WARNING: SHORT STORIES FOR MIDDLE SCHOOL BOYS ONLY, BECAUSE GIRLS HAVE COOTIES!

By Gene J. Miller and Susan C. McGettigan

Dive into a collection of coming-of-age tales! Perfect for middle school boys, teachers, and homeschoolers. Expect adventure, fun, friendships, and life lessons at every turn. A chuckle a chapter guaranteed! 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palmetto Publishing
• Release date: Jun 27, 2024
• ISBN: 9798822948068

Gene J. Miller

Gene J. Miller, a first-time author, presents his short story collection, WARNING: Short Stories for Middle School Boys Only, Because Girls Have Cooties! Originally penned as bedtime stories for his grandsons, Miller's tales reflect his love for nature, sports, and family. A retired educator with 44 years of service, Miller's career spanned from teaching English and History to serving as a school principal. A proud father and grandfather, Miller resides in South Jersey Pine Barrens with his wife, Maria. His passions include Phillies' baseball, Eagles' football, and enduring the trials of Jets fandom. Miller's stories are inspired by his own adolescent adventures along the Delaware River.

Book preview

PROLOGUE

T

he middle school years are a special time of life. We all remember our parental and adult influences, our teachers, our neighbors, and our friends. Many were role models, some good, some not so good. We especially remember those who were our antagonists. Personal growth, play, physical development, emotional connections, friendships, challenges, bad decisions with consequences, music, fun, and excitement all exist around the next corner when you are a middle school-aged adolescent.

This collection of true short stories is a time capsule captured almost sixty years ago before cable TV, the internet, X-Box, cell phones, GPS, and streaming television. It was a more unsupervised time for children to explore their world and to discover new things—a time to be open about everything! Discovery and right from wrong are always a challenge at this age, and this short story collection displays these trials of youth as we attempted to grow into young adults and to discover ourselves and the world around us. Please enjoy the fun, the adventures, the challenges, and the essence of innocence that helped to make a young boy a young man. WARNING: Short Stories for Middle School Boys Only Because Girls Have Cooties! is made up of true stories of a young man’s coming of age. Discover what remains the same today in those middle school years and what has changed or been lost in these documented stories of ’60s youth.

THE RIVER

A

s a child I grew up in a small Delaware River town by the name of Delanco. I went from kindergarten to eighth grade there before attending a year and a half at Riverside High School. Delanco is a tiny town pinned in between two main bodies of water, the Delaware River (famous for George Washington’s crossing it on Christmas Eve) and the Rancocas Creek, which flows all the way from the Delaware River into Mt. Holly, ending at the Mill Street Dam in Vincentown. We are all familiar with the stories written by Mark Twain about Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer on the Mississippi. We too grew up in that same sort of adolescent spirit of exploration around the Delaware River and Rancocas Creek. Swimming, fishing, and floating down the river in homemade rafts built out of wooden pallets were our passions. Thank God we were good swimmers because many times our rafts (pallets) would sink, and we’d have to swim to shore.

The river water, as far back as I can remember, was a murky brown color. You could never see your feet on the bottom after walking four feet deep off the shoreline. The shoreline was always filled with trash. Old pallets dumped into the river floated upstream from Philly onto our riverbanks. Bags of waste, beer cans, and bottles (some broken) lined our beaches. Sometimes fifty-gallon steel drums were washed ashore empty and rusty—another sign of illegal dumping into our playground. At the point of land where the Rancocas Creek split from the Delaware and jutted out into the river was an overgrown peninsula called Hawk Island. Hawk Island sat across the creek from the town of Riverside’s Swamp Poodle section of town, which was connected to Delanco by a small-town bridge. Hawk Island had seashore-like white sand across the peninsula except in the center, where thick woods and thickets led to a very deep, crystal blue aqueduct water hole. The island was blocked off from the main street by a cable. We, as kids, and those who rode dirt bikes all entered Hawk Island on a narrow path that went around the telephone pole-like posts that held the cable. Nothing could stop anyone from entering this unique peninsula, jutting out into the Delaware like a finger pointing south toward Philadelphia.

