Descriptions

Descriptions

Footnotes from The Bago Boy

Footnote#1

Mischief Night is an informal holiday celebrated on the night before Halloween. It’s celebrated by children and teenagers in the United States, Canada, and the U.K. The holiday involves playing harmless pranks on neighbors or family members, but Buster’s interpretation was different, since he thought there was impunity from any repercussions for kids whose pranks weren’t harmless.

Footnote#2

Pirate House-Ship
As early as I can remember I dreamed of becoming a pirate and built my first pirate ship from a large cardboard box I got at the grocery store where Mom was demonstrating the advantages of Borden’s Starlac Powered Milk and giving customers a taste. When I was around six, I tagged along when she didn’t have someone to “watch” me. We struggled home with the box in a seat next to me in the trolley car.
I decorated the box on three sides with pirate regalia, cut portholes in front and the side, and would push it around the house, on my knees, my head in the box, an old Army blanket taped to the top, covering my butt and legs. Luckily, my dog, Katie, was small enough that, after a few jittery shake-down cruises, she lay inside on my house-ship’s lower deck. I “docked” it next to the big wooden console radio to listen to adventure programs, read pirate books and comics with a flashlight.

Footnote#3

Pirate Street Ship
Buster, from my Island Road neighborhood, had a scooter that he called a “soap box scooter.” Buster’s dad had made it with a wooden fruit crate, some lumber, and an old skate. I thought a scooter like Buster’s would give me a place to carry it, extra film, my BB gun, and it would be fun to ride around the neighborhood. I also thought about using it as part of the initiation for the Philly River Rats club once I got it going. Soapbox scooters were the forerunner or first evolution to skateboards.

Fig 1

Fig 2

Fig 3

Fig 4

Fig 5

  • Fig 1. a typical soap box scooter with a wooden crate on base board with skate wheels
  • Fig 2.A decorated scooter with the owner on board
  • Fig 3.A 2X4 base board with skates from a skate nailed to it, front and back.
  • Fig 4.An example of an early 1950s homemade skateboard.
  • Fig 5.One metal skate from a pair of 1950s skates with a skate key.
Soon after I moved to the Horseshoe and built my soapbox scooter, several others appeared, and we would stage races. Elmwood Avenue, from the bridge at the crest of the hill, above fifty-ninth Street, the steepest hill in the area ran two long blocks, to the traffic light at fifty-Eighth Street. It was the best place for racing since most cars would drive outside the trolley tracks, making the asphalt there coarse, rough, bumpy, and the untraveled asphalt in the center of the trolley tracks the perfectly flat racecourse. It also made for smooth sailing on my pirate street ship, and great fun, hands off the handlebars, standing on the baseboard, until a trolley came barreling down the hill.

A sidewalk scooter race

As surfing grew In California in the 1950s, for when the surf wasn’t up, surfers removed the crates and, balancing on the baseboards as we had done on the Elmwood Avenue hill, began “sidewalk surfing.”
Building a scooter wasn’t difficult or expensive. Old metal skates came from the dump, 2 X 4 baseboard from a lumberyard’s scrap heap, the wooden crate from a grocery store. Kids’ skates were all metal and came with a skate key, shown in Fig. 3, that was used to adjust the skate to the user’s foot and made separating the front and back wheels easy.
After I had assembled all the materials in my cellar, under Katie’s scrutiny, I nailed the skate wheels to the underside, front and back ends of a weathered 2 X 4 board, about four feet long. On the front, topside, I nailed a wooden fruit crate Abe had given me. Across the top of the crate, I hammered one of Mom’s broomsticks, sawed-off for the handlebars, on top of the crate, with black electrical tape on each end.
With colored pencils and paints from one of Mom’s art class kits, I drew headlights and, instead of a grille, I copied from a pirates’ book, sketched a reasonable facsimile of a skull. Below it were two pirates’ cutlasses with a crucifix bisecting them where they intersected. On the front of the fruit box, across the top I printed FILY PIRATE SHIP. On each side I drew portholes with the pirate trappings below.
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Lived two houses down from Joey Ferrari and they were each other’s best friend. Bernie was a science buff, nurtured black widow spiders and snakes in his basement, mostly in glass milk bottles. He went to the same school, about a mile away from the Horseshoe neighborhood. Tall for his age, nine, he towered over all but the local teenagers. He and Joey were inseparable.

He was about a year younger than Brad and Em, the same age as Bernie, nine-years-old. Joe was an inch or so shorter than Brad, about the same height as Em, and went to school at another, much larger, Catholic school that was about a mile away from the Horseshoe neighborhood. He lived across the street from Abe’s Market and was one of the first neighborhood boys Brad met. Joe, as some called him, was with Brad on most of the trips taken on Turtle Pond

She was a rat terrier that my mother got me for my 5th birthday, so she was about 5 years old when she accompanied us on our adventure.  Katie was with me whenever conditions permitted, which is to say, when I rode my bike, she couldn’t go, otherwise, including in bed, she did. She was more tan than white, but both colors and weighted around ten or twelve pounds.

She disliked having two first names, Mary Margaret, or either of them separately, so she her nickname was “Em.” Em came from an affluent family who lived in the Upper Darby suburb of Philadelphia before moving to the Horseshoe. Her mother was active in many service organizations, donating her time. Her father was the captain of a Navy destroyer, based at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, which is why the family moved to a historic home on the fringe of Brad’s Horseshoe neighborhood, so he would be closer to his ship. She was about the same age as Brad, and dazzled him with her self-confidence, smarts, and looks when they first met shortly after Brad moved into the neighborhood. Em proved her worth has a pirate, not a girlfriend.

His nickname is “Brad,” but his sister, a few other relatives and Em, his friend who was a girl pirate, called him “Johnny.” Born in Philadelphia, he was living in a rural area of the city until the family moved to a more urban neighborhood, which he dubbed the “Horseshoe.” All of Brad’s gang lived there and most other characters in the book. Although Brad knew early on, he was destined to be a pirate, it was his getting his camera that prompted the idea of making a pirate movie. It wasn’t until he got a pirate ship, that he planned to make a movie about a trip to the island he discovered on a tugboat tour. 

... My articles appeared in TV Radio Mirror, Off Campus and on my non-profit advocacy, established in 2002, Justice On Trial. John Bradley Entertainment produced more than one hundred national broadcasts of Supercross on NBC, CBS, ESPN, in Japan, South Africa and Britain. My company produced some of the first freestyle motocross/Supercross films, Rick Johnson, Profile of a Champion, Ward’s Winning Ways, 1000 Mile Jump, Sick Air, WhatUP!” and many others. I will be completing a new novel, Super Double-Cross - SX 2 , in early 2024.

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