A Teen Adventure(Len Daniels) A Teen Adventure

In the 40’s, my early teens were spent in the streets of South Philadelphia. There were many families, most of which were of Italian descent, living in my neighborhood. Most had children around my age, between 12 and 15 years old.
The older ones, which didn’t include me, many times tried to intimidate the younger ones. There was always an unspoken rivalry between the 12 and 13 year olds and the 14 and 15 year olds. This led to a close camaraderie
amongst the younger ones, and since there were more of us than the older ones; we managed to get the upper hand in the encounters between us, most of the time. Usually in a snowball fight we would reign victorious simply by the fact that there were more of us. This always gave us pure pleasure, knowing that they were beaten so often.

One instance that comes to mind was our “Safari Trick” we pulled on the older boys one summer evening. We younger boys let it get out that we were going to have a little meeting the next night, in our favorite meeting place, the cemetery around the corner. At these meetings, we would play chess or checkers or sometimes even poker with poker chips, since nobody ever had real money. We all came from relatively poor families and poker chips became the “coin of the realm” in our so-called gambling games. We wanted the older boys to find out about this evening rendezvous because we had something planned for them. In the past, occasionally, when we had our little get togethers, they would crash our fun and this gave them quite a laugh. Well, tomorrow night was going to be different. We knew that rain was expected in the evening, and this made it even better.

At this point, I must explain something.
This cemetery was our little jungle. We used to roam the weeds, which were higher than our heads, almost every day, so we actually knew it like the back of our hands. It covered about 4 square blocks and was overgrown so badly that anyone who didn’t know all the trails could easily get lost. Of course if you did get lost, all you had to do was travel in a straight line and you would come to some fence or wall or opening, but this was impossible at night since you literally couldn’t see your hand in front of your face while walking around. You would need to try and shout for help and hope someone would hear you.

This is where the good part comes in….
We knew that the older boys hardly ever went into the cemetery and usually only to break up our play. This was always during the daylight hours. To tell you the truth, we younger ones hardly ever went in at night, but we let on that we were going to have some fun in there with our flashlights and game playing. We were hoping that they would be enticed enough to try to break up our party just like all the other times.
This is what we did…
Eight or ten of us younger ones, armed with flashlights, made our way to the cemetery at about 8 o’clock that night. We had some very big flashlights, some of which we put weak batteries into, and some very little penlight sized ones with us. We trudged over to our favorite play spot and sat down and made sure that anyone near us could hear our talking. We also had placed a lookout at the gate that we used to enter the grounds and would let us know when we were under attack by running back to tell us.

Now it was getting dark and the skies turned threatening. It wasn’t long after we started to pretend to play and talk loudly that our lookout came running to tell us that five older boys were headed to the cemetery.
We laid our weakened flashlights down and left the area while turning on our penlights. This gave us just enough light so that we could see to move around in the weeds and follow the trails. The light from our flashlights drew the ruffians to the play area and we knew that the batteries would go dead very quickly. Sure enough, as soon as they arrived at the spot, the flashlights we left went dead leaving them in the dark. We could hear their shouts and curses as we slowly made our way out of the “jungle.” We laughed and laughed and soon it started to rain and they got soaked so we didn’t stay around to see if they ever did get out that night. All we knew is that they never bothered us again.

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