The Witch of 42nd Street

 

 

The Witch of 42nd Street

The world has changed so much since I was a kid. I suppose every generation has said that. My grandfather saw the first cars, the first airplanes, the first radios, the first telephones, the first TVs, and the first color TVs, and he lived long enough to see a man set foot on the moon. That’s a long, long way from Kitty Hawk.

My life has seen a similar number of amazing events, the internet being one of the most impactful. But newer doesn’t always mean better. I often find myself nostalgically looking back on my childhood. It seems to me that the world’s gotten far too complicated and a bit too mean for me.

I’m going to tell you the story of a woman who lived a couple of blocks away from my grandparent’s house  – a house where I spent most of my summers and weekends.  I didn’t know her real name. It was a foreign last name that no ethnocentric 12-year-old could pronounce.

My best friend at that time was Richard. He was a poor kid from the other side of the tracks, which is to say he lived about a block away from my grandparents. 

Now, my grandparents weren’t wealthy, but my grandfather bought a new Ford every year. This made him wealthy in my youthful eyes. I can still remember him taking me car shopping with him every autumn. I don’t know why he shopped, he always bought Fords.

Anyway, Richard lived in a very ramshackle house. The paint was peeling, the garage door rotting, and the interior of the house was – to be kind – cruddy. But 12-year-old boys don’t notice crud or dirt. In those days, a friend was a friend, and friends stuck together.

And I was always careful not to mention Richard’s filthy house or nutty family to my grandmother, or she would never have allowed me to be friends with him, much less let me go to his house.  My grandmother was loving but stern.

Not to get off the track here, but when I say crazy family, I mean CRAZY family. Richard had an uncle that everyone – even us kids – called “Uncle Stud”. I had no idea what a stud was when I was 12. So I thought nothing of it. Uncle Stud was blind and used a white cane to get around. He would visit several times every summer.

I remember he often would tell us dirty jokes that Richard and I didn’t understand – there was no internet then. No smartphones. No sexting. No digital pics. The best us boys had back in those days was the National Geographic magazine, which sometimes featured pictures of scantily clad, long-necked ladies from the jungles of Borneo—any port in the storm.

Aside from the risque jokes Uncle Stud told us – he was an amusing sort of guy. I always looked forward to seeing him and listening to his tales – and his dirty jokes – that I didn’t understand.

Anyway…

Back in those days, newspapers were a big deal. There were morning papers and afternoon papers. In my town, the afternoon paper was called the Sandusky Register. Back in those halcyon days, paper boys delivered the newspapers house-to-house, sometimes on foot, but most often, they rode bicycles.

Tossing newspapers, painstakingly folded into rectangles, onto people’s doorsteps was quite a skill. Most of these paperboys or papergirls could toss a folded newspaper 20 or 30 feet and put it on the porch– at worst – or on the porch steps if you were good – all while speeding by on a bicycle.

I was never a paperboy, but Richard was.  My grandfather made sure I never wanted for anything and gave me an allowance. Richard was not so lucky.  His family was very poor. So, if he wanted money, he had to earn it. And he earned from his paper route.

Of course, paper routes require a kid to be responsible, so when Richard delivered newspapers, he couldn’t hang out (as we say today) with me.  Luckily, delivering the newspapers to the customers on his route only took about an hour. But you know, when you’re 12, an hour can seem awfully long. An hour seems like a few minutes now.

Delivering papers didn’t take nearly as long as collecting. Collecting was a whole other animal. Every week, Richard had to go to each of his customers’ homes and collect what was due for the newspapers he delivered that week. Walking from house to house in an area the size of four city blocks takes time.

Richard collected on Saturdays. Because I didn’t want to spend a whole afternoon without my friend, I often went collecting with him. Looking back, we must have looked kind of quaint—two buddies spending time together… collecting money from newspaper customers.

You may not believe this, but collecting is a challenge. Because, even in those days, the biggest problems in the newspaper route collection business were that:

• People were not always honest.
• People did not always have money.
• People were not always nice.
• People were not always home.
• And sometimes, people were downright rude and scary.

And then there were the bad houses. One house on 42nd Street looked like a haunted castle. It had a turret… just one. At the top of the turret was a single window. The house sat much farther back from the street than the others. The walkway up to the front porch was lined with overgrown pine trees, creating a tunnel-like effect. Pine needles an inch or two deep covered the walkway. In a word – it was spooky.

A widowed woman lived there. Her husband had died years earlier. She was a foreign woman with a long nose and wild white hair. Paperboys or paper girls with any sense hated to collect from that place.

Each customer on the paper route had a card in a ring binder Richard carried when collecting. When a customer paid, Richard would tear off a little receipt showing the current week for which the customer paid.

