One day in the late 1950s, Bob Pesce, Lou Viani and I played “King of the Mountain” on a big mound of dirt in the middle of the Pit (the vacated sand and gravel site adjacent to the houses on the east side of Janey Way).

We grappled atop the dirt pile trying to push each other off of it. As we tussled, twisted and slipped on this hill, Bob suddenly said, “Look out, here comes Old Man Charlie!”

We stopped in our tracks and immediately looked westward in the direction of Charlie’s shack. Sure enough there he came striding down the west side of the Pit at deliberate pace.

Immediately, we dropped down to our knees, eyes posted, tracking the progress of the scruffy, yet feared watchman of the Pit.

“He’s coming this way’” said Lou. “He must have seen us playing out here. Let’s make a run for it.”

“Which way,” I cried.

Well, we basically had two options: run toward the southeast corner of the Pit and exit on 61st and M streets, or run northeast over the mounds of debris on that corner of the Pit and exit on Elvas Ave.

If we went toward 61st, he might cut us off, so we chose the latter direction.

Off we went in whirl of dust. Up, over, around and through the mogul-like mounds of concrete, wood and soil, we scurried. When we had progressed about 100 yards, we dropped down and stared out to the east to check on Charlie’s progress.

Sure enough, he was heading down the access road leading into the middle of the Pit, right in our direction. We lay low, holding our breath.

The Janey Way gang feared being caught by old man Charlie more than anything. We might end up hanging on one of those posts on the side of his house like side of beef. Yow!

Down into the Pit came the scary old man.

Despite his age, he still seemed pretty spry. We knew he might pursue us into the piles where we lay, but we held our ground.

“Let’s see what he does.”

When he reached the big dirt pile, he stopped. He looked up to the top of the hill and saw nothing but our tracks. Then, he turned 360 degrees, surveying the entire Pit. He scratched his chin.

“Where could those boys have gone?”

For just a minute, he considered heading off in our direction, then he had second thoughts.

“Those boys must be long gone by now. Oh well, at least they are out of here.”

Then, thankfully, Charlie turned and walked back out of the Pit, up the access road to the exit by the Petrocchi house on Janey Way and M Street, then turned right on M Street and disappeared.

Phew, he was gone for now. We had foiled his effort to catch us one more time. Naturally, we returned to the hill again and resumed our contest.

During the time, I grew up on Janey Way, Old Man Charlie pursued me many times. As the watchman for the Pit, this was his job. However, we perceived him as an opponent, a bogeyman. To the best of my knowledge, he never apprehended any of the Janey Way gang, but stories abounded of what he might do if he caught us.

Eventually, we all grew up, to heights much greater than the little old watchman. By that time, he had left the neighborhood and the Pit itself had disappeared, making way for St. Francis High School.

Now, Old Man Charlie is nothing more than a slightly comical Janey Way memory.

The day after I arrived, my next door neighbor, Butch, took me down to play in the “Pit,” a vacated sand and gravel site which abutted the back yards of the houses on the east side of Janey Way.

It must have looked like the Grand Canyon to a five-year old boy. The site sank about 30 feet into the ground and stretched in an L pattern from M Street on the south all the way over to Elvas Avenue on the north, then across to 62nd Street on the east. It covered about 40 acres of the land on which the St. Francis Catholic High School now stands.

At that time, a dirt road snaked down into the bottom of the Pit from the M Street side of the site, just behind the Petrocchi house at the beginning of Janey Way. Big trucks entered the Pit almost daily to dump their contents in an effort to backfill the big hole. They dumped things like broken pieces of concrete, waste lumber and dirt.

We used this debris to build forts to play in. We also did things like racing our bikes over and around the mounds of dirt left by the trucks, playing cowboys and Indians and staging mock battles between pretend armies.

The Pit was our playground and because it changed shape daily that made it all the more fun.

But the Pit went though many changes as we grew up. By the late 1950s, the entire east end of the pit was level ground. In 1959, the East Sacramento Little League built a baseball diamond on that section of the site. It was a beautiful diamond with bright green fences all around, built-in dugouts, stands for the fans on both sides of the field and a two story structure behind the back stop for a snack bar and a public address system. I played my first and only year of Little League baseball in that park.

Soon after that, all the rest of the Pit was leveled to look like a large vacant lot except for a tall mound of dirt in the middle we called Mount Everest. We played often on that hill. We used it as lookout, as a hide out, and as a stage for great military maneuvers. The younger Janey Way kids actually staged gladiatorial fights on the top of Mount Everest.

On July 4th, we lit fireworks on top of Mt. Everest even before Red Devil and Freedom fireworks were sold in town. Dom Costamagna lit flares and popped fire crackers. Once he even shot off a naval flare which turned the night sky red over the top of our Mt. Everest. However, soon after that even Mt. Everest disappeared.

By the mid 1960s, the Diocese of Sacramento constructed St. Francis High School on the area we once called the Pit. We had grown up then and our days of playing army, riding bikes and building forts had long since ended.

Now the Pit is just another cherished Janey Way memory.

In the early 1960s, the U.S. began launching rockets into space. Some carried satellites. Others carried astronauts into space. Inspired, we on Janey Way decided to launch a rocket of our own.

