Over Here: 16 - The Kid's Off Somewhere
"As noted earlier, winters in the market were normally a bitch. In our particular indoor section, which encompassed perhaps 30 x 45 feet (with a small outdoor sidewalk area), there was a single pot¬bellied stove at the common floor's very center. While its top surface was ideal for roasting Ohio chestnuts, its effect within the broader field of fumarolery left a whole, whole bunch to be desired.''
Ron Pataky continues his autobiography.
There were no fans or anything - merely a stationary bed of coals that rendered its surface ornery to the touch, but of no use whatsoever beyond, say, five feet. (I should note here and now, never to be mentioned again, that the single, one-toilet closet, with its dirty sink and matching towel, was a good twenty feet away! We may not have had frozen food yet at the time; but sundry appendages came agonizingly close at times!)
It didn't take me long, summer or winter, to discover a secret spot where I could sneak away and read for hours. (Even at that young age, reading was already my passion. You could spit on my shirt, question my legitimacy, or treat me generally like a squirrelly uncle in the attic; but you did NOT mess with my books!).
Needless to say, my frequent hour-long vanishings from the workplace were not all that popular with the others, whether mere co-workers or the boss himself. In the end, however, it was I who emerged as a victor of sorts. It would happen when they all, each and every one, finally gave up on me completely! "The Kid" was just offsomewhere beinga. kid. (I realized this would not be the case after "the boss" and my father became one and the same. I well knew that that guy would not hesitate to wood-shed me on the spot; and this, mind you, in an age when the notion of welt-raising was universally applauded, when paddlings could be administered by virtually any adult who took the notion, and when the application of wood to skin was solemnly practiced as early as grade school! Sure, my arch hero was Huck Finn — but I wasn't stupid!).
I'd first considered the possibility of reclining up on the loft, behind the crates and paper-bag supplies in the back room. I quickly learned, however, that the back room was also the COLD room! Even in summer, I realized, it was too doggoned chilly there to comfortably roam the various books of the "Children of All Lands" series, or to partake of the latest Hardy Boys adventure. I wasn't all that keen on war stories back then, but I tell you this: when that Dan Dawson guy arrived to do battle with the dirty, rotten, no-good Nazis at Dunkirk .. .well, sir, that was another thing altogether!
But perhaps I digress.
