by H H "Hub" Brown
The other day Rick Marsi in his column was exhorting the younger generation to forsake their TVs and other indoor activities and come out and see what the real world was like. Of course, TV hadn't been invented yet, or if it had we hadn't heard about it. This remind me of something Bob Burns who was an old time radio comic said, "People tell what kind of programs they can get on their TVs and up our road we're still trying to get something good on the radio."
The time I'm talking about Bob had quit school and was working in the shoe factory but I was still in school. Saturday afternoons he would grab a gun and we would go down our street, Davis Avenue, which ended at the river. Between Bob and Jady, our oldest brother, they usually had a boat, sometimes two. We'd run the boat down river, usually to the mouth of Nanticoke Creek. Most times there was good fishing there and when things froze up it was a favorite place to snatch suckers.
Folks that made a habit of catching suckers made themselves a platform of some light, thin wood with a square opening at the top. The snatcher would lie down on this wooden tray so he wouldn't have to lay right on the ice.
Sometimes, if there was a group fishing together, and I remember during the Depression there was apt to be several groups there, they would dump some whole corn in the hole to make a light background to help spot the fish passing by. If the place where the snatcher lay was too wide for one man to cover it, they would place two there and then the rest of the group would get some heavy pieces of driftwood and they would line up at the mouth of the creek and stomp their way up towards the snatchers.
One day Bob was drifting down the river and a hunter on shore said to Bob, "I just shot a duck and he's drifted into the willows. If you find him, you can have him." Bob found the duck and brought him home and asked me to dress it and cook it. I scalded it and picked the feathers off and singed it. Then with some help from Mom with the oven, I roasted it. It came out of the oven as pretty as a picture, round and browned to perfection. Then when we tried to eat it, it smelled so strongly of fish no one could take it.
Earlier in the fall we would hunt down river to the creek. We would put four or five hot dogs and a can of pork and beans in our pockets. Bob carried a small hatchet in a case on his belt and we would find a clean piece of planed driftwood which we would rub on a moss covered log or a snow bank till it was smooth. Bob would lay the can of beans on the clean board and cut it in two with his hatchet. Some beans would spill out, but we would scoop them up with paddles we'd whittled out of some green branches. Bob used to say, "You gotta eat a peck of dirt before you die." Evidently we haven't filled our quota yet.
The Community Press