in Philadelphia and Reading, PA. In retirement, he has translated a number of German and Austrian authors and has provided reviews to newspapers and journals. He lives with his wife in New Hampshire.

Dedication

For my sister,

for my wife and children,

and in memory of my parents.

Copyright Information ©

John S. Barrett 2022

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher.

Any person who commits any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

All of the events in this memoir are true to the best of author’s memory. The views expressed in this memoir are solely those of the author.

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Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data

Barrett, John S.

Beyond the Hedge of Thorns

ISBN 9781649792143 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781649792150 (ePub e-book)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021904755

www.austinmacauley.com/us

First Published 2022

Austin Macauley Publishers LLC

40 Wall Street,33rd Floor, Suite 3302

New York, NY 10005

USA

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Preface

The memories of the people and places of my childhood seem, from today’s perspective, like imaginings of the lost continent of Atlantis. But they were my Atlantis, those first ten or so years of my life, now receding ever further into the past, and I am becoming a more and more lonely eyewitness to that extinct world, which may explain the increasing affection with which I now hold those memories and, as well, a certain desire to pass them on to someone, particularly my family. I hope they, and perhaps others, will share some of that affection, and perhaps even profit in some unforeseen way from a modest degree of sociologic insight into the past.

I’ve chosen self-contained vignettes in very rough chronological order as the method of presentation for the obvious reason: should the writer, for any number of reasons, stop writing them, the end product might still present a sense of completion which would be lacking in a continuous chronological narrative.

Some will smile indulgently at the amount of detail with which I invest episodes that occurred more than seventy-five years in the past, knowing – as I surely do – that memory, as well as omitting and denying, is capable of fairly wild invention. Yet, those earliest memories are not latter-day exercises, but have come back over and over again through the years in startling clarity, rehearsed, so to speak, before being finally written down. Later recollections, those beyond childhood, jostle each other in an unruly crowd, and I have therefore avoided them.

What will be quickly evident about the memories that have presented themselves to me unbidden – having heard, apparently, that I was willing to put them to paper – is how much they revolve around a trinity of war, illness, and coal. The Second World War seeped into almost everything, and illness, even severe illness, was second in line for attention. The shiny, hard blackness of anthracite coal and the inevitable landscape devastation wrought to obtain it provided a backdrop for war and illness that could be thought of as fitting. Some things, however, like school, failed to claim much memory space and have gotten short shrift here.

It will come as no surprise that some episodes that seemed to have ended back then had an unsuspected, continuing presence that was only revealed far in the future. Those occasional late echoes of an earlier time have been included as well.

At the Halloween Party

The children, most of whom appear in the following pages, are (left to right):

Standing: David Derbes, Netta Barrett, Jane Shuman, Lorna Mae Buber.

Seated: Glenny Adams, Jack Barrett, Betty Jane Leuchtner, Lee Gruber, Ralph Leuchtner.

Why?

Why am I writing this anyway? It may have something to do with the picture, the wallet-sized, sepia-tinted photograph that I looked at over and over again in childhood, taking it from the drawer where my father showed me he kept it, then staring at it while running my fingers back and forth across its deckle edges, feeling the vibrations of the blunted saw-teeth that framed the picture and echoed the small ocean waves that filled so much of it, my hand and eyes hypnotically joined together by some unknown force. The scene on the photograph is gloomy, a harbor somewhere, with several ships lying at anchor.

They are too far away for their taut anchor chains to be visible, but on the other hand, there is nothing to suggest motion, either, no wake and no smoke from their stacks; so, lying at anchor. The ships are slender, menacing, and low to the water, painted a dark shade, with no white lifeboats or railings and no colored bands or insignias on their smokestacks. They must be warships. But whose? And where? The corners of the picture are blurred and darker, and the edge of that darkness is suggestively rounded. Has the picture been taken from a porthole? The word ‘Murmansk’ comes into my mind. I remember my father, who joined the navy in 1916 and stayed for ten years, serving on destroyers, telling me that he’d once been to Murmansk. Another time, I remember his saying that the Russians didn’t like you to take pictures of their ships. Were the ships in the picture Russian ships, photographed by an American sailor, my father, from a porthole of his own ship? What was an American ship doing in Murmansk anyway? Was it part of the short-lived and quickly failed expedition to carry soldiers and equipment to help the White Russians resist the Reds during the Russian Civil War?