The long-nosed, foreign lady, who lived in the spooky brick house with the turret and the pine needle walkway, had a card on the ring binder too. But we could not pronounce her last name. I read it as Fuskmuker. Richard thought that was a funny name, and so did I – so when we talked about her, that’s what we called her.

Funny name or not, neither of us wanted to walk through that creepy pine tree tunnel to the creepy door that looked two feet thick and collect newspaper money from Penny Fuskmusker.

We always commented on the turret. The turret had a window at the top of it, which to us meant there was a room up there where Penny Fuskmusker kept a little mean dwarf servant or a kidnapped 12-year-old boy she had cursed into slavery.

Our imaginations ran wild. “Wizard of Oz,” and so forth.

So, Richard skipped collecting from her as much as he could. Sometimes, he let her go without paying for three or four weeks. But sooner or later, he would have to collect from her because he couldn’t afford to keep paying for newspapers.

Let me tell you that just knocking on her door took courage. She had a heavy accent and it was hard to understand her when we did muster up the courage to walk the pine-tree tunnel, step up on her porch, and knock on the door.

We called her “The Witch of 42nd Street” but not to her face.  We were sure that if we lingered too long on her property, we would end up in a boiling pot or the room at the top of the turret with her little warty gnome.

One January Saturday, it was bitterly cold, and the winds were howling. Paperboys have to collect, rain or shine. It had been at least a month since we had collected from Penny Fuskmusker. I didn’t want to go to her door on this bitter day, but Richard couldn’t let her go another week.

Snow was falling heavily aided and abetted by a strong north-easterly wind. With windchills below zero, all I wanted to do was go home and get warm. But we had one more customer to call on – Penny Fuskmusker – the witch of 42nd Street.

The wind howled through the pine trees that lined the walkway to the turreted house. It was late in the afternoon, and the sun was going down fast. The sky was dreary, dark, and full of snow. We were freezing.

We knocked on the door and waited in the freezing wind and snow. And waited. We knew she was home – lights were on inside. We waited as the wind whipped, the snow swirled, and our courage waned.

We were shaking from the cold and fear.

Suddenly, there was Penny FuskMusker. She was looking right at us – peering down with those beady eyes, wild white hair, and long hooked nose.  She said in her heavy German accent, “Boys, you come in now out from the cold and have some Spekulatius and kuchen, yah?”

We could see a fire burning in her fireplace and the homey smell of baking spices swirling from the door. We were freezing to death, so it was either die standing at the door and freezing to death or die in boiling witches’ pot. We took our chances on being boiled alive in a big kettle, and I’m glad we did.

Her house was nice inside. Clean and cozy. The furniture and appliances looked a little outdated to my eyes, but at 12, I knew nothing about and cared nothing about furniture or appliances.  The house smelled like a bakery. There was a cake and a large platter of cookies on the table.

She told us to take off our coats and get warm by the fire and then told us that her name was Penelope Fröhlich-meißner and though she said it so well,  I could not. Then she said in German, “Mein Name ist Penelope, aber du kannst mich Penny nennen”. Then, with a smile, she said in English, “That means you can call me Penny”.

We told her we were scared because we thought she was a mean old witch. She thought that was funny. She thought we didn’t like her, so she didn’t say much when we came round to collect.

And as if to further prove to us that she was not a witch, she took us both up to the room at the top of the turret to show us there were no warty gnomes, dwarves, or enslaved children up there. And no boiling iron pots either… it was just an old abandoned sewing room. She said in her thick accent that she used to sew often but now had arthritis in her hands “wary bad” and could no longer sew.

When we came back down, she asked if we’d like some Heißer Kakao – which she then quickly said in English “hot cocoa” and some “spekulatius and kuchen,” which she quickly translated to English as spice cookies and cake.

We nibbled on the cookies as she sliced a large piece of schokoladenkuchen for each of us. Which she pronounced as sho-koh-lah-den-koo-chen. It was delicious chocolate cake, no matter how you pronounce it.

It was nearly dark outside, and we both needed to get home.  My grandparents always made me come home by dark and the dusky day was turning to darkness quickly.

Penny helped us with our coats and hats and gave us both a hug. She opened the door, and Richard and I walked out into the swirling winter snow and numbing cold. But we were a lot warmer inside than we were before… before we got to know Penny.

From that day on, whenever I went collecting with Richard, we stopped at Penny’s house last because she always had treats waiting for us. And a big smile and a hug.

Richard and I grew up and grew apart and went on with our lives. Penny died a few years later. I remember reading it in the newspaper. I will never forget her or the night we found out that she wasn’t a witch – she was just a very nice lady. 

And I still can’t pronounce her last name.