“Recollections of a Pittsfield Kid” is a series of vignettes exploring the author’s youthful days in the Osceola Park neighborhood of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, during the 1950s and early 1960s. At the time of these adventures, the author was between six and 14 years old.
In our back yard was a centuries old structure that was formerly a chicken coop. It might have been built in the time of the Civil War. There wasn’t much paint remaining on it and what little there was was rapidly peeling off. Many a chicken had come and gone from there over the years. Flown the coop, so to speak.
My family members had no interest in restoring the coop to its previous use. My siblings and I asked “Who wants to listen to the roosters crowing at 5 a.m. or clean up chicken poop?” Instead, we got our eggs and chicken breasts at the First National Store with no fuss or muss. No piercing sound of “cock-a-doodle-doo” for us.
This coop measured about 10 feet high in front and sloped towards Osceola Park in the back to about seven feet, was 30 feet long and 12 feet wide.
Some Osceolians thought that this coop had outlived its usefulness. One neighbor said, “The best thing to do with that coop is to knock it down, make a bonfire and roast marshmallows.” Another said, “Calling that coop an eyesore is too generous a word for it.” Our response wasn’t yielding at all.
First of all, we weren’t beholden to “keeping up with the Joneses” in terms of beautifying the neighborhood. Secondly, the aphorism that “one man’s junk was another man’s treasure was relevant here. My siblings and I became creative and found new ways to utilize the coop and to justify its existence. For example, 15 feet from the north side of the coop were a few trash barrels upon which we placed glass bottles resting on top of a board.
We would get our Daisy Red Ryder BB guns, climb a ladder to the coop roof and shoot at these various bottles, listening to the “pop pop” crackling sounds as they were smashed to pieces. Maybe not an environmentally good idea, but it was fun to target shoot. Likewise, we would place small plastic figures like soldiers, tanks, jeeps, cowboys, gunslingers and so on ,and pick them off one by one.
Sometimes we moved a little further away on the rooftop and activated our GI Joe mortars and bazookas to try to knock down a bunch of cans positioned on top of the trash barrel.
I know, I know, some might say that we were being inured to gun culture and a violent lifestyle. However, Roy Rogers, Hopalong Cassidy and the Lone Ranger were gun totin’ model citizens and always did the proper thing, so we rationalized that we would likely follow suit. Perhaps this was non-linear thinking.
We even mounted a basketball hoop against the west side of the coop and began to play in March, when we dribbled the ball and splashed ourselves with mud. However, we had to learn to shoot the ball from varying heights since the ground sloped downwards from the coop wall. It was quite an art and required constant readjusting of our aim. Unless we played on a basketball court bedeviled by frost heaves or poor construction, this style of shooting remained a very limited skill.
In the fall, we would rake the leaves into a huge pile at the north side of the coop. No one ever saw such a quantity of leaves; I guess that it was enough to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool. We’d run down the slope of the coop roof shrieking with joy and jump into the pile. We disappeared as we buried ourselves inside the brown behemoth. The leaves had an enticingly pungent smell.
My parents used to hide bulky Christmas gifts in the coop: a bicycle, a toboggan, a pool table. It was understood by us kids not to go peeking in there. Well, maybe I looked once or twice.
Not everything we did with the coop was for personal recreation or self-benefit though. In October, we used to have a spook house inside the shanty or warming shed at Osceola Park, but were told not to do this anymore. The little kids got too scared I guess and, after all, parks aren’t supposed to terrify kids. So, we simply moved the spook venue 300 feet away to, you guessed it, the chicken coop.
We had curtains separating the coop into rooms with a hallway between, and made a chilling course for the brave to follow. We ran extension cords from nearby house so we could play creepy music and use psychedelic lights to gain the full effect. We hung menacing pictures and painted gross scenes on the interior walls.
The older Osceolians wore cringe-worthy costumes and masks, displayed fake blood on fake wounds, and wandered around trying to make this haunted world seem as real as possible. Our boasted mantra was: “If we don’t completely shock you, you get your admission fee back.”
We kept that chicken coop on the property tax rolls for many years and this was beneficial to the City of Pittsfield’s coffers, our neighbors’ predilections notwithstanding. It became a versatile four-season structure thanks to our unremitting and productive preservation efforts. It deserved to be declared a Berkshire County Historical site as far as we were concerned. That application is still pending, however.
