My Life in South Philly, In Search of the Music

By Edward McCutcheon

Life is interesting. This is the story of a young boy's adventures growing up in South Philadelphia in the City of Brotherly Love. This is also a story of a young man's life and family and friends who lead him on a path into the music business.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Mar 20, 2023
• ISBN: 9781662483431

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My Life in South Philly, In Search of the Music

Edward McCutcheon Sr.

Copyright © 2022 Edward McCutcheon Sr.

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING

Conneaut Lake, PA

First originally published by Page Publishing 2022

ISBN 978-1-6624-8341-7 (pbk)

ISBN 978-1-6624-8343-1 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Preface

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

To my friends and the McCutcheon family who inspired me to write it

Also

To the love of my life my wife, Anita

Preface

America is full of exciting stories about people who grew up in unusual and different places in America, like farms in the suburbs and other places. I grew up in the inner city of Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love, and I decided to put my story down on paper. Just as it happened, and I hope you can enjoy my story.

Chapter 1

I don't know just exactly how to start this story. Everybody has a story to tell about how and where they grew up in America. Everybody has a starting point in their life, the first time that you really remember being alive, as a child. It's different for everybody. The very first thing I really remember growing up in South Philly as a little boy was that we lived in like an alleyway next to a store, which was across the street from an elementary school. There were three apartments. Mine was the one in the middle. I guess I was about three or four years old. I am not sure which, but I do know that I rode my kiddy cart up and down that alleyway every day. If you wonder what a kiddy cart is, it's just a tricycle with a cathead with handle bars on each side. I would ride to the corner store and get stuff like candy, soda, and ice cream anytime I wanted to. The owner knew that my father would pay my bill at the end of the week, which to me was pretty cool.

All of a sudden, one day we moved into a house about three blocks away, on a small street called Kauffman Street, and it ran into a small street called Reese Street. Kauffman Street was between Catherine and Queen and Fifth Street and Passyunk Avenue. It's kind of a little isolated area of the city. My grandparents lived two doors away from us. It was a nice street, and there were a lot of kids to play with. I stayed outside and played all day until it got dark, but one thing was wrong that day. Nobody had told me that we had moved, so when it was time to come in when it got dark, I walked back the three blocks, across all those streets by myself to the alleyway where we used to live.

I didn't understand what moving meant, and nobody had explained to me that we had moved out of the alleyway to another place. I knocked on the door, and nobody answered. I started to cry because no one was home. This was in the early forties, and during those days nobody had a refrigerator. Everybody had what was called an ice box, and the ice man who drove an ice wagon, pulled by a horse, would deliver everybody's ice. Just my luck our ice man, Jake, came along, the man who delivered our ice. He saw me crying. He picked me up and put me on his ice wagon and took me back to the new house. My parents had told him where we moved. I don't think my parents even knew I was missing.

I remember the new house. When you first came into the house the first room was the living room, and there was a small hallway that led to the kitchen. In the middle of the hallway was a door that led to the cellar, and in the back of the kitchen were the stairs that led to the two bedrooms, one on each side at the top of the stairs. There was also a back door from the kitchen that led to a wooden fenced-in backyard, and we had an outside toilet called an outhouse. We also had a coal furnace in the cellar. Over the eighteen years that we lived there, I shoveled a lot of coal and put out a lot of ashes. We also had a pot-bellied stove in the kitchen we used for cooking and heating water for bathing. It was an experience I will never forget or regret.

I turned five years old, and I went to that elementary school, across from where I used to live. It was called Neibinger. It was at Sixth and Carpenter Streets. This turned out to be a very good school. The teachers were very good teachers. I learned a lot and had some great times there. I was in the harmonica club and the glee club and also on the safety patrol and bank messenger. I never knew exactly what I took to the bank. It was in a closed bag, and I never looked inside. I think those were deposit slips or something, maybe even money. I wish I would have looked inside.

I grew up on that street in South Philly—Kauffman Street. It was my street. I mean really mine. I owned it. What I mean is when it came to anybody doing anything on my block, they had to run it by me. Whether it was playing with doll babies, jumping rope, playing jacks, shooting marbles, dodge ball, hide and seek, dead box, capture the flag, riding bikes, or any other street games, you had to get my permission to play. Alright let me explain: It was just because the kids would argue and fight over the games and sometimes cheat, so I kind of took it upon myself to control things and keep everything fair. I had a little ego, but I mainly played peacemaker, not a bully. That's how I met my best friend, Lenny.

One day a new family moved on the block from down south. They moved right across the street from my grandparents. They both were corner houses, and these two kids came up to me and asked could they play. One was a girl, the other a boy. I was just starting to like girls about then. I was about seven or eight years old. So I said to her, You can play, but he can't, talking to her brother. That's when he became my best friend because he went back into his house and came back out with one of those short-handle axes called a hatchet and chased me around the block. I don't know how many times and of course after that I let him play in any game. He wanted to, and that's how he became my best friend for life.

I had a few other friends that I grew up with, one was named Willy, Bobby, and my cousin Archie.