****

Ref:

Like Manna from God: The American Chestnut Trade in Southwestern Virginia

Authors: Ralph H Lutts, Source Environmental History. Vol. 9. No 3 (Jul, 2004) pp 497-525

Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Forest History Society and the American Society for Environmental History

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The Chestnut Point Stories

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Jackson Tel

The Chestnut Point Stories

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Charlie Mann froze to death under a snowbank on the shore of the Patuxent across from Haviland Mill during the night of February 5th, 1978.

Though transformative, the first 23 hours Travis Mann spent alone at Chestnut Point after Charlie’s funeral were nothing compared to the 24th one, right before sunrise. Having been a famous rock ‘n‘ roll guitarist and leader of the Travis Mann Band for several decades before, that was his customary bedtime.

The death of his grandfather, Charlie, had sent Travis into a spiral of depression. No exhaustion he had ever experienced could compare to the yawning pit of weariness he now felt while ascending the creaky stairs to his chosen bedroom tucked under the gable roof of the old main-house, the one with Jack Chapman’s journals in wooden crates lined up along the knee wall.

Then. ‘What was that!’

Travis thought he saw a movement in the inky dark hallway above, but he wasn’t sure. Travis stopped, silent on the landing, his senses on edge. He gripped the finial of the newel post at the landing to call out. “Hello. Is someone there?”

Silence.

“Hello. Is someone there?” Travis was all eyes and ears. The hallway above was hidden in inky darkness. All sound was minuscule.

Silence…

A rustle of fabric.

Then, SUDDENLY, an ethereal wisp of a woman, dressed in a long satin silver houserobe, appeared face-to-face with Travis. After both of them simultaneously screamed, she glared him in the eye. The jolt of surprise would have sent Travis tumbling backward down the stairs if he hadn’t instinctively grabbed hold of the finial atop the stair newel post to save himself.

“Who are you?” The woman hissed through a missing front tooth, which gave her a lisp. “Whaf are you doing in my house?”

At first, Travis believed he was having an LSD flashback. It’s more believable than actually seeing a ghost,’ he thought, reaching out to see if the woman was real.

“Answer me,” the woman demanded.

Travis remained silent because he was having great difficulty suppressing laughter because she had said ‘Whaf,’ instead of ‘What.’

There’s a whole lot of story between there and then, so let’s take a break, for a sip, and a stretch. But before leaving, let me say:

The Lady in the Hallway was the first ghost Travis encountered after moving to Chestnut Point permanently. He soon learned who she was and why she became a ghost. He also learned ‘how’, but ‘the why’ is always more important, don’t you think?

****

DIRECTORY - BEGIN ANEW

TINY STORY-1975-Remains of Missing Bicycle Boy

By Jackson Tel

1975, Sunshine, Maryland

The remains of ‘The Bicycle Boy’ were discovered twelve years after Charlie Mann took a taxi to West Reading to buy a Buick Skylark as a surprise birthday present for his grandson, Travis. One evening, Charlie was watching TV, on a good memory day, when he saw a report on the evening news that the skeleton of an adolescent boy was found buried, along with a mangled bicycle, in the woods near Reading, Pennsylvania. The body was believed to be that of an eleven-year-old ‘colored’ boy gone missing from Sunshine, Maryland, in August of 1963.

Back in those days, why did they always call out someone as being ‘colored,’ but never as someone being ‘white?

Anyway, the missing boy, named Ricky Bossley, had set out after an afternoon shower on his banana-seat bicycle to go to a friend’s house, but never showed up. An extensive, prolonged search of the area by police, dogs, volunteer search parties, and even by helicopter turned up nothing, except a pocket knife found at the edge of the narrow, shoulder-less, two-lane country road; the same route the boy would have taken to his friend’s house. His panicked parents, desperate for any shred of hope they could hang onto, identified the knife as belonging to their son and pleaded to the public for help to find him.

