A couple months before my Dad died last year, he had joined a writer's group in the small town where he and my Mom lived. He enjoyed it, because it gave him the opportunity to do the kind of informal writing he used to do as a pastor in his weekly bulletins before he retired.
A month or so ago, while my Mom was going through some of Dad's old things, she came across the manuscript for a short piece he was going to read at one of the meetings of the Writer's Group. The illness that sent him to the hospital and eventually led to his death prevented him from presenting it himself. The group allowed Mom to read it for him, and the local newspaper reprinted it.
Mom sent a copy to me and to my brothers. And I thought I'd share it here.
Spa-laaaash!...
by Rob Wilcken
We were “buds.” Jim and I were the same age, somerwhere between 9 and 12. We lived across the alley from each other and though he went to Catholic School and I to public, we were pretty much together during non-school hours. When we weren’t playing our version of Cops and Robbers combined with Hide ‘N’ Seek, we were together someplace else, usually in my room working with my Erector Set.
Asahh -- the Gilbert Erector Set -- a marvelous collection of nuts and bolts, wheels, gears, cogs, connectors and metal strips, perforated in such a way that they resembled girders. They came in three lengths: 12 inch, 8 inch and 4 inch. There were quarter-circle curves so your could make arches or sircles. They were cunningly designed so you could put four of them together to make a girder. From that point, the possibilites were endless.
The wonderful thing about toys of that time was that YOU played, worked or built with them. They weren’t toys that played with you. You didn’t add a battery and sit back and watch the toy play. YOU played. YOU designed, maybe by looking at the example pages that came with the set; maybe soaring off on your own with some mad-cap structure or vehicle. But You did it. YOU designed. YOU struggled, assembled, did the quality checks along the way. When it was finished, YOU played with IT! If it went “Zip when it moved” or “Pop when it stopped,” ore Whirrrr when it stood still,” it was becasue YOU planned and built it to “Zip, Pop and Whirr.”
On a fateful, bright, sunny day in summer, Jim and I were in my upstairs room designing marvelous, miraculous objects with Mr. Gilbert’s great creation. My brother, Pete (two and a half years my senior), and his buddy, Dave were out in the garage working on their motor bikes. Back then, a motor bike was just that -- a bike with a gasoline motor mounted on it. It was not the brightly-colored plastic-bodied speed machine of today. It was not a motorcycle. I was just a bike with a motor. It was the precursor to the home-crafted hot rod.
I must back-track a bit, to “set the scene” as it were. My room opened onto a balcony over the back porch of the house and faced the back yard.. I had rigged up a wonderful thing. I went to the hardware store and got a doorbell and a large six-volt battery. These I carried to my room and fashioned my “wonderful thing.” With a couple pieces of tin and some wire, I made a switch, which was attached to a string. I let the string hang down from the balcony, right beside the back door. Now when Jim came over, he would simply pull the string, ringing my doorbell and walk right in and come on up.
And so it was on that aforementioned fateful, bright, sunny day in summer. Jim and I were hard at work (for it was indeed serious work, to make sure the creation functioned properly). Every once in a while, Pete would have to come into the house. When he did, both upon entrance and exit, he would “ring my bell.” While he probably did it for fun the first time, he quickly realized that it annoyed me. This might have been because I yelled at him. So each time he came in, he did the same. It became the typical sibling annoyance routine. It was fun for him to “pull my chain.”
Finally, annoyance turned into action. I retrieved some wire and a water glass from downstairs. Together, Jim and I fashioned a frame to hold the glass. The frame had a pivot at the bottom where it was held by another wire frame which we attached to the balcony. Then it was just a matter of (a) -- attaching the frame of the glass to the pull string, (b) -- filling the glass with water and ( c) -- waiting for Pete to come in again and “pull my chain”, thus dumping the glass of water upon himself. Jim and I gleefully went back to work.
But Pete didn’t need anything more from the house, and after an hour or so, Jim and I went downstairs and out to the garage to see what they were doing. All annoyance was forgotten, and we got interested in their task. Then we heard four distinct and ominous sounds.
“Hi, boys,” -- my father’s voice as he came home from work and walked around to the back to enter the house.
“Riinng.” I looked at Jim and he looked at me, and was suddenly gone, across the alley and into his house.
“Spa-laash!” No comment necessary.
“Robert!” -- loudly and authoritively.
Fortunately, because the balcony didn’t extend all the way over the back door, my positioning of the water trap was a little off, and the water did not baptize my father, just splashed next to him. I had a look of terror, Pete and Dave looked puzzled, and Jim was nowhere to be seen. The following events have blessedly faded into comfortable oblivion of unpleasant memories, but I do recall that the doorbell and drinking glass holder were gone -- almost as fast as Jim was.