Can you imagine what would happen if a seven year old boy brought a pocket knife to school today?
When discovered, the school would be swarming with a swat team and metal sniffing German Shepherds and the child would be in shackles, followed soon by his negligent parents. Perish the thought of a pocketknife in the hands of a young boy.
Yet…every single Boomer boy that I knew had a pocketknife when we were growing up. It was a right of passage. We took them to school, we took them to church, we took them to scout meetings – they never left our pockets.
I got my first knife at age six. It was a small Barlow pocketknife with two blades and I quickly developed into a world-class whittler. A small branch in the yard didn’t have a chance as my boyhood chum, Billy Richmond, and I would pounce on it and whittle little spears or other works of art, each the envy of the curators at the Smithsonian Institute.
I remember a certain hillside near the Beckley, WV Flying Eagles football field and it was laced with soapstone – or that’s what we called it. The soapstone was a soft rock-like substance that was a whittler’s Nirvana. We would pull a chunk of the soapstone from the mud and spend hours, carving away to our heart’s content.
I also recall a manicure lesson given by our neighbor, Mr. Halstead. Mr. Halstead sat down with Billy and me on his front porch one summer day and showed us how to push the cuticles back on our fingers with a pocketknife, so our nails would be presentable to anyone concerned. I still tend to my cuticles with a pocketknife.
We used our knives to carve our initials on every tree in the neighborhood and we also played a game called “Mumbly-Peg” – the object of which was to throw a pocket knife and stick it in the ground as close to your opponents shoe as possible without severing a toe.
When I was ten, I bought a gizmo called a Wham-O Throwing Dagger. It was a solid piece of steel with a razor sharp edge on one end and a handle wrapped in leather on the other. We often pretended to be little Tarzans and throw our knives into any accepting tree or fence. I was actually pretty good at zinging my knife head over heels into a target.
Today, I would feel lost without my pocketknife. I use it every day for some small chore or another. Mine is a Mini Leatherman Tool with scissors, a pretty decent knife blade, a bottle opener and a tiny screwdriver head.
On a flight next week to Dallas, however, I’ll have to stash the small knife in my luggage. Who would ever want to ride on a plane with a serial whittler?