A CARNEAL STREET NAVY
If old age is a time when you look back more often than you look forward then I am solidly into old age. Things I did yesterday and the people with whom I did them are, sometimes, hard to recall, (perhaps because of the lead paint I chewed off of my crib). Things that were so insignificant when they occurred years ago, however, are becoming my fondest memories and people I knew for only short periods of time are remembered as life-long friends. Some benefits of waiting so long to tell stories from my youth are that, A) the tales have mellowed, and B) the statutes of limitation have expired.
Ludlow, KY, was a wonderful place to grow up, (the word mature is not interchangeable in this sentence), and we proved over-and-over again that my grandmother was correct when she told us that, “Idle time was the devil’s workshop.” Our pre-carpool summers were wonderful long days with limitless hours of doing nothing but entertaining ourselves – and we became good at it. Actually, we were great at it. We could do nothing, mess around, throw stuff, shoot stuff, find stuff, hide stuff, c’mon over, get outta there, get dirty, climb this, hide, run, ride, float and build with the best of them.
Each north/south street in the old part of Ludlow, (Carneal, Locust, Butler, Euclid and Kenner), had a gang. Not like the drugged-out gangs of today, we were more like Sharks and Jets than Crips and Bloods. But we did fight and raid each other’s riverbank camps and compete on the fields of honor with horseweed spears, mud balls, BB guns, sling shots and tomatoes. Granted, it’s hard to “Cap yo’ ass” with a vegetable but we thought we were tough. Although kids on Carneal Street were considered by our neighbors and the police to be Future Veterans of the Reformatory none of us made it and most turned into contributing members of society.
One summer on the riverbank at the foot of Carneal Street we happened upon a rowboat that had been discarded by the marine company that docked barges by our shore. On the riverbank in the 1950’s discarded and left alone a few minutes meant the same thing so we hauled the old wooden johnboat up the hill and a half-block to Cookie’s backyard where two sawhorses were converted into a dry-dock for purposes of repair, disguise and retrofitting. It was an absolute labor-of-love as we did what must have looked like a grade school production of Humphrey Bogart’s African Queen: dragging, pushing, carrying and winching that old ship through the cover of darkness. With every tug of the rope over my shoulder a dream came closer to reality; we had a Navy! We could attack our riverbank enemies on two fronts – from sea and shore. No rival camp was safe. Ah, power. Ahh, absolute power: unrestricted by conscience, reason or responsibility. We wanted annihilation. Total surrender. And we had the means.
Each sailor had the duty to secure any building material that might be useful in the refitting of our warship. Lump found some lumber in his yard, I found a drum of roofing tar that I was sure, (mistakenly, it turned out), my father wouldn’t miss and Cookie came-up with an old wooden step ladder that was to be a flying bridge/gun tower/crow’s nest.
If you’re thinking about turning an old rowboat into a fearsome dreadnought I can give you a few pointers that can save you some grief:
A) DO NOT use nails and railroad spikes to fasten the crow’s nest to the bottom of your ship.
B) No matter how many people you have helping to get a battleship with 100 pounds of tar, wood and a ladder added to it off of saw horses and down to the river, there won’t be enough.
C) And this is nearly as important as A). Don’t put roofing tar on the bottom of your boat.
We didn’t know how they found out about our navy so fast until a month later when we were allowed out again and we saw the trail of tar still on the sidewalk all of the way from the dry-dock in Cookie’s yard to the surf-battered wreck of our navy – capsized and sunk on its maiden voyage. The tar trail looked like a giant slug had inched its way down the street sliming everything in its path which caused our penitent young minds to wonder how much salt it would take to melt an 800 pound slug.