And who ever heard of a modern warship with portholes? Why create rows of holes in a ship’s armor plating, considering that each one offers a point where one of those huge naval shells could, by chance, punch through the glass and bury itself deep in the ship’s entrails, where it would fatally explode? That’s a question that I can now answer, partially at least: any number of pictures of smaller warships, British destroyers of the early twentieth century, for instance, reveal them to have had rows of portholes along their hulls well above the waterline. Safety must have been relative, and total safety must have taken a backseat to the need to supply some fresh air, some relief from the stifling heat in the latitudes where the British often sailed to their colonies. And some light, too, now shared with lower ranks, but formerly the reserve of captains and admirals whose luxurious, glassed-in apartments occupied the stern of many a seventeenth or eighteenth-century vessel, heedless of the possibility that a single cannon ball could sweep it all, mahogany furniture and silver plate and crystal decanters, away in a split-second.

That photograph with its deckle edge was a metaphor for the way I approached the world – simply took it as it was, asked no questions even when questions occurred, and concerned myself solely with the ‘what’ rather than the ‘why’ or the ‘how.’ I never asked my father to tell me, even when I was old enough to understand the answers but not old enough to have forgotten the questions, the whole story of that photograph. And my not asking questions of my parents on so many occasions meant that much of the story, the novel, of their existences was extinguished on the days they died, much to my dismay ever since. I would love to have some of the answers, but there are none, only vague suppositions which are better than nothing, I suppose.

Perhaps our children will wish to have had some answers from me to their as yet unasked questions. That’s why.

Primary Colors I

Something makes me look down. My feet are on the pedals of my tricycle, which is metal; somehow I know it’s metal, colored somewhere between purple and brown – I know those colors, but not their names, that came later – and slightly rusty in places. The paint is roughened, not smooth and shiny. I lean back, holding onto the black rubber grips of the handlebars, and push the pedals joltingly, not smoothly; my legs are not long enough to pedal smoothly. My legs are clothed in snow pants. The material is coarsely woven and I know it is scratchy. The color is dark brown, the color of a candy bar. My jacket is the same color, but over each side of the chest is a vertical rectangle made up of a checkerboard of dirty white and orange squares. The material there is just as scratchy as it is everywhere else. I am wearing leather mittens, cream-colored. Their palms are soiled.

Round and round I go, inscribing a twisting pathway on a rectangular, cement surface that an adult would say is perhaps eight by twenty feet in size, bounded on one long side by the front of a house that is white and on the other by a low cement coping that restrains the dirt of a garden that rises up beyond my field of view or interest. One short side of the rectangle is bounded by another cement coping, but the other short side of the concrete-floored area is only partially enclosed by a metal railing, behind which is a green-painted wooden cellar trapdoor. It is closed. An open space, amounting to a three-foot wide walkway, leads past the trapdoor to a flight of six or seven concrete steps down to a narrow sidewalk, beyond which is the stone-surfaced alley that passes one side of our house. But I do not see myself pedal beyond the partial confinement of the railing and trapdoor. Somehow I know, or someone has told me, that if I do, I will tumble down the steps and hurt myself or spill onto the street where a car can get me.

There is no one else with me, not Mama or Daddy, no one watching, sometimes almost fearfully as they will do when I’m older, to make sure I don’t hurt myself. I am the only one there, and I know it is me.

Up until the moment when I saw my snowsuit and trike, there was nothing, even though, somehow, I knew how and where to ride; but there was, and is, no memory of the me that learned those things, nor of anything else for that matter. And then, suddenly, I was there, as if I had emerged from a cloud. And the most astonishing thing, at that very moment and ever since, was that suddenly I was and knew that I was. Where before, I was nothing and knew nothing, now I was something, and that something was me. And there was me, and the day and then the night – my own Book of Genesis.

