Stories From The Past (Or Did I Tell You About The Time...)

I feel like telling a story about the days of glory,
(or at least something from my past that may or may not bore you to death).

Any or all stories will be factual to the extent of what I can remember and will involve copious amounts of drugs, brushes with the law, or strange occurrences and miscellaneous rants.

I will give you a choice of topics, some longer than others as I really can't remember much of some of them:

The '65 Mustang
Bushy Run
Hatchet Man
The AWOL Marines
Opadope
The Mountain Boys
Willie the Worm

...and maybe a few more when I think of them.

If someone will pick a topic, I'll try to whip up a few syllables of prose for your edification when I get around to it.

 

Hatchet Man it is.

Hatchet Man​

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This takes place, probably back in 1970 or 71 and involves the AWOL Marines I mentioned above.
Gary the Grunt was back from the Marine base at Cherry Point, North Carolina with his combat buddies John and Bugsy. They were AWOL once again.
You see every few weeks they'd get a three day pass from the base and thumb up north to see us as there must not have been much going on in North Cackalacky. Then they'd overstay their pass and end up being AWOL. In this way they were avoiding a year long around the world cruise on some Navy vessel of some sort. They'd already served their tour of duty in the Nam and were steadfastly refusing to ever leave the states again. Plus there weren't any hippie chicks on the boat. Then they'd thumb back to Cherry Point, spend a week in the brig and do it all over again.
They had a system.

This must have been the third or fourth time and the other dude they picked up when hitch hiking had already left to appear in court in New York on some trumped up drug charge. What was his name? Turk, nice guy.

So anyway I found myself in the back seat of Gary's parents '63 Falcon station wagon. A real looser car. This was one of those sixties cars that just oozed grease. The engine bay looked like an Exxon Valdez oil spill.
Anyway, somehow Gary had managed to get the car and we were off. Gary was one of the worse drivers on the road and had already wrecked his Volkswagon Beetle before he left for the service. He bounced it off a concrete bridge a few times while drinking numerous bottles of wine and we couldn't get the rear axles out to fix it, so he junked it. But I digress.

The Falcon looked something like this:​

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So there we were, three Marines, myself, and two hippie chicks crammed into this little old Falcon wagon, motoring down the road. Now, we were pretty happy as we had all done a hit of blotter, microdot, four way, or some such cosmic cleaner and we had a bag or two of weed.
But the problem was we had no where to go.
So Gary comes up with this cool idea, "Let's go to Hitler's grave!"
Hitler's grave was some private mausoleum somewhere that had fallen into disrepair and was now flooded with water. "And you can go down the steps and walk around the coffins!"
Or so he said. But we were up for it. Problem was he couldn't remember where it was.
So then he comes up with visiting the statue with the roving eyes. "There's this statue of a lady in this cemetery and her eyes follow you around no matter where you go!"
Cool.
So we ride around to various cemeteries tripping our brains out looking for this statue. Did I mention Gary had a poor sense of direction?
We never found that one either.

The next idea was to visit Stringtown.
Stringtown is a real place in Pennsylvania, but I didn't find that out until about seven years ago when I re-stumbled on it one day as I was driving about.

Here's a real picture of a house in Stringtown:​

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Gary the Grunt proceeded to tell us about Stringtown.
"One time I went to there drinking with a couple other guys. We were driving down this dirt road and started seeing this light off in the distance along side the road. Like a lantern. Spooky. And it followed us as we went!"
"So like a ghost light, or something?"
"No, it was hatchet man!"
"Hatchet man?"
"Yeah, hatchet man"
"We went down the road to a dead end and had to turn around and as we came back the light was in the middle of the road. And as we got closer we saw this guy standing there with a lantern in one hand and a hatchet in the other!"
"Wow, far out!"
"Yeah."
"So, like, what happened?"
"Well we had to get by him so this guy I was with floors it and we hit the guy dead on and ran him over!"
"Shit!"
"Yeah"
"So we stop thinking like, shit! And we turn around and look and we see the lantern rising up off the ground!
"Damn!"
"Yeah, so we take off."
Yeah, well that's pretty strange.

"Yeah, but the best part was when we got home there was a hatchet stuck in the trunk lid!

"Sure there was."
"No, really, I swear to god."
"Right."

"Okay, don't believe me?'
And off we went to Stringtown.
He did manage to find Stringtown, anyway a dirt road he claimed was Stringtown.

