On the Street Where I Lived

      "History is a pack of lies."   A sentiment attributed to George Santayana, Napoleon Bonaparte and others. 

       My memories of "early days in Valley Falls" are not the same as some others. We tend to choose a memory or event from the past and report it as the actual event because that is our recall. Then others pass the memory on, and history is made, oblivious of how  narrow the slice of life the memory conjured up.

   To my mind:  

 1) Johnny Daurio did not really have the nickname ascribed to him in the column about the old days. He wanted to be called Johnny or John.  Boys then often  called each other by their surnames, so that was the case. Nicknames then were also derived from a form of bullying. A double-bullying had him called Dow-Weer because another child on the street had a speech impediment, and couldn't pronounce his last name. The older boys from upstreet attached the name Tomato, even adding "head"  because his father grew tomatoes  and would  pass out the excess to those he knew or did gardening for. That was his means of income. The family was very limited, financially and in all other ways,  and Johnny pretty much raised himself. I can remember watching from the sidewalk on a hot  summer day as he, probably no more than 10 or 12 years old, crossed the road in front of his house, and went across the tracks, down the bank, jumped in the river and swam across to the other side. And then swam back. And at a young age, he and a neighbor would often hitchhike to Troy. But he survived----for a while.

2) I can't be certain, but I don't ever remember Joby Andrew as a rural mail deliverer. As far as I knew, at least in our early years on River Road, his family, like many others then, did not own a car. The mailman I recall is Bill O'Neill, who worked out of the Post Office when it was down on the corner from us. He was an outgoing person who would sometimes strew the unwanted silver pennies in the driveway there for us kids to "find" as we cut through there on our way to school. He even delivered our mail when we lived in Schrieb's house, where he kept a Doberman  Pinscher in an enclosure that was filled with the bones he would bring it from time to time. I think my mother fed it in between. And he was probably the mailman who brought young Joseph to  Dr. Sproat after the dog bite. Maybe so. He kept a racehorse at the Schaghticoke Fairground, a trotter. One time he bought a goat fom my mother to keep the horse company, as was done then, to calm it down. Billy O'Neill was Sara O'Neill McMahon's nephew. He lived upstairs in her home later on. 

  So that's my version of history.