Memories from our childhood help form the adults we become. Where we grew up has a direct impact on our lives, long after we move onto bigger and better things. I often wax sentimental about the town I still consider home, even though I haven’t lived there for, coming up on, 25 years. My family moved to Kingston when I was just three years old, and though I lived there for less than fifteen years, it has always been and will always be my hometown.
Our house was located off New Boston Road on Dulcie’s Point, one of the many small, dead-end streets that sat alongside the mighty Powwow River. OK, maybe not mighty, but the river and the area around Powwow Pond are as dear in my memory as the friends that surrounded me at the time - even more so. We lived close enough to ‘The Pond’ to be able to see it from my bedroom window and literally walk to its edge inside of two minutes. My father always had a boat of some sort docked at his friend’s house across the street, so excursions on the water were commonplace. When he purchased a pontoon boat, the fun only grew. He installed a diving platform on the front of the boat and we’d travel out to the deep spots in the river’s channel and dive off, over and over. Granted, the ‘deep spots’ were no more than eight feet or so, and the weeds always tickled our feet, but it was good times just the same. Dad would usually bring a bar of soap out with us so he could bathe without really having to bathe. He always blamed our failing leech field as the real reason, but we knew he just didn’t like baths.
Some of my friends (or their fathers) also had boats, so we spent a lot of time on the water fishing, swimming or just cruising back and forth between the New Boston Road causeway and Trickling Falls in East Kingston. We wasted entire summer days just floating around near ‘The Point,’ a sandy outcrop near the railroad bridge and, when feeling especially adventurous, we’d go under the New Boston Road causeway and head upriver toward Country Pond in Newton. The weeds were usually too thick to get far with a motor, though, so we spent most of our time on the cleaner ‘Pond’ side.
Our neighborhood had a lot of kids of varying ages, so there was always something going on in the way of a baseball game, football game, basketball, racing and jumping bicycles, playing with trucks in one of many yards, building forts, building downhill racers, running, climbing, jumping and just plain playing the way kids used to. Climbing trees was popular since there were so many of them around - sometimes we’d call a friend to come over. Then, before he’d get there, the rest of us would climb an 80-foot tree in my yard and sit silently watching him knock on my door and look around bewildered. As he’d start heading home we’d assault him with pinecones. Ah, the glory days.
I attended DJ Bakie Elementary School. The principal was Mr. Pinkerton, a tall, mustachioed man with a deep voice who always wore gray suites. I had teachers named Sawyer, Dudak, Prescott, Amazine, Jenkins, Smith, Long, and Cole. All left lasting impressions in one way or another (who could ever forget Mr. Cole?), but one teacher always seems to stand out when you look back. Mrs. Woods was that teacher when I was in the fourth grade because she acknowledged my ‘specialness’ and treated me a little different than the other kids - at least in my own head. I sometimes wonder what happened to her.
I entered the sixth grade in a brand-new middle school in Newton. Ours was the first class to complete all three grades in the Sanborn Regional Middle School. The teachers there were competent, for the most part, but none really stood out as ‘spectacular.’ Mrs. Eastman was always gentle on the eyes of us pubescent boys while Mr. Rafferty always seemed to keep his eyes glued firmly on the pubescent girls. Mr. Cullen was the school’s joker, while the school’s principal, Mr. Hurlbert, was a very nice man whom we all called ‘Rubberneck’ because of the way he’d bob his head. It was during my middle school years that I lost interest in doing well at school and focused more on clowning around and entertaining my friends.
High school was not especially fun for me. The school had a ‘smoking area’ back then, and I’d spend as much time as I could out there - that’s where the ‘cool’ kids hung out. It was around that time that I dove into drug use and from that point on, it was all down hill. I stopped doing schoolwork altogether and channeled my energy into getting high. I flunked all my classes except art and PE until I finally dropped out in the eleventh grade. There was only one teacher who seemed to care about me in those days - her name was Miss Metterville, a new-to-Sanborn science teacher. She saw something in me that others didn’t and tried to coax it out through books and advice. She later married a guidance counselor named Mr. Carlson, I believe. My counselor was Ken Fagiano, a mellow, down-to-earth man who seemed to have a sincere interest in many kids’ futures. He was inspirational to some, including my wife who also had him as a counselor several years later.
So overall, my later schooling doesn’t hold great memories for me. It was the time I spent out of school that gives me pleasure in my recall. I spent so much time walking and riding my bike up and down New Boston Road, that I knew all its cracks, potholes and discolorations by heart. The woods of the surrounding area became well known to me, too. When my father bought an old trail bike, I was allowed to ride it down at Shattuck’s sandpit and all the interweaving trails throughout Kingston. I got to know, and still remember, how to get from my old house to Long Pond Road in Danville without staying on the pavement longer than it took me to cross a few roads. In the winter, on Dad’s thirty-year-old ‘one-lung-er’ Ski-Doo, the trails went on forever.
Just across New Boston Road was a large tract of land owned by Bill Tucker, the first person I ever heard called ‘a hermit.’ Bill lived alone way out in the woods in a small shack with no running water and no electricity, but was friendly to all those he met. He was often found fishing off his property that bordered Powwow’s backriver and would happily advise us youngsters on the best fishing spots, the best bait, and how to knock a snapping turtle off your line if one latched on (he kept a large nut on his old fishing rod and he would slide it down the line and bump the turtle on the nose).
Not all my memories of the old neighborhood are good ones, but I choose to think mostly about those that give me warm feelings. Bad things happened, but there is little point in running through them time and time again in your head - it only strengthens their hold. Kingston and the surrounding area are a part of my youth and, therefore, a part of my adulthood. It would be easy to continue on for pages recounting all the happy memories I have of being a child in Kingston, but suffice it to say, when I reflect on the happiness, safety and warmth I felt while living there, I feel home again. And that’s a great place to be.
The opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and in no way reflects the opinions of this publication.
(Editor's Note: Ash Lee is a contributing columnist for the Carriage Towne News. Feedback can be sent directly to Ash by e-mailing him at: Ash@IsItJustAsh.com , or by visiting www.IsItJustAsh.com )
