The day ice cream saved me (from a beating).

Life in the trailer court was actually pretty good for a kid! There weren’t many chores outside and trailers were about 10’ apart, so you could pretty much play every day if it was nice outside. We did a lot of bicycle riding and playing in the woods as the trailer court was next to a forest about a mile from town.

This day I had spent the whole morning with a friend riding bikes and we had done a chore for the lady that was one of the owners of the trailer court, her name was Frannie. I believe we took the garbage out of the laundromat and put it in a dumpster for her!

Frannie gave us each $.50. In those days you could do a lot with that as a kid. Well we thought about it for a few minutes and then we decided to get some ice cream at the drive-in at the entrance of the trailer court! It was about 1 o’clock on this day. Tom and I had already had lunch, so we went to the A&W. The front of the drive-in faced the highway and the back of it faced the trailer court and in the back was a huge wood porch with a very large freezer. We would get our ice cream at the front and a spoon and go out back and sit on the porch in the shade and eat our pint of ice cream! Nothing could beat that.

As Tom and I were sitting there enjoying that ice cream, we could see a group of women coming up the main road in the trailer court. Tom and I finished that ice cream and got on our bikes and headed towards those women.

I told Tom that one lady is my mom! We rode up to them and they spread out a little blocking the roadway, so we stopped. None of them looked very happy and this bigger lady her name was Anne had a very large belt in her hand kind of doubled up. 

My mom asked me what we were doing, and I told her of our helping Frannie, and we spent our earnings on ice cream!

She then asked me what I had done earlier that morning?

I told her “Nothing!”

She asked me if I had been playing with Vicki (Anne’s daughter) behind their trailer this morning?

I told her, “NO I’ve been with Tom all day!” 

Anne holding on to my bike now said, “He’s lying!”

My mom said, “If anyone is going to give him a licking it’s going to be me”, and she grabbed the belt out of her hand.  

Then my mom asked this lady I didn’t know, “Is this the boy you saw this morning?”

She couldn’t say for sure.

Then Mom asked Tom if I had been with him all morning?

Tom said, “Yes.”

We had been at his house all morning watching TV and he said, “Go ask my mom!” 

Now Ma was fuming. She threw that belt at Anne and told her to get her story straight before someone gets punished for something they didn’t do!

Then Ma told me to get my butt home. I still didn’t know what was going on.

This all started when the lady I didn’t know (who lived directly behind Vicki’s trailer) saw Vicki with a boy??? She opened the window and asked Vicki if her mom knew what she was doing?

And then the boy took off running! Well, this lady went to Vicki’s house and told her mom what had happened, and Anne wanted to know who was with her? 

Vicki didn’t want to get the boy in trouble, so she blamed me!  But she couldn’t have known I had been with my friend all morning!

Now can you guess who did get the belt? And that was a big belt too! I would like to run into Vicki someday and see if she remembers that memory?  

Well, I learned a good lesson from this! If you ever think you might get into trouble for something, just go get some ice cream and eat it. I can tell you this, I sure have eaten a lot in my lifetime, and I still do!!!!