I faceitiously call us The Gang That Terrorized Marion County. We moved the needle way closer to stupid and mischievious than mean. But if you count how many are in the “jailhouse” photo, you’ll see that we were the Dingy Dozen prelude to The Dirty Dozen.

Frank “Bruno” Franze of Everson and Donald “Jake” Halpenny of Jackson Street in Monongah drove the getaway cars. Their fathers’ cars, actually.

Frank would drive one of his dad’s vehicles from their Everson home and pick up Gang members along the way. My house on Church Street in Monongah was the last stop. I could barely get into the back of the pickup there were so many in it. Other times, Frank had his dad’s car that was so old that you had to use pedals to shift the gears, the clutch and hit the gas. It was a three-headed monster to conquer.

Or Don would cajole his father into letting him use the Henry J, which made a lot of noise the night it sideswiped a bridge on our way to Clarksburg so that Duane Harbert could make it to the train in time to join the Navy after a night of drinking and partying. No injuries. The Henry J. got the worst of it. It was Kaiser’s experiment with small cars.

And then there was the night that Duane (I didn’t know his first name was Donald for another 50 years) drove the car owned by his father, Thoburn Elementary principal Frank Harbert. Police tracked dad down from the license plate after we were caught swimming at 3 a.m. in the Fairmont Field Club pool even though most of us got away and walked all the way to Monongah and some even swam across the West Fork River to escape the gendarmes. Rich folks didn’t like the Monongah High kids playing without authorization in their pool.

If no one had access to an automobile, we would gather nightly at the bus stop between the Tropea Grocery and Carlot’s Grill to hitchhike to Fairmont for fun.

We would sneak into drive-ins (except for two who had to be in the vehicle), steal watermelons to eat while skinny-dipping in the river and get thrown out of a Clarksburg theater, but I put that one on Ronnie “Cooley” Delovich, with his “Be nice; don’t fight” retort to the theater manager who had given us a final warning.

Others in the gang were the late Lawrence “Sonny” Godby, Lawrence and Regina Boone Godby’s son and the late Jackie Godby Lusczynski’s brother; Steven “Bucky” Satterfield, who lives in St. Albans after retiring from a long career as a West Virginia Highway Patrolman; Anthony “Tony” Eates, who is retired and living in Fairmont with wife Lucy; Robert “Satch” Kasper, who had a successful career sitting at the bargaining table for Ford Motor Company before retiring to his homes in South Lyon and Grand Lake (Presque Isle), Michigan; Donald “Jake” Halpenny, clarinetist supreme for United Mine Workers and Vingle bands, living in Fairmont; the late Joe Manzo, who survived the Korean war; the late Tom “Judge” Starcher, who began his prowling in Carolina; and me, the runt of the litter, who was the last one to jump into the Franze vehicles when it barely stopped moving as it went by our Church Street home and onto the latest adventures, which included Coal Hole swimming, skinny-dipping in the river with a gallon jug of draft beer and stolen watermelons and sneaking all but two of us into the drive-ins so that we’d have more money for beer.

Those were the days, my friend. We thought they would never end.

Alas, they did. But the memories will last forever.

Seven of the gang are still alive. RIP, Sonny, Joe, Judge, Coolie, Plumber.

The Gang will reunite someday. Boy, will St. Peter be ticked off.