The Boy in the Park                                                                                                                        BBby SkinFlint McCullah

There is a story that made the rounds back in the 1960's about the strange boy who showed up one day at the Francis Street Park, which is in the Little Budapest neighborhood in the northeastern corner of PA. Little Budapest was a neighborhood that was cut off from the rest of PA by a combination of highways, factories and the omnipresent Outerbridge.

We were a bit of an enclave and there wasn’t much interaction with any of the other neighborhoods and as a result we created our own little social micro culture.

The park was located at the northern dead end of Francis Street, right next to the railroad tracks and it was the social center for the neighborhood’s youths. We had a large roofed sandbox with benches that was an ideal gathering spot for rainy days and for a lot of silly (and often painful) games such as mumbly peg, spreadzies, or knuckles. There were swings, benches under trees, a fountain perfect for filling water balloons, and a basketball court which we affectionately called the “Budapest Garden”. Practically everyone who hung out there had a nick name. Some of the more colorful ones were SkinFlint, Byrd, Taffy, Voop, Perch, Dumb Boy, Carbug, Lurch, Binky, Log, Stomp, Grutin Herbie and others I can’t remember. During the summer a park teacher or “park creature” as we called them, was assigned by the city to ward over this group, and it wasn’t an easy job as we always plotted ways to make their job difficult.

One summer evening, just before dark, right after the park creature had left and we were by ourselves, we saw a young boy of about 12 standing at the far side of the park near the railroad tracks. None of us had ever seen this kid before. One thing that stuck out about him was the way he was dressed, in old fashioned clothes but in a somehow realistic manner, with high top black laced boots, shirt with overalls and some type of flat hat. Sort of a Bowery Boy type of look. He just stood there looking toward us and we debated if we should go over and talk to him and see what his story was. However, just at that moment, the ice cream truck pulled up with its music calling and off we ran for our popsicles.

When we returned to the benches with our ice cream he was gone and that was the last time we ever saw him. A few months then passed, summer was over and we were back at school. Halloween was approaching but we had mostly forgotten about the appearance of the strange boy.

There was this elderly woman who lived alone on Thomas Street near the park. She would occasionally give us kids a quarter to go to Zavitz's market for her to pick up her groceries. One day when we delivered her bag of groceries she asked us to bring them inside. We did and as we passed through her living room, there, hanging on the wall, was a picture of the boy we had seen in the park earlier that year. We remarked to her that we had seen this boy before and asked if he was her grandson or something. She just looked at us for a long pause and then told us that we could not possibly had seen him as that picture was taken more than 15 years ago, and that it was a photo of her son. She went on to tell us that her son as well as her husband had perished in the great Woodbridge train wreck in 1951. The train had derailed near the Woodbridge station and fell off the elevated railway, taking 85 lives. The worst train wreck in NJ history.

She said that the event still haunts her to this day. She related to us that her husband and son had gone into the city that day for the kid’s birthday to see the circus and that they were on their way home when the train crashed. She told us that she had a weird feeling that day, that something bad might happen, so she made her son promise to be careful and to return home safely. He did promise to her that he would return. She said that she still has dreams to this day in which he somehow escaped the wreck and walks home from the accident scene uninjured.

We didn’t know what to say, so we left without saying anything. We were sure that the picture on the wall was that of the same kid that we had seen in the park, or maybe now we weren’t so sure? We had never heard about the train wreck until then, but we knew that the tracks next to the park were the same tracks that ran through Woodbridge. And that the scene of the wreck was less than 1 mile from the Francis Street Park! After that, few us of would ever venture onto that lonely and desolate section of tracks again. He could still be there, trying somehow to fulfill his promise to return home.

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