Primary Colors II

It’s hard to hold the nose with your left hand and the tail with your right. If you hold the plane too tightly, it will get broken, but if you hold it too loosely with the fingers of your left hand, the propeller will get away from you and the twisted rubber band that makes it turn will unwind, causing the propeller to slap your fingers over and over, hard enough so that it hurts, making you let go of the plane and then it will dive straight into the ground. But I have learned to hold it just right, launching it gently from the highest point of our side yard, which is an unkempt, vine-covered rectangle that runs at right angles to the cement-covered area where I ride my tricycle. The plane flies gracefully the entire length of the yard, then lands at its end just in front of the maple tree where I gather pig- nosers that you can paste onto your nose. I pick it up, carry it back to the top of the slight rise, then carefully and slowly rewind the propeller, watching the rubber band form twists, then knots, getting ready for the next flight. I make it fly over and over.

The plane is not really as delicate as one would think. It has withstood the dangers of being brought back in my father’s bag, from wherever it was he went for a long time, sent by Judge Hicks to bring back a man who had run away to keep from going to prison. The plane’s frame is made of slender, but stiff, pieces of very thin wire that seem to be glued together and gracefully bowed to give the wings their curved shape. But what I really love is the covering. It’s some sort of delicate, silky material, so thin that it’s almost transparent, bright blue over the plane’s slender body, yellow on the wings, all shiny, like the wings of a dragonfly.

Bright blue is the color I will paint the first stick-model airplanes I will build, even though the Army Air Corps will have given up the bright blue fuselage and yellow wings of pre-war days by then, even though there never was such a thing as a bright blue P40 or Messerschmidt fighter. Mine would be. But it is not merely the color that will stick with me. It is the combination of the color and the gossamer, shimmering, almost insubstantial substance of this first flyer. Perhaps that’s why, years and years later, I was immediately attracted to the iridized glass of Louis Comfort Tiffany and Witwe Lötz and their Art Nouveau colleagues. I now sometimes wonder what I might have been like if my first snow suit had been bright blue and yellow instead of dull dark brown. Would I have been more exuberant, optimistic, outgoing, and confident? Was my entire personality determined by what someone somewhere had decided was the proper color for the snowsuit that I would wear? Brown?

A Baby Sister

I have been with Grandmom and Grandad for days. I don’t know why. Then Mommy and Daddy come back from somewhere. They have a tiny baby with them. They say it is my baby sister. That means she will turn into someone like Aunt Norma. Nobody said I was going to get a sister. We all have to be quiet so she won’t cry. Daddy goes back to work. He will come back for us on the weekend and then take us to our home, along with my baby sister, whose name is Netta, like Mommy’s name. She will be little Netta, just like I’m little Jack because Daddy is big Jack.

Doctors I

I am a little bit more than three years old. They have put me on a table over which hangs a big, silvery light. They have wrapped what seems to be a soft, red rubber hose around my wrists so that I cannot move. I have not protested or screamed when that was being done. A woman’s voice then asks me to close my eyes, which I do; she gently spreads Vaseline onto my eyelids and eyebrows. While I still have my eyes closed, a fuzzy mask is placed over my nose and mouth and the woman’s voice tells me to take deep breaths, which I do. It smells funny, but not unpleasant. I see flashing lights and whirligigs, which are interesting and funny. Then I hear the commanding, metallic voice of Dr. Cress saying, Take it away, nurse. Take it away, nurse. I don’t know what the ‘it’ is that she is supposed to take away. That is my last thought.

I awake in a room in the Warne Hospital, the smallest of the three hospitals in my town, Pottsville. I have had my tonsils and adenoids taken out. My mother and father are there. Daddy has had his tonsils taken out under local anesthesia right after I was operated on. I pick my nose; what I fish out is bright red and translucent, startling and amazing. I am not in discomfort but am given Asper Gum to chew. Later, that will seem bizarre – why have me chew and move an area that has been stitched together? Why give aspirin which would inhibit blood clotting? But I’m allowed orange sherbet, my favorite, so everything is fine. On the following day, I’m allowed to go home along with my Daddy who has had to be re-stitched during the night, again under local anesthetic because of bleeding. I still shudder at the thought.

