The suburb had two elementary schools, a junior high and one high school. Brookridge Elementary was just off Ridge Road. The building looked to be built in the mid-1950's. And Roadoan was reachable through a little pass road between the two schools. Brooklyn Middle School was very near Brooklyn High School. Very early in his career, Elvis Presley did a concert in the auditorium at Brooklyn High School. It had a library close to Brookridge Elementary. And a very large shopping strip for its time. Brooklyn was a great little suburb in its time. It may still be.

6607 Vandalia was a two bedroom bungalow with a walk-up attic and a full basement built in the 1930's. It was a very well designed structure that even included a gas fireplace in the living room. I really loved that house, up to that point it was the best home my parents ever owned. In the front slopping yard was a flowering tree between the one on the tree lawn and the house. Oh yes, it had a half front porch which was well shaded. The backyard had a three car garage with swing-open doors and an asphalt drive along with a large beautiful evergreen tree in the center. Plain and simple, it was one heck of a property. My parents had really done well this time around.

As you can imagine, the beatings continued both from Dan and my dad. Of course Dan was getting whacked by dad as well. Mark was born on May 5th, 1961 and this was his first house. Mark was lucky, he was a baby and my dad tired out just beating on and screaming at Dan and I, so he pretty much left Mark alone. Dan was basically nice to Mark, but he was really a shit head towards me. It was very rare that Dan and I would sit in a chair together and not choke each other - we only did it for photo ops.

On the corner of Vandalia and Ridge was an abandoned body shop with a field behind it. After the body shop closed, a lot of fenders, bumpers and other body part were left behind. Grass had grown very high from the neglect. The old barn-like structure was once a schoolhouse. I really liked playing in the field with its high grass which came up to my waist. I would stomp down a path into the lot and make "rooms", using the fenders and doors as furniture. It was a good place to lie low over the summer avoiding my dad and older brother - my secret place - duck down into the grass and no one could see you. I only told my cousin Mia the place - proudly showing my home away from home.

In the winter I'd made some friends, Bruce comes to mind. We used to walk along Ridge Road on snowy days and give the high sign and in turn, many of them would give us a toot on their air horns. I also had a female friend who would spend time with me - her parents had the first color tv set in our area. She was into seeing the Flintstones and the Jetsons in color on ABC.

To get to classes, Dan and I would take school buses, Dan to Brooklyn High School which at that time incorporated the junior high as well. And me to Brookridge Elementary. We'd walk down Vandalia to Pelham Drive and wait on the corner. On really rainy days a neighbor on the corner would let us stay on the porch, on cold and snowy days, another neighbor would let us wait inside the living room allowing us to watch the Today Show on NBC. It really was a nice neighborhood to grow up in. One time their son came out and jumped on top of me, didn't know what the heck I did? Mom came out, twisted the son's arm behind his back, marched him back to the house, she came out and apologized to me. You won't see that too often. In the spring, the woman's husband would be working in the garage. There in a corner was an old Zenith multiband shortwave console from the early 1940's. The radio was really neat, it had a tuning eye and a power select circuit which scanned shortwave signals, stopping dead center on the station it found. And yes, it came with programmable buttons. It was fun to watch the dial spin on its own.

About seven or eight doors down lived an amateur radio operator nicknamed "Jay-Jay" by his friends. Jay-Jay was about sixteen or seventeen at the time. He was a really happy well-adjusted guy with great parents. Sometimes he'd fix radio and tv sets for the neighbors. Jay-Jay came to the rescue when our second Muntz tv went on the fritz. While he was fixing the set we'd talk and he told me about his amateur radio setup. He was a General Class ham, and had one heck of a collection of QSL cards from around the world. Okay, if you've never heard of QSL cards, they are essentially post cards with an operator's call sign on front. When one ham talks to another ham for the first time, they will generally exchange QSL cards as proof of their contact via radio. On the back is mode (cw, ssb, code), time (in UTC), location of transmitter and power used. Outside his house was a radio tower on the side. In his parents' basement he had a long large desk with radio equipment spread on the top and hutch above. Names like Allied Radio Knight-Kit, Heath-Kit, Hallicrafters, Drake, Viking, E.F. Johnson, Hammerlund to name a few. He'd invite me down there from time-to-time as he worked other hams around the world. One time he showed me a transformer with a metal wire he strung across it. When he applied power, the wire turned a very bright white, it hurt the eyes just to look into it. Now, I was really hooked on radio, and wanted to get my own ham radio license. From that day onward, I would eat, breathe and talk electronics - wow!

