Where Art Plays Its Part: Volume VI: Author Len Faulkner Jr.

Having always considered himself nostalgia-heavy, Len Faulkner Jr. takes the pen to the page with reflective short stories of his childhood and today is what he calls an accidental author.

Faulkner Jr. is the blogger behind and at the age of 63 has a wealth of glimmers well-worth remembering about the Royersford area.

His unintentional authorship began when he decided to put together a website as a record of his stories about growing up in Royersford. The idea behind it was to have a place where his four grandchildren could eventually glimpse the history of when he was a boy, back when Royersford had a whole different look and feel to it.

In early 2011, Faulkner Jr. published Hooked for Life: The 1950s, 1960s, 1970s and Beyond.

“When I was about halfway through writing the stories, I said, ‘Wait a minute, I think I’ll try to put this in book form rather than on a website,’ because my thinking was that a website is here today, but who knows where technology is going,” Faulkner Jr. elaborated. “It’s just like us putting stuff on disks years ago.”

While he never intended to write the collection of stories to compile as a book to sell, copies housed at the Spring-Ford Area Historical Society did in fact find happy buyers. It’s available for purchase online but can also be read for free on the Bookemon publishing website.

“I did so much research with the Spring Ford Area Historical Society, too” he explained. “The book stayed personal but started to spread out into a history of the town, and it just went on from there.”

Digging up all sorts of details at the historical society to help complete his writings, Faulkner Jr. said he’s very grateful to its members for their assistance and support, along with their encouragement and the fact that they’ve promoted and sold a few copies.

The book begins with the integral mentioning of the moment when at just seven years old, he moved to a new apartment with his family and found himself tagging along curiously in the one-way alley known as Summer Street, perched between 3rd and 4th avenues.

The line, "Hey kid, you wanna go fishing?" sparked to life the friendship that still holds firm today. Faulkner Jr. met comrade Rick Bennett, and as their many adventures to follow involved seeking out fish along the Schuylkill River and smaller nearby bodies of water, the book’s main title is quickly understood—Hooked for Life.

While Bennett now lives in Canada, Faulkner Jr. said even today, his old friend is one of those people someone always knows and makes sure to say hello to, when they see him visiting Royersford.

“He’s a very memorable guy,” Faulkner Jr. said about Bennett who holds the glowing gift of gab. “He can’t go somewhere around here without knowing somebody.”

In the book, Faulkner Jr. illustrates the lifelong antics he and Bennett painted together from their boyhood into their adult days. In the future, the book will be re-released with continued fresh stories of their senior years, he said.

As the book shows, the boys learned to provoke worms out of holes with a blend of water and mustard, but they also realized that fish were not picky eaters—even matchsticks tantalized the river and creek-swept ones.

A curious concoction to lure in fish, which the duo discovered early on, is something they coined as “dough bait.”

The book reads, “Find an old sock. Looking under my bed was usually a good spot for this. My mom thought they got lost in the washing machine, but I never let her know the truth.”

The boys would then boil a mixture of cornmeal, flour and sugar in the sock, till it became firm. They’d cut the sock to release the dough, throw the sock away, and shape it into a ball, finishing off the dough with a drop of vanilla—the secret ingredient.

Securing the dough bait in plastic and foil, they’d then scurry along the water’s edges in Royersford to find sugar-hungry swimmers at the end of their fishing lines.

The book totals 37 stories in short words, something Faulkner Jr. intended so that it’d be a light read to be easily picked up and set down.

“I hope it helps them to remember their own childhoods, wherever they grew up,” Faulkner Jr. said about what he wants the book to inspire of those who read it to learn a little more about the golden days of Royersford.