Chapter Seventeen

How was your Thanksgiving holiday? I hope it was grand! It was fine here and there wasn’t a lot of work being done — so that’s a good thing.

Now we’re back to it again. I need to focus as much time to writing as I can over these next few weeks since another hiatus is just around the corner with the Christmas holiday.

Here’s the next chapter of Lost and Found. It’s hard to believe we’re up to the Seventeenth chapter already. Thanks for reading — and as always — pass it on!

Be well — Be in peace,

Ron Rink
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There was a major happening in my neighborhood during the winter of 1942-1943. A huge ice skating rink was built between my street and the street behind me. I learned how to ice-skate when I was about five or six years old, but unless someone took me to either Belle Isle or Palmer Park, there weren’t any other places to skate. One of the good things about the activities of our church youth group is we did get taken to places like Belle Isle and Palmer Park for things like picnics in the summer and ice-skating in the winter..

My parents had their own rule about ice-skating. They ranked it right up there with dancing, which in their opinion, was sinful. For reasons I never would figure out, ice-skating was allowed. They never stopped me from going skating with the church youth group. They accepted it grudgingly and grumbled accordingly.

The area behind my house, across the alley, opened into a long, but narrow vacant area. It was basically just weeds, long grasses and small bushes. The street behind mine was Cardoni, and there still weren’t any houses on the side of Cardoni which backed up to our alley. The people who lived on my side of Russell, could look out from their back yards and see the front of houses on the other side of Cardoni.

One of the men that lived on Cardoni worked for a company which did excavation work, so he had access to a steam shovel. (The steam shovel was probably the precursor to the backhoe. It was a bit larger than a backhoe, but it served the same purpose. It had tracks similar to what you would see on a tank and a large cab area for the operator. It had a big arm on the front of it that bent like a human arm. Attached to the arm was a huge shovel that the operator could extend out to pick up large quantities of dirt, rocks, or whatever. They also used this machine to dig basements for houses.)

One day in the late fall of 1942, this man showed up with his steam shovel and began to dig out a long trench in the vacant area behind our alley and facing Cardoni. He dug out an area about six or seven lots long (a lot being forty or fifty feet wide). It was the width of the entire area between the alley in back of my house to Cardoni. It was huge. He dug down about six inches and piled the dirt he dug up along the sides to build a bank all around the area. Then the neighbors on Cardoni and Russell ran garden hoses from their houses to the rink to flood it each winter. The kids that used the rink did all the shoveling of snow to keep the ice cleared.

During the first part of the winter I would go and skate most Saturday mornings. I couldn’t skate after school or in the afternoons because I had to work at the bowling alley, and I couldn’t do anything on Sundays except go to church or read. After a few weeks of these limitations, and with persistent begging on my part, my parents did start letting me go out after dinner to skate with just a couple of streetlights for illumination.
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