Portrait by Venture Photography, Greenwich, CT
Kids will be kids.
One thing I’ve learned in life is that with the arrival of your first child, your life changes on a dime. You’re not prepared for the high jinks ahead. You’ll find out—long after the fact, if you’re lucky—that they can be daredevils or just plain devils. Maybe some of our amazing teens in this issue will remember when. Who knows?
Some examples, starting with the devils. There’s no generation gap on this subject. On Halloween my brothers and I used to gum the doorbells of people who didn’t open up for trick-or-treaters. John Sinclair’s gang once made a very realistic dummy and strung it up the flagpole at the Riverside Yacht Club, and when the German groundskeeper came to put the flags up and found a body hanging from the yardarm, he almost had a heart attack.
Young Jimmy Bourne had a serious collection of fireworks. In a line of sailboats being towed to a race at Seawanaka, he and Bob Loghren were having a grand old time tossing out cherry bombs so they’d explode under water and splash everyone behind them. But one blew a plank right out of the bottom of the Timmy Edlund’s Lightning. And a couple I know were invited to a party at the Frantz Sr.’s long ago and were greeted in the driveway by some boys—including their son—mooning the guests as they arrived.
Then there are the daredevils. I remember chasing my friends around the rooftops of our apartment complex, and up and down fire escapes nine stories high. That is, until the superintendent caught us peeking in his windows.
I ’d have a son who, along with some buddies and our golden retriever Charlie, would wait until the water was frozen solid then hike across the ice from Willowmere beach to Tod’s Point. He and Jimmy Sheehan also liked to climb up under the overpasses above I-95 to catch pigeons, including the section that later plunged into the Mianus River. When the police finally caught on, “We had to come down,” says Jonathan. “Besides, they had our bikes.”
But not to be outdone, his little sister Audrey and the girls worked the underground—crawling through the sewer drainage pipe on one side of Willowmere Avenue and emerging on the other. “We even chased raccoons through there,” she recalls with glee. Ironically, Audrey ended up with teenage sons who liked to hang out in the sewer system near Weston School—a middle school rite of passage.
A generation earlier, Alex Platt’s group bought secondhand bikes at Buzz’s for five or ten dollars and rode them off the end of the dock at the yacht club to see how far they could sail in the air before hitting the water. Ropes were tied to their fenders so the boys could pull them up from the bottom and do it again.
“Everything we did, we invented,” Alex reflected at the 50th reunion of the Riverside School Class of ’51. “Nothing was packaged.”
But cars have always been the really big thing. At age 13, Cristin Marandino and two Greenwich Academy classmates decided to take the family Subaru for a spin, Cristin at the wheel, and hit a pickup truck. And oh, yes, John Sinclair and some buddies once piled into the Fannings’ car in the Riverside Yacht Club parking lot and drove it all the way up Riverside Avenue and across the Post Road to North Mianus School—backwards.
Of course, some daredevils never grow up. In college I watched my date, an engineering major from Babson, drive his Volkswagen into Lake Waban to see if it would float. It didn’t.
So, parents, just resign yourselves to the fact that your kids’ antics will put new meaning into old saws like “Ignorance is bliss” and “What you don’t know can’t hurt you.”
You’re better off in the dark.