A poignant and humorous reflection of carefree childhood in the 1950s. A chronicle of capers and shenanigans of two boys, running free and straight into danger and life’s lessons

“How about we just go and catch ourselves one of the FBI’s Most Wanted Fugitives?” Bierly suggested. That sounded like just the plan for this sunny summer morning. I agreed, and we headed off to the post office to identify our prey of the day. That’s how lots of trouble would start for us. Bierly would get some notion, and I would buy right in. We often spent the day extricating ourselves from some fix the plan set in motion. It had become the three of us, all the time, everywhere: Herbie Bierly, Eddie Frye, and Queeny. We wandered all over town in search of adventure and mayhem. That was the beauty of living in a small town. Two boys, aged seven, and a dog had the run of the place. Little kids could do that in the ‘50s. In summertime, when school didn’t use up our days, Bierly and I -- and often one or two others -- would hook up somewhere in the morning, usually down by the old mill. Our mothers did not expect us back before lunch, if then. We would roam about town, go home to eat something, and then head to the swimming pool. There we’d spend the afternoon, along with virtually every other kid in town until closing time at five o’clock. After a quick family dinner, we headed out again, often up to the field behind the high school where we would play baseball until dark. Then home, a snack, bed, and another day just like the one before it. Queeny was with us, all day, every day, padding along right behind us, her nose at our heels. She never knew a leash. She always walked just one and one-half steps behind us, never straying from the sidewalk, never running after another dog, never checking out a squirrel, never stopping to sniff a piece of trash by the roadway. We never worried that Queeny would leave the sidewalk to cross the road after a cat or a bird, or a pie sitting on a window ledge. Queeny always stayed right behind us, shadowing our every move. As we reached the corner and looked across the street, we saw a small commotion in front of Bierly’s store, which was open for business, of course, being it was Saturday night. We hurried over, anxious to get involved in whatever was happening. There lay this guy – this big, burly, middle-aged bruiser – sprawled diagonally across the sidewalk right in front of Bierly’s entrance. He wasn’t moving, and none of the eight or ten people standing around him was helping him. This is bad, I thought. It was. The guy was dead. During the next half-hour, Bierly and I were able to piece together this much of the story. The man, one Bruce Homark, had come to town to attend the viewing of a fellow World War II veteran. He had first gone into Penns Tavern where Perch Gramley served him just one beer. Then he proceeded up the street to George Reiff’s funeral parlor, about four doors up from Bierly’s store, where he paid his last respects to his fallen comrade. He left with a friend, presumably headed back to the tavern. He had to pass another bar, The Millheim Hotel, to do that. But he apparently had made his choice, and he was headed back to the green door. He only made it to Bierly’s when he turned to his friend, looked strangely at him, grabbed his chest, and fell lengthways across the sidewalk. I do not know what the friend did first. I do know that these were the days before mouth-to-mouth resuscitation would have been popular in a man’s town like Millheim. I know that the friend did not call Doc Henninger, because everyone knew that Doc was never in town on a Saturday night. He needed his rest; for that he had to leave town on his days off. I think the guy went into Bierly’s and told Chewy Woller, who ran the store on Wednesday and Saturday evenings. I know it was Chewy who called George Reiff to come down and pronounce the man dead. We had been planning the bank robbery for weeks. The concept was elegant in its simplicity. The Farmers National Bank, right there on the diamond in the middle of town, was, as the bad guys on television said, “there for the taking.” Bierly and I had all the big stuff worked out. We were having problems with just three little things. We needed a wheelman, a gun, and, of course, a stick-up guy. We had the rest covered. We had been casing the joint for weeks. That wasn’t difficult. No one was surprised to see two ten-year-olds in the bank. After all, we were regular bank customers. Both of us had Christmas Club Savings Plans. We made our deposits every Saturday morning. If one of us had to be out of town on any particular Saturday – on a business trip, for example -- the other one just handled his friend’s finances on his behalf. That kept us in line with the bank’s interest-paying policies. The Christmas Club was a public relations ploy perpetrated by the bank on the town youth. The advertised objective was to assure kids that they would have some money at Christmas time to buy their parents decent gifts. A second intent was to teach young people to save their shekels -- the inculcation of sound fiscal management. Not so obvious was the underlying reason the Christmas Club existed: To get the next generation of Millheimers to think of Farmers National Bank when banking came to mind. The bank knew better than to eat its seed corn. So, for several years, for about forty-eight Saturday mornings, Bierly and I toted our little green bank statement books into the bank along with our respective fifty cents. A teller, usually Mr. Bressler, but sometimes Mrs.Barnard, would take our money and make a handwritten entry into the pink and blue ledger boxes on the inside pages. Then, about the middle of December, we would go in to collect our savings. The bank provided some form of interest to us for the year. It matched one payment, paid 3%, or did something to show us how our money could grow if we were just smart enough to begin saving early. We usually ended up with something like $28. We’d buy each of our parents and our sibling a gift and still have enough left over to buy some contraband that would last well into February. Anyway, these weekly financial visits provided an opportunity to reconnoiter the site of the heist. If we stood on our tiptoes, we could look past the tellers behind those iron bars secured to the inordinately high marble countertops that ran across the four service windows. We could see back into the vault area, through the gleaming gold and silver rods that formed a metal door to the safe deposit boxes and the interior vault that held the important papers and the big loot of the bank. Hanging open on its huge hinges was the solid metal vault door, a heavy, round, shiny, steel barrier with a large combination lock on the front with its gigantic four-handled wheel.

Edward T. Frye, Ph.D. served in several teaching and administrative roles in Pennsylvania schools for thirty-two years. During that time he also provided speaking, writing, and consulting activities to educators across America. Since 1999 he has operated his own consulting firm while he continues to teach in the graduate school of Penn State-Harrisburg. Married with two grown daughters and three grandchildren, he lives and works in Mechanicsburg, PA.