His father owned a small construction company. His mother, a pediatrician for a nearby health clinic, in an on-camera press briefing, said, “Ricky is a good boy with a smile that lights up a room. We love him dearly, and everyone who knows him likes him. He has a small birthmark shaped like Florida on the side of his neck, and he is wearing blue jeans and a Disneyland T-shirt.”

Two weeks after that, Charlie, having yet another relatively good day, read in the paper that his friend, Big Benjamin, the taxicab driver who drove him to West Reading, had been arrested in what the press called ‘The Missing Bicycle Boy Case.”

However, just three days later, when detectives showed up at Chestnut Point to question Charlie about Benjamin, he was unable to remember who Benjamin was or provide even a single fact about their cab trip from Sunshine to West Reading on August 24th, 1964. (That happened on one of Charlie’s bad memory days.)

Meanwhile, in West Reading, Dorothy Hamel, speaking to investigators, could only remember that the taxi driver had been very obese and that after Charlie got out of the taxi, he removed bags from the back seat, but none from the trunk.

Big Benjamin was unable to make bail and spent a year in jail awaiting trial. But in the end, Benjamin was convicted only of involuntary manslaughter, failing to report an accident, and improper burial of a deceased person.

According to Benjamin’s own testimony on the stand, it was an accident. He only took his eyes off the road for a second. Then, when he saw the boy on the bicycle, the road was so narrow he had no place to go. He put on the brakes as hard as he could and turned the wheel, but the road was slick from the rain shower that afternoon, and his cab skidded sideways right into him. The boy must have hit his head on the pavement hard enough to kill him, because there wasn’t even a mark on him, no blood or anything. Other than the back wheel of the bike getting caught underneath the cab when Benjamin backed up to find out if the kid was alright, you couldn’t even tell that the boy had been hit by a car.

The pathologist who conducted a post-mortem examination of the child’s remains testified that he found evidence of trauma to the side of the skull. This fractured wrist was consistent with a hard fall from a bicycle.

With tears in his eyes, Benjamin said he didn’t report the accident because he was afraid of losing his taxi license, which, because of his weight, was his only means of income and the only way to provide for his sick mother. So he put the boy’s body in a deer hunting freezer out in an outbuilding, on his parents’ property, and hid the bike in the falling-down tobacco barn, next to it. He intended to give the poor child a decent burial, with prayers and a cross, as soon as he could, when things blew over. But then the call came in for the fare to West Reading, Pennsylvania, Benjamin saw it as an opportunity to take the boy’s body out of state and find some place to bury it there. He knew what he did was wrong. And a day doesn’t go by that he isn’t deeply, deeply sorry and ashamed of what he did.

The lenient verdict came as a shock to young Ricky’s parents, who wanted him to be executed or, at the very least, spend the rest of his life in jail for what he did. But the Judge decided to give Benjamin only probation, with time served. The parents claimed, to the press, that the only reason Benjamin received such a light sentence was that their son was black. (Maybe, maybe not. But, the fact that white people committing crimes against black people were judged less harshly than black people committing crimes against white people was a pervasive pattern in the criminal justice system of the day.)

And when his probation was up and after his mother died, Benjamin sold out and moved away from the area. He becomes homeless. No one seemed to know what happened to him after that.

So on August 24th, 1964, when Big Benjamin showed up at Chestnut Point in his taxicab to take Charlie to West Reading, and Charlie joked to himself about the broken trunk lock, thinking, …or maybe there is a dead body in there. It turns out there actually was one, for real.

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DIRECTORY - BEGIN ANEW

DIRECTORY - SQUARE ONE - FLIPBOOK VERSION

1973-When Travis Made a Quickstop

By Jackson Tel

1973, Hyattsville, Maryland

In the spring of 1973, Travis Mann’s best friend, Barry Wolff, gave up his Deadhead lifestyle and went on a mission to find God through meditation and selflessness. He parceled out his worldly possessions to friends and flew to Colorado to live in an ashram of the Divine Light Mission ten miles outside Boulder.

