by Phil Rowe
I was all of 14 years old when my life of crime began ... and ended. I guess I was too chicken to pursue it further. Perhaps I'd better explain.
In the first year following W.W.II, two men in our rural area introduced me to the fine art of breaking into an unoccupied building. Well, it wasn't exactly a break-in, because we didn't have to pick a lock, bust in a door or even a window. We crept into the building through a restaurant-type walk-in cooler with both an exterior door and another to the kitchen. Neither was locked. We didn't break anything or do more than just look around. But clearly we should not have been there.
Both adults were local businessmen, respected in the community and not given to criminal activities. One man, whom I'll call Allen, was a neighbor. The other, Curt, was from nearby Laconia, just six miles away. He even brought along his son, so there were four of us that wintry day of crime. There was a little snow on the ground, except along the south side of the building, so we left no tell-tale tracks.
The place we entered was a roadhouse, a popular night club on a lonely country road not far from The Weirs, a resort in central New Hampshire. That summers-only road house is long gone now. The site is now occupied by a church, it too only used only in the summer.
None of us had ever been inside that road house, not even when the place was open for business. It had an unsavory reputation as a place that attracted the less than upstanding folks in the area. It did attract summer tourists looking for night time distractions. I guess that the modern term is "action". My grown-up companions claimed that they just had to see what the place was like, for their wives didn't permit them to go to such places. The men's curiosity was just that, nothing very sinister, merely the attraction of something forbidden.
I don't recall how it was that I happened to be there with the two men and the other boy. Many times I had walked by or ridden my bicycle by the place. My parents told me that it was not the kind of place that nice people went to. That only piqued my curiosity, of course, and probably explains why I jumped at the chance to see what was inside. We did so in broad daylight on a Saturday afternoon.
We began by walking around to the back side of the building, peeking into the windows, and trying one after the other to see if perchance one might be unlocked. Allen walked up onto the back porch and discovered the unlocked heavy wooden door to the walk-in cooler. That was the delivery door used by restaurant suppliers.
"Hey, Curt," Allen whispered. "Over here. Look at this."
"What in the heck are you whispering for? Nobody can hear us," Curt responded, sounding a little annoyed. "Whatcha got there?"
Allen pulled the big wooden door open and quickly disappear inside. Then he motioned for us to enter. It couldn't have been easier. Then upon finding that the opposite door from the cooler to the kitchen was also unlocked, we simply entered and began to look around. The electricity was turned off and there was no heat in the building.
Dark wall paneling and heavy window drapes that didn't make it easy to see what it was like inside. That made the place seem eerie and foreboding. Our eyes took several minutes to adapt to the dim light. I was excited and yet afraid that we would be discovered. But in I went, driven by great curiosity and excitement.
"George, you keep an eye out for anybody coming. Sing out if you see anyone. Okay?" Curt instructed his son. The boy was not pleased, for he wanted to explore too. But he complied, grudgingly.
The place seemed quite sumptuous. The ornate mahogany bar was long and graced by a huge mirror on the back wall. Shelves were lined with a variety of glasses of many types and sizes, but we found no liquor or even empty bottles. My friends looked into cabinets, on shelves beneath the bar and in some cardboard cartons near the opened cash register. Except for the furnishings and glassware, there was nothing of value for criminal types to covet.
Even in the large, well-equipped kitchen we found only hardware, pots, pans and chinaware neatly stacked onto shelves. There was no food in the pantry. Everything that could spoil, freeze or draw vermin had been removed. Even a hungry ant would have been out of luck. It was so cold and inhospitable in there even a marauding critter or a passing hobo wouldn't stay long.
"Someone's coming," shouted George. "There's a car turning off the highway. Oh boy. We've had it now."
Allen quickly moved to the north side window and ever so slightly pulled a corner of the drapes back. He looked out just in time to see a brown sedan make the turn off the highway and onto the dirt road that went along side the road house.
"Wait up," he cautioned, as he watched the car intently. It seemed like an eternity, but in seconds he declared, "No problem, it's just Mrs. Grenville. She's just going home down toward the lake. It's all right."
My heart just about stopped there for a minute. My mouth felt dry and I was breathing heavily. "Let's get out of here. The next car could be the sheriff's," I pleaded.
Mostly I was scared, but also greatly disappointed. I don't know exactly what I expected to find, perhaps some racy paintings behind the bar or half-filled booze bottles lying around. The place was not particularly appealing. For this teenager it was, as they say today, "dulls-ville". I suspect that my adult companions were disappointed too. Yet our curiosities were now satisfied. This was just not worth the risk we'd taken. If we'd been caught we'd all have been in trouble. And for what? This was dumb.
We left the way we came in, back out through the two refrigerator doors, empty-handed save for a matchbook that I found near the cash register. Was taking a usually free book of matches really theft? It was the only souvenir of my life of crime, that wintry day in the roadhouse beside a country lane. I never told my parents. They would have been furious with me, and rightly so.
Now this probably sounds like a dull experience, as I look back upon it some 53 years later. But at the time it was a heart-pounding adventure. The threat of getting caught in a place reputedly owned by gangsters was frightening. That worried us more than being discovered by the sheriff.