Man, I loved building forts in our backyard or in the backyard of one of our friends. So did most of the kids on Greenfield Road. And we built a number of good ones.
Building anything was new for me and my brother. We had come from an apartment in the city with no access to tools or building things. My dad was a mailman, and never in the construction industry. And my father’s father was, well, I’m not sure come to think of it. But he wasn’t in construction either. Two of my friends, we’ll call them Joe and Billy, were practically born with tools in their hands. Each of their fathers was handy and familiar with construction. That skill difference was obvious from the start, but my brother and I learned and eventually got good with a hammer and saw.
We weren’t building something constantly. But quite often. We had plenty of other things to occupy our attention, things like baseball, softball, football, basketball, and playing kick-the-can. Girls hadn’t yet entered the equation. In the summertime, we were always in somebody’s pool. But when we got the itch to build, we were focused!
The process usually began with trying to figure out where we were going to get the wood. Sometimes there were 2 x 4s laying around, and plywood too, but not usually. So we had to go scavenge. Luckily, Greenfield Road ran off of Ridge Road, a major commercial and retail highway on the west side of Rochester. It was part of Route 104 which ran from northern New York State to Niagara Falls. On Ridge Road, across from the top of Greenfield Road, was a flooring company, Warner and Ehman. In the back of their store were dumpsters full of scrap wood from demo jobs. All were free for the taking. We would bring a wheelbarrow up there and take whatever we could load on it or carry in our arms.
There was never a drawn-up design for our forts. They just sprung from our collective imaginations. Of course, with limited material, our imaginations didn’t need to be all that extensive. Joe and Billy usually led the way with the foundational framing. My brother and I then joined in hammering the floor joists to the outer frame. Then the fun began! Framing the sides, allowing for a window or two, then cutting or piecing in scrap plywood or other boards for the sides and roof. The roof had to be sturdy because one of the first things we would do when completing the fort was climb and jump on it — sometimes from a nearby garage roof. That was fun. If we were really being fancy we would scavenge some roof shingles and nail them on the roof to complete the job. Often we couldn’t find them though, so we made do with it leaking a little. Oh well. We weren’t going to live in there.
Fort building really was an exercise in teamwork and cooperation, usually learned the hard way, meaning there was at least one fistfight per fort build. It was a blue-collar neighborhood after all, and yard fights were as common as ball games. Oddly enough, the fights were usually between Billy and the much larger Joe. Joe was larger than Billy by any measure – height, weight, biceps, thighs, hands, feet. That didn’t stop Billy from starting the fights though. He had a hot temper. Joe would usually squeeze him until Billy finally gave, but not before Billy turned purple. “I give,” was the universally known term among neighborhood kids for conceding a fight. Interestingly, for all the fights we had, we rarely ended up punching each other in the face. We punched each other for sure, but usually in the stomach, arms, or back. The fights typically involved wrestling and headlocks. We never spoke about that out loud, but looking back now, punching each other in the face would have been “for keeps,” and no one wanted to go there. Usually, the combatants were playing together within an hour of the fight.
After a few days’ work, the fort was completed. And for a few days after that, we’d hang out in it eating lunch, talking about sports, or telling funny stories. On occasion, we would sleep out in it. Soon we grew bored with it and went on with our days doing other things that occupied boys’ minds in the mid-1960s. Within a month or so, we were knocking it down and saving the wood for the next iteration. We’d even try to save the nails, hammering them as flat as possible for future use.