Two Surprises on Western Campus
Screen 1 of 2A Bottle of Ink
Before Cherryton Village was built in the early 1920's on the Western campus, my brother, our mother and I lived for several months in an abandon wooden gymnasium located behind the old Potter College building at the head of College Street hill.
In an earlier story, titled, "Aubrey, the Policeman, Spoiled Our Fun," I described how our "rooms" in this old building were divided by bed sheets hung throughout the large area, which had been used earlier as a basketball floor for both the women's and men's teams. The reader may remember also that this was the building whose windows served as targets for a rock-throwing contest in which I participated.
One night, my brother, Will Gooch, and I were studying at a table in one of our "sheet" rooms in this gymnasium when we heard a peculiar noise outside the window.
"It may be a robber trying to break in," Will Gooch suggested with a sinister smile.
Not wishing to appear afraid, I boldly picked up a bottle of green ink from the table and whispered as I held it high in the air that if a robber came in the door, I would throw this bottle of ink right in his face.
What I didn't realize soon enough was that the top of the ink bottle was not screwed down, and when I held it over my head bottom side up, the green ink came down full force on the top and sides of my shirt--my very best school shirt, which I should have changed but didn't when I came home that afternoon.
I was so startled at this green mess that for a moment I was speechless. But my brother was quick to enumerate all the horrible things our mother would probably do to me for ruining the shirt. Since I did not disagree with any of his dire predictions, I immediately took off the shirt, went to the shower room, and washed it out with cold water. But that seemed only to make the situation worse. The green color was just spread more evenly over all the shirt.
Then I remembered a recipe our mother had used once to get an ink spot out of a towel: vinegar and lemon juice. That was it. She had rinsed the towel out in a mixture of vinegar and lemon juice. I tried it, washing the shirt out several times in our family dishpan--the same one we used to wash our dishes.
The color cleared up more and more with each change of the mixture, and finally only a slight trace of green could be seen.
With my brother's help, we dried it some by wrapping it tightly in a bath towel (yes, the towel did pick up some of the color but not much). It was now still damp and quite wrinkled. So we decided to iron it.
Will Gooch was a good ironer--he was thirteen and I was only eleven at the time--and so he did most of it, while objecting to my attempts to supervise his work.
The job was done. The recipe had worked, and I continued wearing that shirt for a long time. Our mother may have noticed something different about the shirt, but she never mentioned it. I learned as I grew up that she used great wisdom many times by not "noticing" or at least not commenting on some errors and shortcomings of her two sons.
With ball-point pens so common now, I'm sure young people, including my own grandchildren, are not nearly so likely to spill a bottle of ink when planning their strategy to confront a robber.
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