Sadly, Jay-Jay passed-away well before his time when a plane he was piloting crashed. Jay-Jay became my mentor and Elmer (radio slang for a licensed ham who helps a novice obtain their own FCC amateur radio license) in life as well in death. After Jay-Jay died, his equipment was sold-off, and the beam antenna on the tower was replaced by a yagi outdoor tv antenna. As a friend, I really missed Jay-Jay.

One spring day, I missed my school bus, reaching the corner as it pulled-away in the distance. I didn't want to chance getting a beating from my father. So I decided to run the distance to school, about a mile away following the route the bus normally took. I was highly nervous and very scared of getting into trouble. So I ran as fast as I ever did, or would ever run again. When I crossed into the shopping center, i astro-projected out of my body, rising higher seeing the roofs over the stores and my body still running hard below me. I followed it from high above until I physically reached the crossing in front of the school when my consciousness' and body became one once more. I didn't understand what happened at that moment - I was too concerned at getting to school on time.

The abuse I was taking really piled-up, there was no release. As to the sexual awakening in me, it had already arrived. Walking in on my mom and Uncle George had also had an effect. It was a period when I was looking for any escape I could make. I found it in masturbation. Nobody taught me how to do it, I figured it out myself. Thankfully, I didn't grow hair on the palms of on the back of my hand, and it wasn't a gateway to other sexual acts. I found quickly I was into older women, in my case women thirty or forty years-old to my ten years-old. And getting off took the edge off. Given my home life, I did it quite often. No, I didn't acquire homosexual tendencies, I was strongly and still am heterosexual in my orientation. I started doing it in bed at night, then in the bathroom on the commode and in the bathtub. That was okay, however, I took it one step too far - I tried doing it under my desk at school. Not a problem at first, but I got so into it that I would forget where I was and the desk started moving. That really got me into trouble. My grades were not the best which further added to the problem. My parents were called in for a meeting with the school physiologist and the principal. That's all it took to make me stop the practice in public. However, the damage was done, and I found myself transferred to Special Education classes. I remember the first day the Special Ed teacher quietly walked me to the room. I took my first look, glanced at my teacher and said, "I really don't think I belong here..." The teacher told me to take my seat - I would be there for the next two years before school personal realized that I was much too intelligent for special classes, and in IQ tests ranged a little higher than those in normal classes. However, its the only thing they could think of doing with me. Not all the students in Special Education classes were slow learners or mentally-challenged - some were there because of advanced polio or MS or other physical ailment. I was stuck there because I masturbated under the desk three or four times. That, and because on the yearly computer tests, I decided to fill in the little blue circles on the computer-tabulations randomly without reading the questions. That was a mistake!

While in Special Education, I did make friends with Lewis, Jimmy, a really tall rail-thin girl who actually looked too old to be in elementary school and Janey who suffered from polio. The class work was non-challenging, and we got to spend time on the playground a little longer. One day, Janey and her normal girlfriend coaxed me to the far end of the playground where trees would lead into the park. We quietly slipped between some of the trees and Janey said she'd show me hers if I showed her mine. Huh, did I hear that right, show me what? Janey sat on the grass next to her girlfriend as we got into a three-way circle. Then both girls pulled down the front of their panties exposing their vaginas encouraging me to show them my penis - this was a first! Next, they encouraged me to stroke their vaginas while they stroked my penis. Hey, this was more fun than going down a sliding board or climbing monkey bars in my mind. When the bell rang indicating recess was over, the girls pulled up their panties and I pulled up my underpants, and we went back to class as if nothing happened. We did this another three or four times before we mutually ended it.

I went to a birthday party once, a lot of cake, ice cream and pop. My friend's older brother had a state-of-the-art Hallicrafters mid-range shortwave receiver - I thought it was pretty neat! He also had one humongous St. Bernard dog. Realize I was at the typical nine year-old height, and this was a full-grown dog. While I ate my cake on the couch, the dog decided he would like a piece of it as well. the dog jumped on the cushion, knocked me on my back and sat on top of me taking his portion - everything left over on the plate - and I found myself under a humongous amount of fir. Now I like dogs, I just didn't want to be buried under one. I screamed "get this dog off of me" as I squirmed underneath. It was a great party, but they had to rescue me from a cake-ravenous St. Bernard!