Many adventures occurred on the island. Swimmers illegally swam in the mirror-like lake that appeared bottomless from atop the hill overlooking the lake like a bluff. Many of us jumped off the fifteen-to-twenty-foot bluffs as dares were passed from neighbor to friend or to any passerby walking along the sandy bluffs that overlooked the lake. Lovers came at night to walk the sandy beaches—one side of the beach belonged to the river and the other side to the creek. Daytime had illegal dirt bikers tearing up the sand, tossing rooster tails of sand high into the blue skies above.

Occasionally, a Delanco police raid would come through Hawk Island to arrest all the trespassers and impound the motorcycles. Most ran for the cover of the woods or worked their way into the water to float away unscathed down the creek or the river. Both had strong currents that flowed on and off at different times of the day. We had a few creek drownings over the years and a few river drownings, but the worst were the drownings that occurred in the crystal blue waters of Hawk Island’s sandpit.

As a child, it felt like we would lose a person every other summer season. Most of the time, it wasn’t a kid we knew or attended school with. It was a visitor coming in from a nearby town—sometimes as far away as Philadelphia, lured by the stories of Hawk Island and its crystal blue lake. The lake was a huge gravel pit fed by an underground aquifer. Many took their chances cliff diving in—never to be seen again. The emergency rescue team would clear the island and begin a small boat search with divers to find the body of the poor, lost soul in the deep, still blue waters of the gravel pit.

At the other end of town was my house. Behind my house was an athletic ball field with a basketball court, and behind that was the river. When I was born, they dredged the channel of the Delaware to get larger cargo ships upriver from Philadelphia to Trenton. The Army Corps of Engineers piled sand that appeared hundreds of feet in the air against the back end of our athletic field. The new sand piles blocked our view of the Delaware River. The thirty-five acres of dunes of river bottom spoils were first known to the locals as The Dunes, yet later officially became the West Avenue Nature Trails of The Dunes. The Dunes trapped a line of water along the back end of the athletic field. That water line became known as The Swamp.

Many adventures, beginning with catching frogs, turtles, tadpoles, and snakes, made for a great story. The Swamp made for great show-and-tell stories at school. No one understood—we had The Swamp, but no one else did. In winter The Swamp froze, and we gleefully skated, built bonfires, and made-up teams for ice hockey. Kids of all ages from Delanco and Beverly chose up hockey teams that played all day and into the night, while swamp-side bonfires lit up the night tree-lined sky with their dancing flames.

It was also established as a place for launching trial rafts to see if they floated or sank before heading out on the river for their maiden voyages. It was our special place to meet on the days that we weren’t on the ball fields playing pickup baseball, basketball, and rough-touch football.

Many winters got so cold that the Delaware would freeze over. It was rumored that one time a teenager drove a car onto Hawk Island, drove out on the river, and got the vehicle stuck on the ice. A few days later, it had disappeared. Those were the days when we would walk across The Dunes to the edge of the river, walking all the way above the river ice to Hawk Island. Our parents would have killed us if they ever knew, but they never found out—and we never told them.

ADVENTURES ALONG THE RIVER

M

rs. Michalski was ancient, but she sure knew her stuff. Our brilliant sixth grade teacher captured our minds by filling us with tales of our close location to famous pirates and their buried treasure. As legend has it, the likes of notorious pirates Edward Teach and William Kidd—whose aliases were Blackbeard and Captain Kidd—sailed up the Delaware Bay along the main coast of the Atlantic Ocean to avoid detection from the British Navy during The Golden Age of Piracy.

Since Philadelphia and Burlington City were both established Quaker cities and pledged to nonviolence philosophies, they posed no threat to the pirates. Historians believed that pirates regularly frequented the Quaker port cities in the early 1700s to trade booty and resupply their vessels for their next plunder. Reports of Blackbeard, Bluebeard, and Captain Kidd finding refuge in such desolate areas of Marcus Hook at the opening of the Delaware River on the Jersey side and Blackbird Creek on the Delaware side are documented in texts.

Since sixth grade, the possibilities of buried treasure along our shores hung in our heads. As luck would have it, our town fell smack dab in the middle of both cities! I always wondered if I would find something amazing one day along the river. Now Easter break was here. As a seventh grader with a week off from school, I knew I had plenty of time to explore the river, searching for that mythical buried treasure.

