Mr. Quill, another Childhood Memory

11/13/2009

My job requires me to do a fair amount of driving.  Just this week I drove from The Farm to Columbus, Ohio and back, 326 miles each way.  A five-hour trip affords a lot of time to think, and this last trip had me traveling back in time.

I don’t know what caused Mr. Quill to pop into my diagnosed atrophied brain, but there he was clear as day looking like just as he did all those many years ago, very much the twin of Bear Bryant, hat and all.

I grew up in Baltimore, Maryland about eight miles from the heart of the city on Valley View Avenue.  Valley View Avenue was a dead-end street when I was a kid, and at the end of the street was a woods, maybe 50-60 acres of big old trees – a great place to play Cowboys and Indians, or war, or to build a fort or just get lost for a couple of hours on a hot summer’s day to smoke cigarettes one of the guys swiped from his folks.  The next street over was Woodley Avenue and it also came to an abrupt dead end.  Woodley Avenue is where Mr. Quill built houses – post World War II, and each year the dead end moved as small bungalows sprung up two or three at a time along the street.

The bungalows were the source of construction materials for many tree houses back in the woods.  Obtaining them is where many of us met face to face with Mr. Quill.  The man didn’t have much of a sense of humor, and I don’t ever remember a smile on his craggy face, but man, could he yell loud.  We got chased off the construction site more times than I can count, and, yes, we had some spectacular tree houses and forts.

It’s kind of neat the way this stuff pops up after fifty-plus years of gathering dust.  Back then it never entered my mind I might have been stealing.  I thought more of the materials as being a gift from God.

And that is all I have to say about that…