Our family moved into the house on West Main Street in Richland, PA, in late November 1957, and one of my first memories of that house is being sent to my room to take a nap. This was an all-purpose punishment whenever I did something that didn’t please my mother, or whenever she simply wanted to get rid of me for a bit. I was eight years old at the time, and whatever I did on this particular occasion is forever gone from my memory banks. Perhaps I had complained about wearing corduroy pants; I hated those pants.

Whatever my infraction, my nap was interrupted, as very shortly my mother came to get me because some boys had come to the back door to welcome me to the neighborhood.

They turned out to be the Gass boys, Frank and Mike, who lived just a couple houses down the block.

Frank was a year my junior and his brother Mike was a year younger than he was, but they quickly became fixtures around our house. If they weren’t at our house, I was at theirs. At least for the next year or so anyway.

They had a dog that they named Snoopy. It was a completely black colored dog, and I think it was a beagle, but whatever it was, it looked pretty much like Snoopy from the comics except for its black coloring. (The black dogs in the header are not Snoopy; they’re pics that I found on the net.)

After a year or two, the Dieffenbach family moved in right next door to us, and from that point on the dynamics of the neighborhood became that much more complicated. The Dieffenbachs had two boys, Jimmy and Dennis, who were closer in age to the Gass boys than to me.

Sometimes the five of us got along very harmoniously, and sometimes we didn’t. 

I no longer recall what the sources of the discord were among us, but from time to time the four of them seemed to get mad at me, and so I was excluded. But then at other times, the Gass boys got angry with the Dieffenbachs, and once again the three of us were thick as thieves. On no occasion did I ever side with the Dieffenbachs against the Gass boys, at least not that I recall. 

In any case, once our family moved to South Race Street in 1964, which was really only something like two or three blocks away (depending on how you counted the blocks), I rarely saw any of them again. Maybe occasionally I would run into one of them at the Post Office or something like that.

And then somehow time seemed to pass without my noticing it.

Anyway, word just came that Frank Gass died on June 5 at Southeastern Veterans Center in Spring City, PA.

Apparently he had been ill for some time.

His brother Mike has suffered a stroke and is in a nursing home. Alas, I don’t have any photos of Mike.