Blix Street kids

 

When I was 8 years old, Bambie (next door) was 10 and Candy (across the street) was 6.  The two of them had very little in common, with different interests and a 4-year age span.  I was in the enviable position of being in the middle of an unstable threesome.  We rarely were all friends at one time.  Candy was a kind of a play-inside, dolls-and-hairdos kind of girl.  Bambie was an outdoorsy tomboy.  It was the best of both worlds for me.  (Interesting how both my friends at that time had future stripper names.  Candy was short for Candace, which no one but her mother called her.  Bambie was a nickname given her by her brother, when he was reading the Disney story of that name).

Bambie was a little bigger than me, and a little stronger.  She could hold me down and spit in my face, or make me eat grass; luckily, those incidents were rare.  We were both skinny and gangly, often had skinned knees, and endured the “pixie cut” haircuts so common in young girls in the 60s. 

Bambie organized things like building go-carts and racing them (about four teams competed in the eventrual race down the street, which culminated in shooting across the intersection wildly and with a reckless disregard for potential traffic).  After we read Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, she was fired up to emulate their river-raft building.  We scavenged wood from both of our garages, and nailed the heavy boards together.  We tried to float our raft in the runoff from a storm drain down in the canyon, and it was a spectacular failure.  We had recruited little Greg from the corner house to sit on it, and the raft sank and left him in foot-deep water. 

We had no formal parks or playgrounds in our area, so we used the elementary school and the strip mall as our turf.  We rode our bikes quite a bit.  One morning in early summer I ran next door and knocked.  The time-honored phrase “Can Bambie play?” was followed by her coming out of her garage on her bike.  I grabbed mine:  a hand-me-down from the bigger kids across the street, with one pedal broken off.  The little shopping center was about ½ mile away.  It was a quick bike ride, and sometimes we rode up there several times a day.  That day, we parked our bikes out in back of the store near the dumpsters, and climbed inside the first one, as dumpster-diving seemed like a fine morning’s entertainment.  The long lid, in two pieces, folded back until it bounced heavily against the cinder block wall.  The dumpster and the lid were slightly rusted, so in the heat of the day there was a coppery smell that almost drowned out the scent of garbage slowly softening inside.  In the first dumpster, we came upon something we had never seen before.  In among the black bananas and brown lettuce was a (fruit? vegetable?) that was a glossy purple, bulbous in shape, and the size of a small pumpkin. 

“Throw it against the wall.”  (That is what we had done with the dozen eggs we found there the past week).  “That way we can see what’s inside”. 

“No, let’s take it home and we can cut it up.”

The mystery produce was stashed in Bambie’s bike basket, and we went on to the second dumpster.  In there, there was a cigar box which we pounced on in great delight.  Even an empty cigar box was a treasure, since they had such sturdy edges, hinged lids, and colorful pictures on the top.  This one, though, seemed full of memorabilia, and we sat down on the oil-stained concrete to look at it.  There were things like old letters, ticket stubs, and a small porcelain doll.

“Maybe some old lady died and they are throwing away her stuff.”

“Or….maybe someone robbed her house and threw it away here.”

10-year-old Bambie confidently said “That makes us criminals too, if we take it.”  8-year-old me found that idea somehow thrilling.  “Maybe we’ll get adjoining cells,” she said, which we laughed at heartily, covering (at least in my case) a vague fright that we were doing something wrong. 

The letters were to someone named “Effie” and the ticket stubs included one from the New York World’s Fair in something like 1905.  We took it home and split it up between us.  I kept what the two of us called “the Effie stuff” for many years:  Bambie (now called Anne) said she still had hers a few years ago when we last talked about it.

We showed her mom the big purple thing we had found, and she said “Eggplant!  I’ll slice it up and make it with our dinner.”  I slid out of there and headed home before I found out if Bambie ever told her we had found it in a dumpster.

