Visiting West Grove

West Grove, Pa is a small town some what southwest of Philadelphia on US route 1. It’s where my grandmother Blanche and grandfather Noni lived and where my father and his six brothers and one sister were raised
From about six year old until ten years old, I would visit there in the summer. Along with my grandmother and grandpop there were six uncles. My dad had been the oldest of the four along with Bud, Clyde and Junie and a sister Alva and three younger brothers Ray , Hughsey and Gene who were about ten or so years older than I, my gran’mom having had them late in life. The three younger boys were still living at home when I would visit. My cousins, Kenny and his sister Barbara, lived up the hill from grandmom.
West Grove was part country and part small town and for a city boy it was a real experience; since there were outhouses and at night if you had to go it was up the hill in the back and scary to go. My gran mom had a chamber pot for night time use. I guess when I was there for a month I needed a dose of castor oil to clear out my system since the hole in the plank and the pages of the Sears Roebuck catalog did not allow me to have regular elimination.
The local kids and my cousin Kenny had a lot of fun playing tricks on me. One of the things I remember most was a time we cut through a pasture and a bull chased us. They knew where he was and split up. I was petrified and then took off with him snorting and stomping and charging behind me; just as he was about to reach me I slipped under the fence to safety. They all were rolling on the ground laughing at my narrow escape. Back at the house when I told my uncles, they said that I was making this up.
Another of the scary daring things that they did was to go down to a train trestle which spanned a creek They would wait at the edge of the trestle and when they heard the train blowing for the crossing about a mile away they would start running towards the middle where the creek flowed deep. I am trailing behind not knowing the routine about the trestle and jumping in the water but I can hear the rumbling, roaring and shaking as the train sped towards us, the engineer blowing his whistle like mad. They all began to jump off in the creek below, me jumping at the last minute as the train sped over us. The engineer shaking his fist and cussing at us.
We knew we had a whipping coming for swimming in the creek but if grandmom knew what we really had done Kenny and I would have had our buns turned into hamburger.
I also remember that there were very few black people in West Grove and everyone knew Blanche and Noni and the Robinson boys but the local tavern had a brass rail down the middle separating the whites from the blacks.
My grandmoms father Uriah Martin had been a pfc in the Civil War and there is a commemorative plaque to black veterans in Washington on the National Mall with his name inscribed.
My dad was the first black to graduate from West Grove high school and later to graduate from Lincoln University up the road in Oxford, Pa as president of his senior class. When I moved from Atlantic City when I was 10 I never went back to West Grove until I was an adult.