When I was placed back into regular classes I lost two unaccredited years in my education. However, I did make friends with a kid from California who lived in a trailer park on Ridge Road in Brooklyn. One day we decided to check out the railroad tracks and climbed down the ravine to get to them. We got down okay, but we surprised two hobo's and they started to chase us. The guys had obviously been riding the rails for a long time, and even from where my friend and I stood, we smelled it...ugh! Our trip ended very quickly when we beat the hell out of there and climbed back up the ravine - I was quite agile in those days, especially when almost given the bum's rush!

In Brooklyn, I got to cop another mutual feel. It was summer and my female cousin Randy and I got curious about what we each have underneath. We were not too bright where we decided to do this, and it was quite a spur or the moment thing. So we went to the back side of the dining room bay window in the driveway and she reached down my pants and I reached down her one-piece dress. We didn't get caught, however we both realized there was nothing interesting down there for each other anyway. Aside from that, I had more of a crush on the middle daughter, Mia. But she was a cousin and there was no real interest beyond friendship!

Dan on the other hand was discovering his sexuality as well. However, as usual, Dan had his own peculiarly way of satisfying his urges - and it was not very innocent. There was a little five year-old girl who would traverse up and down the street on her tricycle - typical happy little kid, bothering no one. Dan has never really been good with the opposite sex, heck, he wasn't very good with same-sex friendships. Dan was pushy and aggressive. If he wanted it, he took it! And Dan wanted me as an accomplice in this particular case. Dan was already in junior high school, and he wanted to force a five year-old girl into sex. Dan wanted me to lure her in the garage where he would be waiting. I told Dan "NO WAY, and if you even try I will do everything to stop you...and I WILL TELL THE GIRLS' PARENTS AND I WILL TELL MOM AND DAD, AND I WILL TELL THE POLICE!" Dan decided it wasn't such a hot idea after all, and beat the living shit out of me instead. I was glad to take the beating on this one - it saved a little kid from a horrifying experience!

Dan and I belonged to Troop 419 of the Boy Scouts in Brooklyn. We both started out as Tenderfoots, and I remained there during my scouting career. We each got a handbook and really neat green outfits with the scarves. We'd meet in the gym/lunch room at Brookridge Elementary where we'd listen to lectures, learn how to tie knots and all the things scouts did. There were special nights for the parents where we would show the skills we learned and put on humorous skits written by the scouts themselves. I participated in one of those skits as a main character, while everyone played straight-man around me. The curtain slowly opens on stage, the lights come up and in the middle, I'm sitting on a galvanized water bucket. One by one, each scout approaches me asking if I need anything. I would mumble something incoherent with each question. Finally, comes the punch line, "I NEED TOILET PAPER AND A LITTLE PRIVACY" as polite chuckles and applause emanate from the audience...stage goes dark, curtain comes down.

Dan and I went to our first and only scouting jamboree at a camping spot called Glenndenning. It was three days of roughing it in late summer. We'd pitch our tents, use the skills we learned for survival. It was a washout! The tent Dan and I borrowed from my Aunt Hope leaked terribly - and it drizzled and rained the whole three days keeping us pretty much in our tents. We ended up mosquito bait!

One time there was a scouting party given in a finished-off basement of a scout master. It was fun. The scout master pulled a harmless prank on many of us. He found a way to quietly spray some Sweet 'n Low artificial sweetener on our lips without our knowledge. We'd suddenly would feel something sweet on our lips never knowing where it emanated from.

Finally there was the time Dan and I and a scouting friend roughed it in our basement - sort of an "indoor" campout. We played board games, told ghost stories and went to sleep on foldout cots my dad borrowed for the occasion. The next morning, my father came down with a bunch of raw eggs, an iron frying pan and some paper plates. Lets be honest, Dan and I both knew my dad didn't know how to cook...period! He was only a great chef in his own mind. We were quietly horrified when he started cooking the eggs on the basement natural gas grill. The eggs came out stringy from being overcooked, the yolk was hard and as my dad watched all smiles, we had to consume his creation...and we all got sick. Needless to say, our friend never spent the night with us again, and after word got out, neither did our other scouting friends.