When I was “in a fight with” Bambie, I would go across the street instead of next door and find Candy.  Candy had 3 older brothers.  As the youngest, and the only girl, she received a degree of “girly attention” from her family.  She had a dressing table in her room (a kind of a toy makeup and hair station).  She had the latest toys and dolls, including a Barbie-type doll named “Tressy” whose hair changed lengths with the twist of a key in her back.  Several kinds of hair styles were possible as a result.  Candy herself was a small, white-haired girl with pale skin and a pink-around-the-eyes-and nose look.  Her hair, in addition to being white, was sparse, and she had pink scalp showing through. They put a pool in their backyard in 1962 or so, and we spent all day in the pool in the summers.  Her hair turned green around the edges in the chlorine.  The first few years neither of us could swim, so we stayed in the shallow end.  Walking on the bottom surface caused the pads on my big toes to wear out a time or two.  Candy’s father had a “deep end test” for anyone who wanted deep end privileges that entailed diving in at the shallow end, swimming the length of the pool, then swimming back.  Even when Candy and I were able to pass the “deep end test”, we were not allowed in there if her mom was at home alone (her mom was a non-swimmer).  We would go door-to-door looking for one of the neighborhood older girls (probably high school age) to come over and hang out by the pool, because if they were there we could go in the deep end. 

 

Occasionally there were times that Bambie, Candy and I were together.  There was a military air base called Miramar close to us and most of our dads had base privileges as retired military.  In the summer, when one of the moms went grocery shopping at “The Commissary”, we could talk them into dropping us at the large base swimming pool while they shopped.  We drove by the base airfield on the way to the pool, and there was a large windsock to let pilots know how much wind there was and from what direction.  Bambie said to Candy “Oh look!  They’ve caught the Ghost of Miramar.”  Candy, a bit worried yet suspicious, listened as Bambie spun a convincing tale.  “Oh yeah.  Everybody knows about this ghost that hangs around here.  When they caught him, they hung him up there as a warning to other ghosts to stay away.”  When we got home, the three of us went into my house and the daily newspaper was on the coffee table.  Bambie picked it up and showed Candy (who couldn’t read yet) the headline.  “Oh no!  This says the Ghost of Miramar escaped from its pole just now and is flying around the neighborhood again.”  Candy looked to me for verification and I, easily led, said “That’s what it says. We all better be careful.”  Candy ran home at that point, and Bambie and I shared a good laugh.  No wonder the three of us together just didn’t work.

We were relatively free-range kids in those days.  There was a high school about a mile from our neighborhood, and once a small carnival set up in a vacant lot across the road from it.  Bambie and I walked over there in the evening and spent a few dimes on rides, carnival games, and sideshow exhibits.   I was 8 or 9, which would make her 10 or 11.  There was a sideshow “freak show” tent that advertised a frog man.  We paid our money and went in, and were amused and dismayed by an adult man with flipper-type arms and small vestigial legs.  In retrospect, he was probably what was known as a “Thalidomide baby”.  He did some tricks unrelated to his limbs, such as flaming sword swallowing (and he spit on the ground a lot, so I also think he coated his mouth with something for the trick).  When the show was over, we left the tent and Bambie said “I want to see him again.  We don’t want to have to pay again, though” and I followed her to the back of the tent where she lifted up a flap to peek in.  The “frog man” saw us, and shouted “Get those girls!” as he grabbed at us with his flipper hand.  Although I have never, then or since, been able to run a mile without stopping, I certainly remember that it happened that night as we got back home in record time. 

 

Bambie was a fast thinker and may have gotten me into trouble a few times, but she got me out of it also.  There were wooded canyon areas around our homes, and she and I had gone for what we grandly called a “hike” by dipping down into one of these gullies and exploring.  A young man (older teenager maybe, or young adult) approached us on the path and said “What are you girls doing?  Having fun?”  I didn’t think anything of it, but Bambie turned abruptly and started walking back the way we came.  She pushed me in front of her and called to one side of the trail: “Michael!  Come on, we’re ready to go.”  The young man said “Oh, your brother is with you?” and backed out of the area the way he had come.