We started by taking an expended metal CO2 cartridge and filling it with match heads. When it was full, we placed one end of a match into the cartridge with the head of the match sticking out. We then taped the cartridge to a 3-foot long stick, and took the rocket out into the pit, the vacated sand and gravel site located behind the houses on the east side of Janey Way, to a carefully selected launch site. There we stuck the rocket into the ground, lit the match and ran back to a bunker built out of broken pieces of concrete, where we waited for the rocket to fire off. Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one – then off shot the rocket. It sailed probably 50 feet into the air, and out 100 feet or so, and then crashed to the ground. Just like at Cape Kennedy, we cheered our successful rocket launch. We subsequently attempted several rocket launches from the pit. Some worked just like the first. Others only sputtered. Some misfired and bounced along the ground until the matches stopped burning. Eventually we ran out of CO2 cartridges and our rocket launching experiments came to an abrupt halt. I shudder to think what our parents would have said, had they known what we were up to.

 

Fire in the pit

My friend Dan went out to the pit one day to play with matches. He had a box full of book matches to light. He carefully folded two matches out of a book and lit them. They burned slowly back toward the book and eventually ignited it. When this happened, he threw the burning book of matches into the air, creating a fireworks effect. He did this several times without a problem. Finally, as he lit another book, a spark flew back toward it, igniting it immediately. This caught Dan by surprise and burned him, so he tossed the lit matchbook into some brush near where he stood. The brush caught fire. He panicked. At first he tried to stomp the fire out with his feet. It didn’t work. He then ran back into his yard to get a garden hose. It did not reach out far enough into the pit. The fire now blazed. Not knowing what to do, he ran into the house to his bedroom and hid. Someone must have noticed the fire and tripped a fire alarm. Soon the fire trucks came. They drove down into the pit and proceeded to put the fire out.

After extinguishing the fire, the firefighters decided to investigate. The walked from house to house up Janey Way asking residents if they had seen how the fire started. When they got to Dan’s house, his sister Nancy answered the door. They asked her about the fire. She said, “I didn’t see it start, but my brother Dan might have started it, he ran into his room a while ago, looking pretty guilty.” The fireman asked to speak to Dan, but Nancy couldn’t find him, as he hid silently under his bed. Soon the firefighters left. The pit however, continued to smolder for weeks after the fire. The smoldering finally stopped when the rains came in the fall and thoroughly soaked the ground.

The firemen never came back to question Dan about the fire, but he had learned his lesson. He never again played with matches. Interestingly enough, after serving in the army, Dan went on to enjoy a long career with the California State Department of Justice. Now the story of the fire in the pit is just another incendiary Janey Way memory.

 

E-mail Marty Relles at marty@valcomnews.com.

Back in the late 1950s, we played daily in the pit, the vacated sand and gravel site located directly behind the houses on the east side of Janey Way in East Sacramento. Today, St. Francis High School occupies the site; but back then, the pit became the source of many unforgettable stories. Local barber John Waldren related the following story to me recently.

 

One day, John, his friend Sonny and cousin Joe went down into the pit to play. They climbed up on a dirt pile in the center of the pit and heaved clods off the top of the mound. As they did this, they beheld an incredible site – a horse running loose in the pit. John had idea. “Let’s capture the horse, then find its owner. We will get a reward.”

 

So the boys worked as a team and managed to herd the animal up to a wall on the north side of the site. Carefully, one of the boys grabbed the horse’s rein. After calming the animal, they led it out of the pit up to the line of backyard fences located on the west side of the site. There, they tied the horse to a fence post. They walked over to M Street and then east toward 62nd Street, looking for yards large enough to stable a horse. Eventually they found a likely farmhouse off Elvas Avenue. They knocked on the door and spoke to a woman.

 

Sure enough, she said that she owned the horse. So the boys returned to the pit and waited for the owner to come and pick up the horse. After a while, a truck towing a horse trailer drove up and parked. The woman they spoke to exited the truck, walked up, unhitched the horse then walked away from the boys without even saying thank you. The boys were dumfounded. No reward, no thanks – nothing. They learned a valuable lesson that day. Sometimes in life, the most honorable deeds go unrewarded.

 

 

Spartacus revisited

This following story comes from my friend Tom Hart. In 1960, a group of the younger Janey Way boys went to the Alhambra Theater to see the movie “Spartacus,” the story of the gladiators who staged a rebellion against the Roman Empire.

 

The boys were so taken by the movie that when they returned home they fashioned shields out of cardboard and twine, made make-believe weapons by taping boxing gloves to the end of broomsticks and wore football helmets depicting the Roman headgear. Then they marched down into the pit and over to Mt. Everest, the large mound in the center of the great hole. There they staged seemingly-realistic gladiatorial fights, bopping one another’s shields with their homemade lances. As they did this, a group of older boys saw them and decided to chase them off the top of Mt. Everest. A battle ensued. The older boys cast dirt clods up at the boys atop Mt. Everest. They young boys returned fire, but the older boys moved inexorably up the side of the hill. In response, the younger boys rolled an empty 55-gallon oil drum up to the edge of Mt. Everest and down the hill toward the attacking boys. Naturally, the attackers fled in all available directions and did not return. Realizing they had won the battle, the younger boys raised their hands in the air and yelled, “Victory, victory, victory!” The battle for Mt. Everest had become another swashbuckling Janey Way memory.

 

E-mail Marty at marty@valcomnews.com.