Lou’s View

By Lou Bernard

Okay, from the beginning, full disclosure—I semi-stole that headline.

I couldn’t help it—It was just too good. The original headline, in the newspaper on November 12, 1945, was “Gets Ducking In Muck Instead of Hunted Duck,” which I felt was a bit wordy, but had the right idea. At any rate, I wanted to use some of that for my column.

If you’re a regular reader of my column, you may have noticed that I enjoy these little “slice of life” stories. I like writing about the big stuff—Lock Haven’s founding, Piper, Henry Shoemaker, the important people and events that make up our history. But I also have an affection for the much smaller stories—The little incidents that happen to ordinary people and make up so much of our time.

I love stumbling upon one of these in the archives, and getting a column out of it. Like the incident that happened to Paul Clark, of Flemington, in November of 1945.

Clark was nineteen, an age generally not known for excellent judgement and life skills. At nineteen, I myself sure as hell should not have been unsupervised, but in 1945, we paid a lot less attention to our kids, generally leaving them to fend for themselves. I once wrote a column about a little girl who swallowed a knife, and another time I wrote about a boy who drank an explosive. (Both were okay, and died much later of old age.) So young people basically ran feral in those days, is what I am implying.

Clark decided to go hunting. No reason he shouldn’t. It was hunting season, and there were ducks all over the place, driven in by a recent storm. (It was not, apparently, wabbit season.) Ducks were all over the river and the local creeks.

So, obviously, the best choice for Clark was to try the sedimentation pond in Flemington.

Back in those days, the pond was not exactly clean, fresh water. It was the property of the paper mill, and they dumped all sorts of crap into it. Again, it was 1945. In addition to basically letting our children run wild, we also weren’t paying much attention to the environment then. Companies were essentially allowed to pour whatever garbage they wanted into nature. (They’ve cleaned these ponds up a lot, these days, but they’re all gated off. You can’t legally get in. I’ve tried.)

So Clark got into a canoe and rowed out to the middle of the pond. He brought with him a double-barreled twelve-gauge shotgun, which could have taken out Godzilla at a hundred yards. This made it the perfect choice to shoot a few ducks.

Upon seeing his first couple of ducks, Clark got a bit too excited and fired off both barrels at once, which was far too much. It upset the canoe, dumping Clark into the water, which, again, was not exactly known for its cleanliness. The article referred to it as the “not-too-enticing muck of the pond into which is drained waste material from the local paper mill.”

In the subsequent chaos, Clark assumed he had swallowed some of the water, which would not have been an unlikely reaction to being heaved into it by a shotgun blast. Fortunately, the hospital wasn’t all that far away, so he reported over there to get checked out.

As it turned out, he was fine. The hospital cleared him, and released him. Clark left, though presumably he didn’t immediately get back to his duck hunting.