Page 17 - Winterling's Chasing the Wind

craftsman who taught Manual Training there. He had an easy-going temperament
which was not a good fit for dealing with some of his rowdy high school students. A
couple of years later he joined us in Cranford after spending a few months with a
nervous breakdown in a sanitarium not far from Scotch Plains.

Upon completing the first grade, I spent the summer exploring the neighborhood. One
day I decided to brighten it up. I spied our landlord’s old Essex automobile which had
wooden spokes on its wheels. I decided that they would look better colored red, so I
decided to paint them. I often wondered why we then had to move!

While I was in the second grade at Scotch Plains, NJ, I remember a few of our projects
in school. I thought it was neat to separate cardboard layers and glue them to the side of
the jar with the corrugated part on the outside. We then painted them and shellacked
them to give them a glazed appearance. They were nice for display at school and to
have at home to contain some of my stuff. Another project was to place a moistened
slice of bread into a jar, seal it and place it in a dark closet. Several days later, the bread
turned a greenish-gray, covered with a growth of mold.

I remember one day in class a classmate, Charlie, kept getting up to run his pencil in the
pencil sharpener. After three or four trips, the teacher finally asked Charlie why he kept
sharpening his pencil. Charlie said it was because the fresh wood on the lower part of
the pencil kept getting dirty.

I would sometimes go home for lunch around noon. One day while crossing one of the
main intersections in town, I noticed the cars approaching, waiting, and then passing
through. For some reason, I decided to go back home, change into a blue shirt. Then
armed with a toy badge from a Cracker Jack, I proceeded back to the middle of the
intersection where it I stood directing the traffic waving my arms and blowing a
whistle.

That summer I caught "poison ivy", a very uncomfortable skin rash that itched
incessantly. My mother got Fels-Naptha soap and scrubbed my skin to rid me of the
allergic reaction. I thought it strange that my brother, Richard, never got it. Apparently,
he was immune to it.
A kid has no more fun than feeling the rain on the face and stomping in mud puddles.
One rainy September day, I spotted a low spot on the road with a rain-swollen ditch.
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