It was dark, and wooded, and no one was around. We inched along staring into the woods looking for that light, and of course we were tripping so we thought we'd see it, then maybe not; then maybe yes, then fer sure, then wtf are we doing here...and so on. Then Gary tells us the next part, "Ya know there are people around here who wait for cars to go down this road then they drag a log across it so you can't get out and kill everybody."
Great.

But I'm figuring, hey I'm with three combat tested Marines and two hippie chicks. When the going gets rough I'm thinking while the Marines are fighting off the hoards of desperadoes I can out run the hippie chicks, leave them as bait and get outa here.
So what's to worry about?

But then I start to notice the trees. They seem to be getting red. Blood red.
And as we reach the end of the road I'm looking around and thinking, "All these trees seem to be awfully red."

Oops, diner time.
I'll be back and finish up later.

 

It's hard to tell when you're on LSD.

Hatchet Man cont....​

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Where was I?

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Oh yes, the trees were turning red.
There I was sitting in the back seat of a beat up old '63 Ford Falcon station wagon with a hippie chick on one side and a marine on the other.
And I'm looking at these trees and they'e turning red and stuff is just dripping off them and I'm thinking "Hatchet man" but I know about the acid so is it really there or not? Then I hear...off in the distance one of the hippie chicks say, kinda slow...."Do those trees look like they're getting red?"
And we all look at one another and everybodies eyes have this red glow...and we all say, "SSHIT!!"

The Grunt wheels the car around and we beat feet out'a there down the road! As we get about halfway out we see something and he swerves the car to miss it!
A log halfway across the road.

We rode around for awhile after that, I really don't know where, but we ended up at some small local ice cream stand, god knows how we got there but as everyone knows there's nothing like an ice cream cone when your tripping and have just escaped certain death, so we stopped.

So there I am sitting back there next to the window, holding this melting ice cream cone and trying to figure out what exactly to do with it, as ice cream just disappears in your mouth when your tripping so you don't really know if you're eating it or not, and I'm looking out the side window.
Now looking out the side window of a car on a dark night when under the influence of cosmic energy pills can be strange as it's hard to tell if you're actually looking out the window or just seeing yourself reflected in the glass. Like the time Willie the Worm was talking to himself in the passenger window of his car cause he thought he was driving the car when in reality it was me. But that's another story.
Plus, I was trying to figure out if the car was moving, the ground was moving, nothing was moving, or as the Buddhists say, it was my mind that was moving all along.

And I get this funny feeling, liked somethings not right. And I'm trying to focus my eyes, and there's a car beside us but the people inside are strange.
For some reason.
Not quite right.
But I can't put my finger on it.

Then it hits me. Little people!
The car is full of midgets!

​

That's all I remember.....midgets waving at me and my ice cream cone!
Strange.

We never did see hatchet man, I think the Grunt was full of shit.
But the trees were turning red..........

 

And that, children, was the story of Hatchet Man.

I did think of a couple other adventures:
Jeez, what were they?

Oh yeah:
The James Gang
Thirty Three Mailboxes
Bull Island (the infamous Erie Canal Soda Pop Festival)

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and
We Go to the Circus.

Also as a bonus I can relate what college life was like circa 1969 to 1974. I know that's five years, five and a half actually if you consider the one summer when I started but there were a few parties going on at the time, ya know

 

Also there was The Farm House, our lame attempt at a commune.

 

Willie the Worm​

Reader's Digest used to have a gimmick called "My most unforgettable character".
Wille was one such being.

I first met him through Gary the Grunt. I had known Gary for a very long time but didn't know about it for a while. But how we re-met is another story.

Gary was a year older than me but we became reacquainted in high school when he discovered I had access to the family car.
One day as we were deciding what to do and where to go he said, "Hey let's go see this really cool dude I know!"

Off we went to Willie's house which was a small Spanish style deal. We went in through the basement and entered a bare concrete room where Willie was sitting on an old bar. He was about 120 lbs. and 5'8" with sparse dark hair, and he was wearing Buddy Holly type glasses.
Across the room was this muscular hulk of a guy, about 6'4" and 215 pounds.
The curious thing that instantly struck me was that Willie was holding a .22 rifle in his hands and as he pointed it toward the other dude he'd say, "You missed a hole." And the dude, Herbie, would say "Okay.", and he'd take some spackling and fill up the hole.

