Before Atwood There Was Murphys Lane

I am the only one left who can remember when we lived on Murphys Lane a half block below Highland Drive at about 3600 South. We lived there while Dad was building the house on Atwood and moved when he got the basement finished. I attended half of either the second or third grade while living on Murphys Lane and finished the last half at Arlington Elementary School in Murray. So Van would have been only about two or three when we moved. He says he has a memory of the back yard on Murphys Lane.

I had a friend named Ronnie Rowell whose dad owned a dairy right there on Murphy’s Lane just a few houses West of ours. You all know the famous triple dog dare in the classic movie “A Christmas Story” when Flick froze his tongue to the flag pole. A similar thing happened to me when Ronnie Rowell told me to put my tongue on a pipe that was on the outside of the small refrigerator building at their dairy where they kept the milk cold. The tip of my tongue froze to the pipe. We didn’t need the Fire Department to rescue me. I jerked it loose but left some of it on the pipe.

Another memory involves an injury. We had a detached garage behind the house and the garage had a cement floor and exposed ceiling joists. For some reason there was a pulley attached to one of the joists and there was a rope hanging over the pulley. I grabbed hold of both ends of the rope and swung my legs above my head so that I was hanging upside down. There was no problem until I adjusted my hands a little and one of those rope ends slipped through my grip dropping me head first onto the concrete floor. I did not pass out but I saw more stars than I ever thought possible and I was very dizzy and nauseated. Soon I had a huge goose egg and a splitting headache.

My final memory involves another stupid kid thing. Mom had bought me a new pair of galoshes which I wore to school one wet late winter day. When it was time to go home I couldn’t find my galoshes. I looked and looked. The other kids had left and there was just one pair of galoshes left in the cloak room but they were not mine. The teacher said that maybe some other boy had taken the wrong pair and that I should take that last pair and then bring them back the next day to exchange. I took them home but was angry or something and didn’t want them so I threw them in the creek. When I got home and Mom asked me where my galoshes were I told her what had happened and what I had done. She was, of course, furious with me and marched me up to where I had thrown the galoshes in the creek so that we could retrieve them. We were not able to find them and Mom was very upset with me because money was always tight and galoshes didn’t come cheap.