Chapter Seven

Back in Ohio after an all-too-short trip to Vermont. Although, to be honest, it felt super good to be back in my own bed and be able to know where everything is. The trip was wonderful. We spent Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning with my son and grandson in Michigan. We left for Vermont on Sunday around noon.

Vermont was fabulous, as always, but the colors weren’t as vibrant as I’d hoped. It was still beautiful, but the weather had turned much colder than normal, so instead of bright fall colors, we were seeing many bare trees and snow in the mountains. In fact, at Killington, one of Vermont’s ski resorts, it had been cold enough to allow them to make snow for some of the higher trails.

So, it’s back to work. Here’s the next chapter of Lost and Found. I’ll try to get another one up this week.

Be well — be in peace,

Ron Rink
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It was a gorgeous morning and even though I spent the night sleeping on a floor with my satchel for a pillow, I felt good. I didn’t think about how scared I was the night before—I just enjoyed the fact that I was out in the brisk morning air on my way to a new adventure. I figured I would go right out to the track and see if I could find some work so I could stay off the streets. If my parents had called the police when I didn’t come home, they would probably be looking for me. An eight-year-old kid riding his bike with a satchel tied onto the back wouldn’t be too hard to spot.

I got to the track and rode into the open gate on the side by the stables. After leaning my bike against the fence surrounding the property, I took my satchel and hid it in some nearby bushes. I walked around to the front of the stables and looked at some of the horses sticking their heads out of the top half of the door. When I got near to one of them, I reached out to pet its nose. It made me laugh when the horse picked up its head as I reached for it and it let out a big whinny.

There was plenty of activity at that time of the morning. As I stood near the doorway of one of the stables, I asked three or four people who passed by me if they had anything I could do for them, but they all said no.

Then this really old guy came walking by carrying a bucket full of water. I don’t know how old he was, but he was all bent over and his face had so many creases it reminded me of the old brown leather on my satchel. He had a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, and was wearing some beat-up old overalls with a flannel shirt under them. He had on cowboy boots and a cowboy hat. When he was all bent over like that he wasn’t much bigger than I was. As he came closer I could see him squinting at me with his bleary-looking eyes.

“Hey, mister,” I called. “Would you be able to give me some work so I can buy some food?”

I don’t know what made me say that—I had enough money for food for a while. I guess I thought maybe making it look like I was this poor little kid in trouble might work.

It did, because he said, “Sure, Sonny, come with me and I’ll give you a job.”

That was one of the first lessons I learned about surviving as a kid on the streets. Since I was so young and there were a lot of people who were really struggling during those years after the depression, and during the war, people were inclined to want to do what they could to help. This was especially true with people who were themselves struggling. I learned quickly to use this fact to my advantage.

The old guy took me to a huge stack of hay bales inside a large barn and showed me how to break them up into smaller bunches and put them into hay racks inside the stalls for the horses. The racks holding the hay were like strips of wood built out on an angle to make a sort of trough. The hay would stick out between the slats and on top so the horse could get at it.

At first the horses frightened me since they were enormous in size compared to me. I was also worried they would either run out the door when I opened it or they would knock me over. Then the guy I was working for showed me how to open the stall door and sort of push my weight against the horse’s front thigh to move them to the side so I could shut the door and put the hay into the trough. I had to do this for the whole row of stalls on two of the buildings. After I finished hauling hay I carried water to the watering troughs inside the same stalls.

I worked most of the morning when the old guy came up to me and said, “You’re a pretty good worker, kid. What’s your name?”

“My name’s Van Buren”, I answered, “what’s yours?”

He looked up at me with his eyes narrowed, and then shook his head. He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a Bull Durham pouch and some papers. He kept his head down as he rolled a cigarette and stuck it in his mouth. He lit it with a match he struck on the back of his pants.

“First lesson you need to learn if you’re going to hang around here is don’t tell anyone your name and don’t ask anyone theirs, okay? We mind our own business around here, and we don’t want no one sticking their nose in where it don’t belong—got it?”

I nodded and he said, “That’s all I can give you to do today. Here’s a buck. Go get you some eats. You coming back tomorrow?”

“Yeah, I’ll be back in the morning,” I said.

I noticed some of the people were starting to take the horses out of the stalls, so I asked, “Can I stick around and watch the horses?”

“Yeah sure,” he replied with a quick grin on his face, “They’ll be saddling them up soon to take them over to the track for a workout. You can watch, but stay out of the way.”

He was a strange old geezer, but I now had a dollar more than I did when I started the day.

This track would eventually become the Hazel Park Raceway. It would become known for harness racing. At the time I was there, the only racing that took place was regular horse racing which didn’t seem to be organized—just a lot of people who boarded their horses there and would race them at the make-shift track. I learned some of the horses actually did go to other racetracks for organized racing, and this track was used mostly for training purposes.

I watched the horses exercise for a couple of hours and then went to a store across from the track and bought some lunch meat and some bread. I went back over to the track and found a place behind the stables that had a bunch of loose hay in it and a lean-to cover over it. I didn’t know what it was used for, but I arranged the hay so I had a place to sit and ate some of my food.

That night I got to the bowling alley before it closed so I had no trouble getting in. I sneaked in the back door and slipped over to the dark corner and hunkered down. Billy was right—no one noticed me at all and soon the bowling was over for the night. The boss just filled a bag with the money, turned off the lights and went out the back door. I was starting to feel quite confident about being out on my own and not getting caught.
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