Barry entrusted all his Moleskine notebooks and rock-and-roll memorabilia to his girlfriend, Cookie, before leaving. He entrusted his beloved record collection to Phillip and gave the keys to his rent-controlled New York apartment to his baby sister. And last but not least, Barry signed over the title of the 1968 Westfalia Camper to Travis.

The Volkswagen van looked and ran rough after four years of constant travel to Woodstock, the Baja Peninsula in Mexico, and from one Grateful Dead concert to the next. However, Travis enjoyed working on cars and kept the camper on the road despite his lack of cash for parts and tools.

…

That summer, Travis was renting a tiny apartment above an old brick carriage house in D.C. off an alley on H Street near the Washington Coliseum. The garage space below, originally built to house a horse-drawn wagon, was so small that ‘the Wolfmobile’ barely fit in it. Travis had to open the carriage house’s wooden doors from the alley side and crawl into the van through the rear hatch to go anywhere. Getting the vehicle in and out of the alley was a complicated process, involving a precise three-point turn and lots of mirror-checking. But after a while, Travis became adept at the maneuver even when coming back home stoned and half asleep from his job at The Crossroads nightclub in Bladensburg.

…

On August 30th, during rush hour, Travis was driving south, high as a kite, down Route 1 from Hyattsville after making a weed delivery. He was wearing stonewashed cutoff jean shorts, handcrafted leather sandals, and a brand new Boast polo shirt. (an unwise choice if he were to be pulled over by the police because the embroidered Japanese maple silhouette on the breast was often confused with that of a marijuana leaf )

All of the windows in the van were wide open. It was so hot outside that, as his Pop-Pop was fond of saying, “you could fry an egg on the sidewalk.” The thermometer on the Citizens Bank sign in Hyattsville read 94 degrees.

Travis turned on the radio, tuned it to 102.3, progressive rock WHFS, and cranked up the sound so that he could hear over the traffic noise. It was five o’clock and time for Weasel, the afternoon disk jockey, to start his popular set of music and interviews.

There were tons of stoplights on that stretch of road. At each intersection, Travis got annoyed looks from the drivers and passengers stopped alongside.

Late at night, if you timed your speed just right, you could catch all the green lights for miles. But, at that time of day, navigating the parked delivery trucks, grouchy commuters, and jaywalkers made the going slow.”

In Mount Rainier, Travis turned into the old trolley stand to take his sweaty shirt off. His driver’s side left arm was so sunburned that there was a dramatic line between the skin tones on his bicep where the sleeve ended. Around his neck hung a chain bearing an antique silver coin that looked hundreds of years old.

Standing at the corner on the opposite side of the road, with her thumb out, was someone who looked very familiar. Travis recognized the long braid of hair that reached all the way down to the small of her back. It was that girl, Eileen, whom he met back in June at the fraternity house in College Park, the day of the Grateful Dead and Allman Brothers concert at RFK. She wore a broad-brimmed straw hat, a long peasant skirt, an embroidered blouse from India, and dance flats, with a large macramé bag slung over her shoulder.

Travis put the van in gear, watched for a break in the traffic, made a U-turn, and pulled over to the curb to pick her up. Eileen looked through the window to check him out first.

“You smell like pot,” she said.

“You smell like patchouli,” Travis retorted, and they both laughed.

“Where you headed?” Travis asked.

“Queensbury Road near the train tracks,” Eileen answered.

“Hyattsville?”

“Riversdale, actually.”

“Ok, you’ll have to give me directions. Hop in.”

Eileen opened the door, lifted the bulging macramé bag carefully onto the floorboard, and climbed into the passenger seat.

Travis took a peek at the contents of the bag. It was stuffed full of vegetables, a brown bag labeled Glut Food Coop with ‘brown rice’ scribbled in pencil, a bottle of tamari, and at least a dozen of the largest, most delicious-looking peaches he had ever seen.

