THE BELMONT JUNGLE WARS OF THE 1950'S

JUNGLE WARFARE

THE BELMONT JUNGLE WARS OF THE 1950'S

INTRODUCTION

The Belmont Jungle wars existed only in the minds of the boy-soldiers who fought them. The battlefield was small - about 2 acres, and the weapons were primitive - cap pistols, slingshots, and spears made from wild carrot stalks. But alliances were made and remade, battles fought, and territory won and lost. But a decisive victory was denied the combatants. Age and time defeated the boy-soldiers where cap pistols, slingshots, and spears could not, and mother nature reclaimed the Jungles after our final defeat. But the wars were real to us, and it is this reality I hope to convey.
We were all boy-soldiers when the battles raged the fiercest. But soldiers, and boys, move onto other things. One fellow, my neighbor, is retired from the state police, I became an environmental chemist, and the others, like so many acquaintances forged in countless battles by innumerable armies, have retreated into the recesses of our minds, and into history. But under our adult facades, we are still the boy-soldiers who once lived their lives in our bodies, sometimes smiling to ourselves as we remember our wartime exploits. And like soldiers of so many other wars, we rarely talk about what we did. As with them, it is too painful. As with their listeners, ours really don't care what we did.

DESCRIPTION OF THE BATTLEFIELD

Those of us who grew up in the back part of South Easton, by this I mean Line St. and South of there, though I suppose there were exceptions, fondly remember the Belmont Jungles. How the area came to be known as the Jungles is lost in time, but Ramar of the Jungle, a sort of civilized Tarzan, was a popular TV series in the early 1950s, so perhaps that is where the name came from.
The Jungles were about 1 1/2 blocks long by a half block wide. The area was bounded by Center Street on the west, Glendale St. and one of Paul Lamberts farm fields on the south, Raub's truck farm on the east, and on the north by Raub's truck farm, several private residences and Hazel Alley. There were actually 4 distinct mini-battlefields within the overall area of the Jungles, each with its own personality.
The westernmost section had a few trees along Center St., along with elderberry bushes and a few trees on Glendale St. The remainder had low bushes, milkweeds, so named from the milky sap they gave off when the stems were broken off, and 'wild carrots', which provided many spears for the battles (non-injurious of course) after they were grown and dried. These 'wild carrots' would give you large blisters if handled when green, and we all did that sooner or later. there were several paths through this area. One led from Bill Blum's trash burner, at the corner of Center and Hazle, just behind Hazle St., to the wooded second section of the Jungles. Another led from the boundary between the first two sections to a clump of trees halfway back Glendale St. The exact location of these paths varied somewhat from year to year, but these two paths were the main routes through this part of the Jungles.
If I make the Jungles seem like another world, it is because to we boy-soldiers it was. It was a world populated by our friends and not our parents or other adults. We alone determined its boundaries and planned its defenses. It was our secret world where adults rarely intruded. Even though we knew it well, the Jungles somehow seemed different when we were in them, as if crossing the boundaries from our home yards to the Jungles instantly transported us away from our familiar homes. Though it has been over 40 years since I last set foot in the Jungles, and over 10 years since I even observed the boundaries up close (I did not cross the boundaries into the Jungles. I can never do that again. The Jungles are not a battlefield anymore. The battle scars have healed and they have been reclaimed by the surrounding countryside, and progress has transformed them into no more than a memory.), if my imagination and memory couple up just right, I can close my eyes and again I am ten years old, running through the weeds and vines, and climbing the trees. Those are very pleasant memories for me.
The next easternmost section of the Jungles was more wooded than anything else. The interior of this section consisted of taller trees than at any other place in the entire Jungles. The paths through this section were muchly determined by where there weren't any trees. There were no easily used entrances to this section form the north, the Hazle St. side. Partially blocked by dense elderberry bushes, most of this side was piled with years of yard waste and furnace ashes. This section was directly behind my house, and I can recall few times going into the Jungles from this direction. There was only one path into this section from the east, about 2/3 of the way from Hazle to Glendale. the rest of the way was blocked by thick undergrowth and two huge wild cherry trees.
The trees and dense undergrowth along the south side of the third section of the Jungles, as you continued eastward, ended about 30 ft. north of where Glendale St. would have run if it had gone all the way to Industrial Drive. The remainder contained the same sort of vegetation as the westernmost portion, except where residents of Belmont St. had planted vegetable gardens and had trash burners. A drainage ditch of sorts was on the southeast corner of this section, separating it from a huge mount of earth, Glendale St., and the incinerator of the Radio City Electronics plant. Glendale St. was only a half block long and ended at the rear of the Radio City plant. Low vines and poison ivy occupied the few places that weren't trampled into paths or play areas. There were two paths running through this section, the main path which went from northwest to southeast, and another that ran straight south from the beginning of the first one. There was a third shorter path which ran from the southeast end of the first one to the farm fields down over the bank.
The fourth, and easternmost section of the Jungles was where we played the most. Full of the same spear-like wild carrots found near Center St., it also had shorter more spread out trees than the second section, denser undergrowth, and 3 paths, two running east-west and one running straight south, though it was usually too densely overgrown to use, from behind Robeson's new ranch house. The route of paths in this section of the Jungles were rarely changed because of the dense undergrowth. Children had obviously been playing in the Jungles for many years at this time, the mid 50s, because there was a large shallow depression in the southwest corner which had been dug by my father and Uncle Lester in the early 1920s, when they lived in the same neighborhood, though not the same house that I grew up in.