Willie had this thing going with his mother. She thought that if she let him make a little private room to entertain his friends, that would keep him home and out of trouble.
Bad idea.
Then she gave him her credit card.
Over the next few weeks we raided the local Murphy's Five and Dime store for all sorts of hippie type supplies. Christmas lights, flashers, black lights, paint, tin foil, posters, candles, extension cords, etc.
Next we "acquired" a wide variety of road signs, and anything else we thought was neat such as an "Officer Friendly" sign like this.

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And we made a very cozy little subterranean "pad". We even had a bed, just in case we wanted to take a nap.

Then the parties began. At that time, oh '66 or '67 there really weren't many drugs around so we relied on alcohol. Mainly bear and wine. We had this black dude named Biz who would hang around a street corner and we'd get him to buy us a case of Schmidt's or a couple bottles of Pluck wine. The cheapest wine you could buy at the time.

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And he'd sing us a little song, "Oh that Pluck, Pluck, Pluck. Make you want to....*, *, *!" You get the idea. Last time I heard about him he was serving time for murder.

Now the parties were pretty good. His mother was never home, just his grandmother, a sweet little old lady.
What we'd do is go to the mall and pan handle the local chicks for quarters until we got enough money to buy booze.
Or we'd hold a "fraternity" meeting to recruit members. Our fraternity was called Phi Kappa Psi. We had no idea there was an actual college fraternity named that very thing.
Willie had proclaimed himself the president when the previous older dude he knew got stabbed in a bathtub, or something like that.

But our version wasn't so violent. All we did was hold meetings for new members, make them give us a dollar initiation fee, tell them the party was going to be on Boy Scout Hill and then abscond with the money and have a party somewhere else. The only problem was the party always ended up at Willie's house so it never took them long to find us. I was the treasurer.

At the house we'd put the beer and wine in a basement window well so his grandmother wouldn't find it, then all we had to do was open the window from the inside and grab whatever we wanted. This worked fine for about a half an hour then everyone would be starting to get drunk and whooping and hollering and his grandmother would run down the steps and start grabbing bottles of wine out of kids' hands and dumping them down the washtubs. At that point Willie would go over to her and say, "Don't worry, just go back upstairs!" And she'd huff and puff and retreat back up top.

Poor women, she was so nice.

The parties got worse and worse with more and more people. At one point according to the cops, we beat out Boy Scout Hill, the local keg party site, for the number of parties per month for three months in a row.
Eventually at one party a neighborhood riot broke out involving ten state police cruisers, so we had to scale back.

Our main change was to chisel out the blocks in the back wall of the basement until we had a little cave about four feet off the floor to hide the booze in, then we covered that with an American flag.

..to be continued.

 

Willie the Worm cont.​

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So, I'm trying to draw a picture of what it was like in the late sixties in my neck of the woods, for me anyway.
Times were strange in a different way than they are now.
Much more innocent.
I liked it better.

I think I'm done with Willie's story...it's starting to depress me as I'm not finding a way to express his personality with humor.
Analyzing a person in depth can be dangerous, better to just relate things that happened and let others draw their own conclusions.

I'll just finish this with by giving a little idea of what that particular set of circumstances was, and then maybe tell another story if someone asks instead of concentrating on one individual.

_________________________________​

I only ever believed half of what Willie ever said.
He said his phone lies were bugged, the police were after him, etc.

I shrugged it off when he'd answer the phone and say, "If you're listening order me a pizza!"
Then one day one of my uncles took me aside and said "I have a few contacts and their telling me that they're watching you guys down at Will's house. His phone lines are tapped and they have men staked out in the woods watching the house." "They think there's drug deals going on and they've seen one guy going into the woods with a box. They want to know what's in that box."
I think they were seeing Herbie wander up into the woods to talk to his favorite tree when he got drunk. He liked that tree.
"Last week-end when you guys took off in all those cars they were following you but you lost them and they want to know where you all were going. (We all piled into about six cars to head to another party.)
"They know everyone's car, and everything illegal that was done to those cars, and they're just waiting for a chance get everyone."
Illegal stuff on the cars was junk like glass packs and exhaust systems, shackles, missing bumpers, wrong size tires, hot rod stuff.

So I just feigned ignorance like, "Well, geez, golly, I don't know, ?????"

So one day, in an effort to fix things up and straighten Willie's ass out on his 18th birthday, after he got his driving license back; she took Will, another guy, and myself to the local Mercury dealer to buy him a car.

They disappeared into the building and we stood around admiring Merc's newest muscle car that was proudly displayed behind a "no enter zone" of ropes, balloons, and colorful flags.
In time out marched Willie and his Mom and we ran over and said, "What'ca get?" expecting some pedestrian budget car.

