Jim K's High Notes The Scioto Voice 4-27-2012

High Notes 04-27-2012

In the mid-forties, about 1946 or so; Joe and Bessie Hansgen, with their sons, Joe and Dick lived at 1330 McConnell Avenue, and Howard R. and Mildred Brehmer and their son, Howard (Skip), lived two doors up McConnell Avenue at 1404.

Joe Hansgen was the oldest, then Skip, and Dick.

It was about 1945 or ’46 that Skip’s mother died, and Howard (Every body called him Sticks) and Skip were living in the small cottage alone. They called Howard senior, “Sticks”, I assume, because he was the long-time leader of the Boy Scout Drum and Bugle Corps, which met and marched for practice at Mound Park. Johnny Rowson remembers Sticks too, and said he was our Scout Troop leader at Franklin Methodist, Troop 12. Johnny played drums, and eventually the base drum. I was a member of Troop 12, but not the drum and bugle corps.

I do remember Sticks well, a fine man, whom I got to know better during the 1960’s when I handled his Ed Brehmer & Sons, Painting Contractors account while at the Portsmouth Times. Mrs. Thelma Boormaan was Sticks’ paint store clerk, located at 919 Chillicothe Street. Thelma, I learned, was the mother of Judy, Linda and Bill Boorman, all Lincoln School, PHS students, and fifties contemporaries of mine.

Sticks was a good father to Skip, and he used to invite all of the neighborhood boys to congregate every Saturday morning on the Brehmer front porch, to listen to their radio. Saturday mornings in those days, radio broadcasts were programmed for kids, just as today’s tv broadcasts are directed toward kids on Saturday mornings. In the mid forties, we had no television, but on Saturday we had a steady menu of serialized fare, such as, The Lone Ranger, The Shadow, and our favorite, the suspense show, “Lights Out”. Lights Out, to pre-pubescent members of the McConnell Avenue gang, was major excitement, of the horrific kind…you know, ala ghost stories told around a flickering campfire.

There we’d be, everybody but Joe Hansgen, who was old enough to be a soldier, sitting around the radio on Skip Brehmer’s front porch. My brother George, two-years older than I, was a classmate of Dick. He was there, as was Randy Chapman, the youngest of the lot, and me. I can remember one particular “Lights Out” story, which chilled me to the bone. It had to do with a lighthouse keeper, whose small island was over-run by a horde of Norway rats, which escaped from a nearby ship wreck. The lighthouse had a circular staircase, and the tall round house was compartmentalized with closed-off doors and rooms every 15-feet or so, until the final trap-door into the top-most, light bearing room.

The story, punctuated with eerie organ music, held us on the edges of our seats as the squeaking, squealing rats would gnaw their way through each doorway, to the top, and the lighthouse keeper’s family. I seem to remember the rats were just about to get into the top floor, when another ship came by and lured the rats away.

Scary!

Lights Out, according to Google, began in January, 1934 and ran into the summer of 1947. It eventually made its way onto television.

Skip Brehmer, deceased, went to OSU, as did, Dick Hansgen. Skip graduated PHS in about 1952, and Dick graduated PHS in 1955.