Bullies

During my final two years of residence in Erlton, 1956 and 1957, when I would have 12 and 13, I became friends with a kid named Ronald Hanson, who was the same age as me.
Ronald was an only child, son of a father who was stonily conventional — he worked as a real-estate agent for local Blakely Realty — and a mother who was a Hawaiian exotic gone heavily to seed.
They lived in a small two-story on Harrison Ave., one of a bunch of houses put up in Erlton after the first bunch, probably in the late ‘30s.
Ronald was rather spoiled, and I would hear him yelling with his mother. Both he an she would go completely bonkers, yelling at the top of their lungs.
And Ronald always won these contretemps. He always got his way. I guess his father weighed in on his side.
Ronald had a fabulous Lionel layout in the basement, more realistic than my Uncle Herb.
Uncle Herb would string stuff together on a table-platform to display the trick gizmos Lionel had. Ronald’s layout was through plaster scenery intended to look faintly like the real world.
Of course it was a world awash with railroad-track, but I remember war-bonnet Santa Fe Fs trailing tiny imitation stainless-steel streamlined passenger-cars. (We never saw such things on the PRSL.)
Those war-bonnet Fs were the jewel of the Lionel line, and the coaches had internal lighting with opaque shadows of people in the windows.
The Hanson house was on a double-lot, which meant the house was on the south lot, and the north lot was vacant land, which could have accommodated a house, but didn’t.
Instead, the vacant land was fenced (half-fenced), and attached to the house-lot on the south.
A rustic playhouse had been built along the back wall, turned into a medieval torture-chamber by Ronald.
Ronald had strung up a steel cable from a tree, down across the vacant yard.
A big cardboard shipping-barrel had been hung from the cable with tiny pulleys. The idea was to climb atop the playhouse, get in the barrel, and ride it down across the yard.
Musatanos had a similar arrangement at their house on Marlton Pike, although theirs was a bosun’s chair.
I rode them both.
So the cable-ride was the bait.
Ronald was playing with the Divine kids, perhaps slightly older, and enamored of torturous intimidation.
I was invited to ride the barrel, but soon found myself lashed to the backwall of the playhouse facing a grand assemblage of rusty bicycles, screens and wire, all intended to signal my escape to my intimidators.
And escape I did. I managed to escape my tie-ups, and bolted out of the playhouse without attracting too much attention.
But the yard was surrounded by fence, so I had to leap the fence to escape.
Couldn’t do it. Johnny Divine lassoed me with ropes.
It started me crying, which turned them all off.
Seems that was all they wanted; intimidation enough to make me cry.
A few years ago I saw a movie about stock-market investors whose greatest joy was to get others to cry.
It reminded me of this incident.
So does the “story” on Weggers sub-bags.