The Two Georges at 15 Sheppard Street

Short Non-Fiction by Claude Clayton Smith

ONE FRIDAY in the early 1950s, when we showed up to spend the night with Grampy and Nanny at their bungalow on 15 Sheppard Street in Stratford, Connecticut, we learned that the spare bedroom had been “put-to-let,” at ten dollars a week, bringing “the two Georges” into our boyhoods.

The first boarder—a large, beefy character by the name of George Wilcheski—wrestled professionally under the name of George Wilchester. I remember a puzzling public-service TV ad from those days that showed several cartoon-like people in different shades of black and white—one Negro, one Hispanic, one Asian, etc. A catchy jingle accompanied these images, something to the effect that it doesn’t matter what color you are, or whether your name ends in a witz or ski, it’s a great big beautiful world out there and we’re all a part of it. “Prejudice” was another word I hadn’t heard of, like “divorce,” “custody,” and “cancer.” Yet we did have a friend named “Rackiewicz” (if the different spelling counted), and now there was a “Wilcheski” at 15 Sheppard Street. Who, for some reason, called himself “Winchester.”

But none of that mattered. George was a wrestler! And one summer night, we went to see him in action at Raybestos Field. But to our great disappointment, he sported no flashy robe like the studio wrestlers we watched on television. He simply entered the ring in plain black trunks, a white towel draped around his neck. We wanted a spectacle—we wanted to see George bounce off the ropes and crack his opponent in the face with a flying dropkick, like Argentina Rocca; to twist his opponent into knots with a step-over toe hold; or at least put him in a hammerlock and gouge his eyes out—but all we witnessed were two men rolling around in the center of the ring, a match so dull that I can’t remember who won. George made fifteen dollars on the deal. He was a serious wrestler, though a mediocre one, and he avoided the play-acting we saw on television and accepted as real. Despite his poor showing, we liked George anyway. It was a novelty having our own wrestler in the house, and we delighted in him showing us the holds and moves. And like our dog Bingo, who had mysteriously disappeared (he’d been “put to sleep”) George Wilcheski was simply gone one day. Decades later I discovered that he’d been “a big man on campus” at Boston College, where he’d starred in football. Then he abandoned his wife and young son for the wrestling circuit, where his lifetime record (because of arranged matches?) was an even 75-75.

The second George—George Mooney—showed up a week or so later. He was an ex-marine just back from Korea, where he’d been a machine-gunner in a lumber camp, laconically telling us, in a rusty voice, about “mowing down” enemy soldiers as they attacked from across an open field. “They just kept on coming,” he said. This was even more exciting than having known a professional wrestler!

George Mooney was extremely thin, with an Adam’s apple that protruded from his neck as if he’d swallowed a popsicle stick and bobbed up and down with his rusty laughter. His black hair, as thin as the rest of him, was rapidly falling out, a fact he blamed on the bottle of Vitalis that sat on his dresser in the spare room, but which he continued to use nonetheless, slicking his hair straight back. Next to the Vitalis he kept a quart jar of dimes. He saved dimes as other people save pennies, tossing them into the jar carelessly, with no apparent concern for their value. But that solid silver cylinder was the most money I’d ever seen in one place—more than all the nickels my brother and I could imagine lugging home from Paradise Green in our Radio Flyer wagon, had we not been paid in dollar bills when returning Grampy’s beer bottles. I stared at those jarred dimes whenever the door to the spare room happened to be open, although I personally preferred nickels, thinking they were worth more than dimes because they were bigger. And so I insisted that the fifty cents Grampy and Nanny gave me for my weekly allowance be paid in nickels.

The Saturday afternoon matinee at the Stratford Theater cost only twenty cents, so I could afford to go every week on the strength of my allowance, impatient for the cartoons and serial (some guy who could rocket about with a jetpack on his back) to get to the main feature, which always followed a boring newsreel. One Saturday, however, just after George Mooney came to 15 Sheppard Street, there was a newsreel that startled me—it showed a bulldozer pushing skinny naked people into piles, as other skinny people, with shaved heads and baggy white-striped outfits, stared at the camera from behind barbed wire. It was about Nazi hunters, whatever they were, and I wondered if it was at all connected to George Mooney and his machine gun in Korea. But when I got back to 15 Sheppard Street, I was too frightened to ask.

George Mooney drove a van for Railway Express, and we liked to see him in his khaki uniform. He wore a different sort of uniform—brilliant and silky—for the VFW softball team that played its games on summer evenings at Longbrook Park, which lay between Paradise Green and Raybestos Field. Once in a great while, when the team was short of men, my brother and I filled in, the softball as heavy as a shot-put in my hand. Stuck out in right field, I always took my participation seriously and never doubted that the noisy, lusty Vets did the same. Yet there were times when their smiles were beyond me. Often, George would play catch with us in Grampy’s back yard, where we used a hardball. But I would always drop out before too long, the stiffer tosses stinging my gloved hand. Then George and my older brother would “burn ’em in” to each other, with me well out of the way.

George’s ten-dollar weekly rent for room-and-board was due on Saturday morning, when Nanny would walk down Park Street hill to do her shopping at Paradise Green, and Grampy slept until noon. But George Mooney liked to sleep in too, and so Nanny would stand in the little hallway outside the door to the spare room and yell: “George! Time to go down street!” After a while George would mutter something from beneath the covers, climb out of bed, then open the door a crack, looking like Ichabod Crane in his rumpled underwear, and hand out an equally rumpled ten-dollar bill. Then I would “go down street” with Nanny. My presence on these excursions had but one purpose—to ensure that the Kool-Aid and candy bars she provided kept coming.

One day, while “down street” with Nanny, a woman who got off the C. R. & L. bus from Bridgeport caused me to stop in my tracks. She was all black. Incredible! I’d never seen an all- black woman before. So I pointed and said, “Look, Nanny! A chocolate lady!” Nanny responded with a violent tug of my arm. Seeing her gesture, however, the “colored” woman smiled and came right over. “That’s all right,” she said to my grandmother. “The little boy knows. The little boy knows.” I can still hear her saying that, repeating herself for emphasis.

Not long after George Mooney came to 15 Sheppard Street, he got married, and his wife moved into the spare room with him. Mary Mooney was a redhead like Nanny, though our friend Ralphie Stinson said that Nanny dyed her hair, which I vociferously denied, ignorant of the purpose of the Egyptian Henna in the bathroom, a product with a foreign character on the label that gave me the willies. Mary Mooney was tall, gawky, and unattractive, and my grandparents’ bungalow suddenly seemed crowded. Conflicts arose over who would do the cooking, and before long the Mooneys moved out.

Both Georges took Grampy’s drinking in stride. Both were poor, and extremely ordinary men, with little to offer. And both were our boyhood heroes.

Claude Clayton Smith, Professor Emeritus of English, Ohio Northern University, is the author of eight books and co-editor/translator of four. His own work has been translated into five languages, including Russian and Chinese. The 3rd edition of his historical novel THE STRATFORD DEVIL was published in October of 2023 by Shanti Arts, Brunswick, ME.