The Big Sled

The winters then seemed long and beautifully snowy. On weekday mornings, my mother always had the front room radio tuned to WBRM, our local AM station. When we woke to a deep snowfall, the radio announcer, Sid Carrigan, proclaimed in his booming voice: “Well, kids, you don’t have to go to school today.”

Hearing these words, my older brother, Steve, squealed with happiness. Though I liked school, I was happy, too. I knew my day and maybe the days ahead would be filled with bowls of my mother’s snow cream, snowball fights, and sled rides.

In the 1960s, Steve and I and the neighborhood kids enjoyed sledding. But in my family, the sleds weren’t store-bought ones like wood-and-steel Flexible Flyers that you’d find at downtown hardware stores. In fact, when I recently asked Steve what kinds of sleds he remembered us having when we were growing up, he said, “I don’t remember having a sled.” He noted that for sledding we used Coca-Cola button signs that belonged to our neighbor Virgil, who painted signs for the Marion Coca-Cola plant. And he also said we used a piece of cardboard for a sled. For me, my mother’s aluminum dishpan worked fine. Even our gently sloping backyard offered a brisk ride down to the house. Before I slammed into the house, the dishpan would start twirling and capsize, dumping me in the snow.

Home movies that my father took with our Bell & Howell movie camera captured a heavy snow in 1965. On the film, I sledded down our street, my collie, Laddie, running alongside me, my gloved wrist in his mouth. He never let me get far away from him, always herding me back home. In this same home movie, our across-the-street neighbors, David and Marie and their kids, along with my mother and Steve, frolicked in our yard, throwing snowballs at each other. Snows then were a neighborhood event.

David worked at Drexel Furniture and was a skilled carpenter. During one of our deep snows he decided to build a sled large enough to hold a group of us kids. From scrap wood he constructed the sled, attached a rope to hold to, and pulled it out to the street. Bundled in our winter clothes, we kids piled onto the sled and huddled together. David sat at the helm, rope in hand, and gave the road a kick to get us started on the packed snow. I don’t know if he had contrived any steering mechanism on the sled, but as we raced down the icy street we laughed gleefully, our voices edged with nervous apprehension that we might end up veering into a ditch and being buried in the snow.

Our street was a downhill slope leading to the highway. But some how, David kept us on course to the bottom of the street where we stopped safely. We were all amazed we survived the trip. After we scooted off the sled, David tugged it back up the street, all of us trudging with him, eager for another ride. David never seemed to tire of providing us more fun.

A few years ago, I was visiting my mother and looked across the street to see David’s daughter, Kaye, sitting on her porch. After Marie and David passed away, Kaye and her husband moved back to the family home.

I walked over there and sat with her on the porch. As always, we started talking about the old days on the street.

Kaye asked, “Do you remember the time it snowed and Daddy made the big sled for us?”

“Oh, I remember it,” I said. “I’ve thought about it a lot. That was fun.”

“A bunch of us rode on it,” she said.

“I know,” I said. “It was big enough for all of us.”

We sat quiet for a while remembering.

“I think David enjoyed it as much as we did,” I said, recalling his laughter as we flew down the street.

“Yes,” she said, “he did.”

Kaye and I reminisced about how we missed those days, and we agreed that the winters then seemed long and beautifully snowy and always fun.