I knew exactly what I wanted to do. I was ready for a week of exploring The Dunes along the river on my own, possibly searching for my own buried treasure left by the likes of Blackbeard, Bluebeard, or Captain Kidd. Near my house, there were tree-lined trails with a swamp for catching turtles and tadpoles. The sand dunes and their trails then led to the Delaware River. Without any adults in sight, we had the freedom to pursue adventures on the river like fishing, swimming, and exploring. As kids we loved hanging out on The Dunes and beaches along the Delaware River. Every visit began a new adventure.

On this particular River Adventure, I had been up early on Easter Break and got out of the house right after my parents had gone to work. My dreams of the pirates had me excited to explore for the treasure. I was one of the original latchkey kids, now old enough to come home alone off the bus and not walk to Granny’s house anymore. It was a big kid kind of feeling. I would be my own man. My parents always drilled into my head that I could have no one over and no one in the house. Rarely were any of my friends ever allowed inside the house, even when my parents were home, so being alone in the house was no big deal to me. I learned to hang out at everyone else’s house. Since this was Easter vacation, I had no bus to ride and no parents at home during the day. It had the makings of the best Easter vacation ever!

I didn’t waste any time. The first thing that Monday morning, I woke up early and got out of the house immediately after my parents left for work. My dreams had me excited to search for the treasure. Walking from my house over The Dunes took time. Even with well-worn sandy trails of sugar sand, it was a high hike up and across the sand dunes with my eleven-year-old legs. Thankfully, motorcycle paths helped to cut out leads towards the river, but the paths changed daily depending on the last rain. The trick was getting down to the beach since there were no clear-cut pathways.

To get to the Delaware’s beach, you had to sand surf down the side of The Dunes. You could get there either by standing upright or sliding on your bottom. It helped if you took a trail by the trees that had been covered with river bottom dredge spoils to enable larger ships to get to Trenton, just north of Burlington City. The forest that had once been part of a tree-lined river view was now completely covered by the sandy bottom of the river. Our home view now was just The Dunes. Over ten years of post-dredging, the resilient trees near the beach line began to spring out of the sand dunes. These small, twig-like branches poking out of the sand were like handles to use as you descended down the fine, ever-shifting sugar sand while surfing toward the river’s edge.

Before landing on the beach, you had to determine whether it was low tide or high tide. At high tide you had to continue to hold onto the trees and walk gingerly through them to stay dry and out of the water. At low tide you could release the death-hold grip on the branches and drop onto the darkened wet sand where you could see an army of rats scurrying back and forth across the sand and into the treasures of washed-up trash, pallets, and rusted fifty-gallon metal drums that had floated their way to our beaches.

This particular morning the beach was at low tide. The lowest I had ever seen. Upon landing on the firm sand, I began my solo trek, paralleling the river south toward the Kaiser Gypsum dock. Ships offloaded huge white rocks that made a journey by conveyer belt across an entire football-sized lot into the Kaiser factory, where the rock was crushed and used to produce sheet rock or wallboard. During the offloading of the gypsum, white dust flurried in the air like snow, coating our streets, sidewalks, and automobiles upon weekly deliveries. Most of the off-loading was done at night.

This dust was the reason my dad had purchased an acre of a farm field and built a home where we moved out of town when I was fifteen. It was the middle of my sophomore year of high school! I left my lifelong friends because of that wallboard factory. Ironically, about five years later, the factory closed for good.

As I neared Kaiser Dock that warm Monday morning, I could see no ships were there. Suddenly, I noticed a ten-foot-long piece of rotting wood sticking out of the sand. I visited the river at least once a week in search of washed up treasures. I walked over to it and examined what was exposed. It was unique. Nothing like that had ever appeared out of the sand or water before. I walked back up and over The Dunes to go home and got a shovel. I had an old WWII Army portable folding shovel in the shed. With my handy tool, I could adjust it into a pick if necessary to dig at an angle. I had dug many an underground fort with that old shovel! My army tool would now help me uncover that wood.

As I returned home, I saw Big Rich and Mark Bruno, my best friends in the world. Big Rich was the biggest eleven year-old you would ever see, and Mark was always the brain behind our adventures and escapades. Both were out in the street on their high-handled bar-banana seat bikes, attempting wheelies. Mark was a great curb jumper, but all of us could ride the back wheel on a wheelie for the length of a house or two.

Hey guys! I called. Do you wanna help?

Help do what? Mark asked.

I just found this huge piece of wood sticking out of the river at low tide. I want to see what it is.

They detected the excitement in my voice,