Winding down winter

The Lorenzi's moved from Lackawanna to Eden in November 1958. There were ten of us, eight kids plus mom and dad. Lackawanna was a suburb of Buffalo and the home to one of Bethlehem Steel's largest mills in the world. Ride Route 5 through the steel mill and the odor and color of the ferric oxide was strong; no one put their clothes out to dry on a clothesline on a bad dust day. The local economy ebbed and flowed on Bethlehem business and occasional strikes. One of the largest strikes launched in July 1959, running 116 days. At that time, steel and autos were the true kings of American business and industry, when making things (rather than offering services) still ruled the top of the Fortune 500. The post World War II baby boomer generation was growing up with television with shows like Howdy Dowdy, The Lone Ranger, Sky King and Soupy Sales. Even then, I sense my dad had a premonition that the future of Lackawanna, Buffalo and Bethlehem Steel may not be as tranquil and robust as had been the previous ten years. At a minimum, he knew it would be better for his still-growing family to move 'out of the city' and 'into the country.' So we did.

One of the joys for a youth in Eden was the abundance of trees and streams. They created a sense of adventure that most kids could only read of, in books like The Last of the Mohicans. We lived 1.1 miles east of the one traffic light in town, up the first hill east of Lake Erie shore. In our small world, we prided ourselves as "hill toppers" and those living near the center of town as "city slickers." This in a town of 7800 souls and a burgeoning youth population in that waning baby boom era.

There was no Internet, no smart phones, no cable tv. Radio was still the prominent audio medium, playing for teens the popular artists whose records that they could not afford. So one of our primary activities once the snow cleared sufficiently, was to "play in the woods." Our land included acres of grapes and a small forest about a quarter mile from the barn, down the hill to the north. A much better venue was the sprawling fields, woods, dirt roads, streams and ponds on the Cowper property, just down the road from us near town.

Bill Cowper was the sole Cowper son and he fit neatly in the middle of the age range for the first six Lorenzi boys (with Jim (1960) and Mark (1963) to follow). With or without Bill, we'd make extensive forays into the back of the Cowper property, well out of contact with any adult supervision and loaded with a sense of pioneer-like adventure. We'd explore the stream and name distinctive features. We'd climb the stony out crops near the waterfalls, look for tiny crayfish in the ebb pools, build dams and diversions, and identify potential camp sites for our imaginary lives as pioneers. One year we collected obsolescent posts from the vineyards to construct very primate forts, dedicated primarily tossing just how high we could build the levels of our tree houses. We constructed same in both our woods and in Cowper's woods. I think we were able to get up to three levels or floors. Of course these rough posts did not provide anything close to a smooth, flat floor, but they were not there for the aesthetics; we were there to test out basic engineering skills.

Spring was best, when the water ran freely and our desires to divert or dam the water were best satisfied. This was purely male activity, and we looked down on the Boy Scouts as a coddled, unskilled group of country life wannabes. Until puberty, extracurricular sports, and girls won out attention, there was nothing quite a s satisfying as an afternoon in the woods.