I have no idea why this was done to me, but my parents do; the operation was intended to put an end to the endless series of sore throats and ear infections, one of which got my left eardrum lanced, the scar of which it still bears. And what was intended is exactly what happened after the operation: no more sore throats, no earaches, and no rheumatic fever. Years later, just after I’d become a doctor, the best scientific minds decreed that tonsillectomies had been needless and accomplished nothing. They hadn’t asked me or my parents if that were so, that they accomplished nothing. Decades later, they changed their minds once again, with equal assurance.

Johnny Tommy

It is barely light, but I have been awake for a long time. I have tiptoed, yet again, into my parents’ room and been told that now I can go downstairs. I go to the stairs. They are not very steep, but I put my left hand against the wall so I can feel my way down. I can see the Christmas tree with presents underneath and more presents lying on the sofa when I turn the corner at the landing. I run to the sofa. The bump lying there is a bear. He is as big as I am, but I wrap my arms around him and pull him off the sofa. It is just beginning to get light outside, so I can see that the bear’s furry coat is a shiny brown, like some of Daddy’s shoes, and is very soft. But his big nose is lighter, the color of honey, and his eyes are light brown with black centers. He has a lump on his back where you can push and make him give a squeaky grunt.

Mommy and Daddy have come downstairs. They ask me what I will call the new bear. I tell them, Johnny Tommy. I don’t know why Johnny Tommy, but it seems good. There are all sorts of children with two names: Kitty Lou, Patty Bell, John Joe. Two names sound good together. Johnny Tommy. Johnny Tommy still seems as big as I am as I carry him around. He is much bigger than Tutt, Tuttie Bear, who, small as he is, seems old, and he is worn, too. His coat is shaggy and dull and missing in places. His paws are dirty, not pink like Johnny Tommy’s. He belongs to me, but I don’t know when he came to me or whether he belonged to someone else before that. No one tells me. But I know when Johnny Tommy came to me, just like I know that I came to me when I was riding on my trike.

Joys of the Garden

It would never have been called a garden – make no mistake about it. It was our ‘backyard,’ half the size of a tennis court, and it extended up the gentle slope between the cement square where I rode my tricycle and the garage that rose up at the rear of our property. The yard was bordered on the alley side by three silver maples spaced out in a row, but otherwise it was unkempt, full of vines, downed branches, and decaying leaves. Two elderly cherry trees, one a sour pie-cherry, the other an ox-heart, occupied the center of the area. Their trunks were old, rotten, cracked, and partially hollowed out, and yet early each summer, for the few years that remained to them before they were torn out to make way for a lawn, they produced prodigiously, Maria Theresias among fruit trees. My father would spend evening hours on a ladder, filling cooking pots with fruit that went into pies or was eaten avidly as soon as it was available, by us and by all willing neighbors.

Beautiful, amber-colored sap seeped out of cracks in the cherry trees’ trunks and stiffened there against the rough bark. If you worked at it for a few moments with a finger, a blob would come loose, and you could chew it.

Nowadays, someone might well rhapsodize about Mother Nature’s chewing gum. How wonderful! And probably gluten-free. Then, it was something to put in your mouth that tasted good – well, sort of good – and it was free – no pennies to sacrifice. Petunias happened to be in the same category. You could pick one from the stem of the plant, then pull away the green cup at the blossom’s base, and suck the few sweetish drops of liquid from it.

Where there were cherries, there were, of course, bees and yellow jackets, and they often strayed into the few petunias my mother had planted. How old was I when I learned that you could quickly pinch a flower’s petals together at their edges to imprison a bee that had alighted there and then separate the flower from the stalk? No idea! I seemed to have been doing it forever. You could hold the flower prison to your ear and hear the frantic, possibly angry buzzing. Then you had to