The following is an article by Fran Thiercof. It originally appeared in The Carlin Express newspaper on Wednesday, June 30, 1999. It is being reprinted here with permission from the editor-in-chief, Ruth Hart. The Kenyon Hotel still sits on Camp Street between 5th and 6th Street and is an apartment building today. Today it is called the Oak Street Apartments.
Across the street to the west of us, was another hotel for railroad men called the Kenyon. This was owned and operated by Mr. and Mrs. Renz Doxey. They were good friends of my folks and as far as I know, no competition existed between the two. Each had their own clientele.
Mr. Doxey was the town clerk and almost rant the place single-handedly, although there was a Town Board.
I don’t know who the previous owners of the Kenyon were, but when the Doxeys bought it and moved in, we (one of the Southside kids) acquired a new member.
Our gang, south of the S.P. tracks consisted of Raymond Aiazzi, Enzo and Elia Bianucci, Laurence Willison, Martin Richard, and Marian Piccinini and my sister, Donna, and I. It took a awhile for Loren and Gordon Doxey to fit into our group.
We had rubber gun wars all summer. The guns were made from a piece of wood cut to resemble the shape of a gun, with a handle. A clothespin was attached behind the handle and acted as a trigger. An old automobile inner tube was cut to circular strips about ½ inch wide for ammo. The rubber strip was inserted into the clothespin and stretched to the end of the barrel and when you pressed the clothespin it went flying. If you hit what you aimed at it was purely coincidental. We had to fall down and be dead though if we were to get hit, and I can still hear the arguments going on about who was dead and who wasn’t.
My sister and I had to be in the house by 9 p.m. on summer nights. It was awful to be in a good hiding spot and about to score in “Run Sheep Run”, and have my dad come out and whistled us in. We’d have to go, there was no question, but then everybody had to go by then.
Another thing we liked to do was bake a potato. Doesn’t that sound exciting? Ha. It was fun though. On the corner of 6th and Camp was a vacant lot, there’s a house there now, but for a long time, it was a hole in the ground where a cellar had been. Most of the above mentioned kids would build a small fire in the hole and let it go down to ashes, and we’d bury a potato or two in the ashes, cover it with dirt and go play a game, and come back in an hour or so and dig them out of the dirt, brush them off and cut them up to share and did they ever taste good.
We used to love to tell ghost stories, sitting under the arc light at the above mentioned corner.
I was one of the gang. I had my own rubber gun. I still can see the scar on my left thumb where the knife slipped while carving out the handle. It wasn’t until I began to “date” a young man from the “other” side of town that I became a girl.
Behind the Kenyon hotel and where Rev. Inzer’s home is now, is where our High School basketball stars of the late ‘40s made some of the best shots. They were Laurence Willison, Enzo Bianucci, Raymond Aiazzi, Loren Doxey, Eugene Fong, and later, Hank Chavez. They were a good team and beat Elko on one occasion. That was quite a fete considering that Elko was an “A” team and Carlin a “B”. This classification was done according to school size. If I remember correctly, Carlin only had five boys to put on the floor. Luckily no substitutions had to be made.