“Want one?” she offered.

Travis nodded emphatically.

Eileen reached down and picked out two, one for herself and one for him.

Travis, holding the peach in one hand and steering with the other, shifted into gear and headed back up Route 1.

The fruit was so ripe that the juice got all over their hands with each bite and ran down their arms. They smiled in mock embarrassment at each other.

Eileen asked, “Do you have a tissue or something?”

I don’t think so, maybe in the back. Then Travis grabbed the polo off the dashboard. Here, use my shirt.”

“You sure?” she asked skeptically, “Looks expensive.”

“I don’t care,” Travis fibbed.

Wiping up, Eileen inquired, “Do I know you from somewhere? You look familiar.”

“I met you upstairs at Delta Sigma Fi in College Park back in June.”

“Oh yeah! You’re that dealer guy. James traded his old electric guitar to you for pot and concert tickets, right? How’s the music going?”

“Pretty good. I’ve been getting better. I work at night at the Crossroads in Bladensburg, and I get to sit in with the guys there sometimes during sound checks and stuff.

“Cool. Take the next left.”

“On Cleveland?”

“Yeah, it’s a shortcut,” Eileen said, throwing her pit out the window.

Between steering, shifting, and munching, Travis was way behind her. His peach was only half-eaten.

After making the turn on Cleveland Avenue, they had to stop at Chambers Funeral Home, as a burial procession with headlights on was slowly being directed out of the side parking lot.

Travis finished his peach as they waited, then took out a baggie filled with chunks of hashish, a broken-off wooden chopstick, a Bic lighter, and a pack of Marlboros from its hiding place in the side door panel. He gently massaged the tobacco out of one of the filtered cigarettes, sprinkled in some hash, replaced the mixture using the chopstick as a tamper, lit it, and asked, “Want some?”

Eileen looked around front and back, asking, “Aren’t you paranoid?”

“Nah, just act naturally, and no one will notice. People don’t really pay much attention to what is going on around them unless something unusual happens. They are mostly preoccupied with what is going on in their own heads.”

“Ok,” Eileen agreed, leaning down as low as she could behind the dashboard and took a hit.

Travis chuckled as he took a deep drag and let the smoke drift slowly out of his nostrils, “You don’t need to hide. Pretend like you’re smoking a regular cigarette.”

“But I hate cigarettes. I have never smoked one in my whole life,” Eileen said, taking another hit, as if she were Audrey Hepburn, “Darling, I simply don’t know how.”

“You are a cigarette virgin,” Travis commented.

Eileen shot right back. “And you’re a marijuana whore.”

For some reason, both Eileen and Travis thought that was hilarious. They laughed so hard that they started coughing together at the same time.

Suddenly, both Travis and Eileen realized that the mourners in the cars, one by one, as they made the slow turn out of the funeral home, were eyeing them indignantly. They straightened right up and stared into space, affecting somber expressions.

After the last car finally pulled away, Eileen chided Travis, “Act natural, and nobody will notice,” and they burst out laughing again.

Once again, Travis continued on. This time, he kept his hands at ten and two on the steering wheel, stayed well within the speed limit, and cautiously came to a full halt to look both ways at each stop sign.

Oddly, smack dab in the middle of the residential neighborhood, they came upon a traffic roundabout. Halfway around, Travis couldn’t resist the compulsion to complete the 360-degree circle.

Eileen leaned out the window, as if she were on a theme park ride, to enjoy the cooling air flowing upon her face. As the joyful circumnavigation came to an end, she pleaded, “Again,” so Travis gladly proceeded to take another spin, and after that, she urged him on, “Again!”

But Travis couldn’t finish the third circuit. Suddenly, he felt an intense burning pain in his crotch! He could feel something moving! Travis looked down and took one hand off the wheel to frantically unzip his Levis to get “whatever it was the hell “ out of there.” Taking his eyes off the road, he momentarily lost control of the vehicle.