"That one," he said.

So began the era of the under 14 sec quarter mile LSD driven Cobra Jet (with Ram Air that this one lacks).​

 

Okay.

Bushy Run​

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Bushy Run is site where one of the most important battles against the Ottawa Chief, Pontiac, took place at the close of the French and Indian War. Nine British forts had fallen and Fort Pitt was under siege in the English frontier of the American colonies. Colonel Henry Bouquet was sent with five hundred Scots Highlanders and their supplies to relieve the fort.
They were met about twenty five miles east of Pittsburgh by Delaware, Mingo, Shawnee, and Wyandot warriors.
It's now a park administered by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

Here's an aerial view.

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This story is about the second attack at Bushy Run.

 

Bushy Run cont...​

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But first a little history of the time. The early nineteen seventies, not 1763.
Basically, for me, the years from 1969 to 1974 were one long party. I know people still party but these years were different in my opinion because the parties never stopped. Almost at any time, at any place, one could find someone, usually several to many people engaged in various illegal partaking of drugs and alcohol. Friends, neighbors, strangers, didn't matter.

For example, one night Willie and the Worm and I had visited a tree house someplace I could never find again where people would go to smoke weed. We knew that because of all the melted candles all over the place and someone must have told us about it because how else would we have found it?
As we emerged from the woods to where my car was parked we saw a biker gang going through my glove compartment, probably looking for a map.
Not wanting to look like wimps we marched out of the weeds and demanded to know what was going on.

I don't remember what they said but we ended up smoking a few joints and taking one of the chicks home cause she was tired of riding on some fat guy's motorcycle.

Then there was the time we dropped some acid and Willie fired up the CJ and we all decided to drive to Canada for some reason or other. When we reached the college town of Indiana, PA Bruce and I decided to bail and hitchhike back home instead of continuing on. So, Willie and Gary O. kicked us out and we ended up strolling through Indiana looking at all the drunken frat parties.
We ended up on the outskirts of town standing on some two lane road with our thumbs out.
If was late at night the stars were out and a cool breeze was at our backs. It's great to be young and carefree.
We were having a good old time watching the cars racing by as we must have stumbled onto the local public drag strip. Some car would appear in the distance, engine screaming and gears jamming and we'd stick out our thumbs, and it'd fly by leaving a rainbow of colored trails and echoing thunder in our LSD induced brains.
Then it'd turn around and head back and pretty soon another one would appear.

So it went for many minutes and who knows how long when finally this Beetle screams by and slams on its brakes. We run up and jump in and find some dude driving around looking for someone to smoke a little weed with.
"Do you smell something burning, man?"
"Ah, not really."
"Are you sure, smells like an old rope, maybe."
"Oh, yeah, right."

​

So we end up at this basement night club somewhere with a dollar between the three of us and the cover charge is a buck per. And there we stood looking at this lone dollar trying to figure out what the red stuff on it was, kinda looked like blood ya know?
"Well where'd that come from?"
"Damn if I know."
"Is it blood?"
"I don't know"
"Anybody cut anywhere?"
"Yeah, well, I don't know"
"Well, hey man, it must be something!"
"Well is it really there?"
"What?"
"Ya know, man, the stuff."
"What stuff?"
"....I don't know, man"

Finally the bouncer got tired of watching us strain our brains and just waved us in.
I sat the whole time behind some concrete pillar listening to some band and trying to figure out just what the fuck was going on.

Then he drove us about 60 miles the whole way back to the trailer where he parked next to the front door so that we could hardly get out and we beat on that door till we woke everyone up leading Jim L. to say, "What the fuck are you guys doing here at 2:00 in the morning?", then we all went inside and smoked dope till the sun came up.
Never saw the dude in the Volkswagen again.

Anyway, I hope I made my point clear.
Anytime, anyplace, a lonely back road, a midnight bridge, somebodies' house, standing on a street corner looking dumb, somebody was ready to party.

And this brings me back to Bushy Run.

To be continued.....

 

Bushy Run cont...​

Back in those days, before the net, we couldn't meet online so we had to do it in person.

There were certain spots anyone could go to for free, like Blackburn quarry, The Rocks, Buttermilk Falls, and of course Kingston Dam where you could always find a variety of people laying about on the concrete, wading in the water, trying to climb the spillway....having fun in the sun.
Willie the Worm claimed he got sucked into the discharge pipe one time and popped out somewhere downstream.

