Richmond Press, Inc.                          Richmond, VA                          1938

The Battery Cats

There was a small gang that lived near the Battery, from McDonough Street west to the Petersburg railroad.

Once we went, late in the summer, in the afternoon, to the great field just north of the Battery, to witness the shooting match of the Gun Club, who had bought a new trap to project glass balls into the air.  But the trap failed to work.

"Can any of you boys throw?" inquired Mr. Joe Bronaugh, one of the shooters.

"Let Willie Young throw the balls," cried several boys at once.

For Willie Young was a clever and accurate thrower; and all of us loved him, he was of such a gentle disposition.  (Only, we called him Peedly.  You must remember that those boys' nicknames are usually bestowed in friendship, something their fond mothers never quite understand.)

So Willie was invited to throw the glass balls for the shooters, which he did in the most acceptable manner and with the most perfect fairness.

Some of the boys of that gang, besides Peedly, were: Dots Connelly, Henry Whitlock, Ed and Cons Reynolds and their younger brother, whom we called Kakey, Charlie and Ned Tatum and Blankenship, but I have forgotten his first name.

The Battery was built during the Confederacy.  It was a redan with a ten-foot ditch and a ten-foot ramp, or thereabout, and was intended to command the Richmond & Peterburg Railroad track.  It was on the site of the celebrated Haunted House, which had been dismantled when the Richmond and Danville Railroad was being built.

This fear of the supernatural stuck to the site, for there was in the middle of the Battery a magazine with a dark chamber, into which we would, two or three of us, perhaps, venture for a few minutes and then dash out again in delightful terror.