Living well for Bill involved going
out in the woods with his 22 rifle or bow n’ arrow, or off to Little
Neck Bay (or one of many lakes) to fish and camp. The furthest lake, Lake
Success, was 6 or 7 miles away --- a long distance for young boys to go.
But Bill had a homemade backpack to carry his gear in, looked older than he
was, and could sweet-talk my mother into letting me go with him by telling her
the lake was close by, and that we didn’t have to cross any busy streets to get
there.
There were some projects Bill thought we
should undertake to make our camping excursions more adventurous. One of these
involved building a boat to take out on the bay. For this we first had to raise
15 cents to send off for the boat plans. But once the plans came there was no
money left to build the boat. Bill thought we should get paper routes to
raise the money. But at age 8 or 9 we were really too young to be delivering
papers.
Some time after this Bill built a raft on
his own. I didn’t know he was doing this because he didn’t talk to me about it
either before or afterwards. But another classmate was down at the Yacht Club
the day Bill assembled the raft and launched it into Little Neck Bay. At first
every thing went well with Bill paddling off towards the far shore about a mile
away. But then the raft began to disintegrate with the logs moving off on their
own. So Bill had to abandon ship and swim into shore.