Kingston Dam​

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It's off limit now.​

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But for some reason the gathering place had moved to Bushy Run. Sunday mornings only. It started with a few freaks and grew exponentially as spring wore on. The parking lot became impossible to get into, so people started parking along the road, on both sides.
This was fine for awhile until the state police started handing out tickets to anyone with at least one tire on the road surface.
We could live with that.
We had established camp near the top of the hill, near the "flour bag fort" originally erected by the British. The flour had evidently rotted away, so it was replaced with fake cement flour bags surrounding a flag pole. American of course.

If you refer to the map you'll see this offered a pretty good place to view the park and the road that passed in front of the "fort". The trees to the east weren't so thick so you could see down the road in both directions.
We'd show up with a few blankets (supplied by the hippie chicks), and a few bottles of wine, tabs of LSD, and bags of weed (supplied by the hippie dudes).
Then we'd while away the morning, afternoon, and early evening watching the people come and go. Cars and motorcycles would parade by, kites would fly, dogs would run, and Frisbees (TM) would fly.

It was great a real peoples' park. Freaks were everywhere just enjoying Mother Nature, peace and contentment, and the cosmic groove.



But all things must pass:

All things pass,​

A sunrise does not last all morning - Lao Tzu​

And so for our sunrise, the day came when Gary the Grunt heard something in the air.
"I hear a helicopter!"
Now remember Gary was a Marine just back from Nam. He was there that day with his comrades John and Bugsy, the last day they had scheduled to be AWOL. We had all done a hit of windowpane or blotter, I forget which, and were in the process of drinking wine and smoking dope. Gary had his mother's wig on as his theory was it would get him more girls.

The Marines were searching the sky, and we figured they knew something about helicopters, so something must be up. The sound kept getting louder and louder, and then we saw it coming in at tree top level. That was strange.

Then we looked down the road and it was filled with police cars...and we looked up the road.....and it was filled with police cars......so we decided it didn't look too good.

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The Marines, being Marines were the first to react.
"Shit!, We're AWOL!" "We can't get get caught here!"
And they immediately went into panic mode.
"Shit!"
The copter landed and the cops get out, and the cruisers are stopped and cops are pouring out of them, and everyone is looking around like:
"Shit!'

So we hurriedly devised a plan. We stuffed all the drugs into the three Marines' pockets and handed them the wine, then they beat a hasty tactical withdraw into the jungle, to blend with the underbrush. We figured they were best at this, with their combat experience, and they were halfway to the woods already so why not.
We didn't complain cause now we weren't holding, and they didn't complain cause they figured they had all the dope and no PA state police would take them alive!

So now we had a chance to further evaluate the situation. The cops were "working" the crowd. As they advanced freaks would rise and wander off into the forest or make for their cars.

We elected to stay put as everyone's car had something illegal going on and we figured if we started them up that would be just the excuse the cops needed.
Soon the cops made it to our little blanket to find about ten freaks of various sizes and genders innocently gazing off into the distance. The head cop, he must'a been an admiral or something as he had on one of those captain hats and was flanked by troopers with guns and stuff and he had a photographer with him that was taking all kinds of pictures probably for evidence; starting talking.

I wish I could tell you what he said but I was too far gone. The LSD was kicking in pretty hard and all I could think about was what my picture would look like on the front page of the Pittsburgh Post Gazette.

...suddenly, as happens all to often under the influence of cosmic energy pills, everyone was gone.
The cops were gone, all the freaks were gone, and the Marines were back.
All clear.

Our little band gathered what remained of our wits and started heading to our cars. Choke'um headed to the parking lot to see if his un-inspected Cameo had been impounded, Bortz to his Fairlane, Barry T. to his Chevelle, Willie the Worm to his CJ, and me to my '63 Dart. Which sorta looked like this:


.
Except for the grey primer from when I took out 33 mailboxes one night.

In other words it was a piece of shit. But it was mine.
And we had a new plan.
It seems that during the confusion the Marines had negotiated with Willie the Worm to drive them to the Breezewood exit of the Turnpike to give them a head start back to Cherry Point, N.C. About a hundred miles, as they had to be there by morning or they were in deep doo doo.
I got volunteered to ride shotgun. This would require a few more hits of acid.

But first we needed to ditch my car. So I climbed in and turned the key......and there was an explosion!.... and I watched the hood seem to jump a foot in the air......... as think smoke poured out the sides.....