As the camper veered erratically across the lane, Eileen braced her hands against the dashboard. With wide-open eyes, she demanded to know, “What are you doing?”

Travis grabbed back hold of the wheel in time to steer sharply off onto a side street. Three mailboxes up from the turnabout, he came to an abrupt stop, threw open the door, hopped out onto the pavement, and, cursing to high heaven, pulled down his denim shorts.”

An elderly couple was sitting in the shade of the front porch at that house. Surprised, they rose from their rockers and stepped to the railing to see what was happening.

“Sorry, sorry,” Travis apologized as he pulled his pants back up and loudly explained, “I got stung by a bee. Sorry.”

When Travis slid gingerly back into the driver’s seat with a grimace, Eileen just shook her head in disbelief and said, “You’re a big dope.”

…

And as it turned out, that was not the last time she would say that to him.

****

DIRECTORY - SQUARE ONE - FLIPBOOK VERSION

1956, May Day Celebration-Reading, Pennsylvania

Six-year-old Eleanor Schloss, the first-generation, Jewish daughter of Lawrence and Mariam Schloss, who immigrated to Reading, Pennsylvania, from Germany during World War II, was first mistaken for Catherine Beaumont, the world-famous child movie star. They were dopplegangers.

****

1944, Great Britain, Thorpe Abbotts airfield

While performing for the USO in England, dancer Melanie Peters found herself in the sights of a handsome tail gunner named Jacob Mann. When the dashing flirt who laughed at death and lavished her with gifts was shot down over Italy, she cried for days.

****

Kirby Kahn, Nelly Jones’s buddy at the Gayety, was a miserable comedian, meaning his jokes were intentionally awful. He employed ringers in the audience to make catcalls, and he provided them with free rotten tomatoes, as well as the paid ticket holders. His Kahn Job Act was hit with a very busy laundress.

****

Little Sweets father

Alonzo Ochoa was born in the Indian Territory, now known as Oklahoma. The year was 1861.

His father and mother were both black Spaniards, and their family trees had grown together out of that very soil. They had been ranching cattle there for many, many generations.

That was, of course, before the Trail of Tears changed everything, before the evil white devils invaded that land to imprison the natives from whom they stole their land.

Yes, in those days, life was good for the Spanish cattle ranchers--not discounting the constant danger; after all, that land was the American wilderness.

One can only imagine the reasons why Alonzo grew up with a guitar in one hand, a gun in the other, a knife at his waist, and one in his boot. Yet, he always had a song in his heart.

From his friends, Alonzo got a good ribbing about always getting distracted by Cherokee girls.

****

After graduating from the University in 1866, Benny Barsky joined the British army and was assigned to the Balloon Corps as a design engineer, developing long-range helium balloons in preparation for a war with France.

****

Jeremy Chastaign Mann had a good laugh with Lady Janet Gladys about their romantic tryst during the French and Indian War when she was married to the wealthy Annapolis Assemblyman, Peter Gladys. They were almost caught in the act several times during that tempestuous period. Say more.

****

By 1762, Jeremy Chastaigne Mann, though promoted to the rank of Colonel in the Maryland Militia, was weary of the war with the French. From Allegany County, he traveled alone to Baltimore, where Estella, his mother, then lived. He was ready to settle down, get married, and become a father.

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Jeremy Chastaigne Mann was much shorter than Lady Jane Gladys. Nevertheless, despite being married to Assemblyman Gladys, she was enchanted by Jeremy’s charm, self-assured smile, kind eyes, and adventurous spirit.

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Twelve-year-old Jeremy Chastaigne Mann had inherited personal qualities from both of his parents. He was an adventurous explorer like his father, the seafarer Captain Robyn Mann, and a thoughtful, inquisitive observer of the natural world like his well-read mother, Estella Chastaigne.

****