by Terry Shannon

Created on: February 07, 2009

Several days ago I turned up an alley and stopped behind and just beyond a gray concrete block garage to get a look at a small building measuring about 4'x6' resting in the back yard of the place where I grew up on the east side of Indianapolis. It's a fairly innocuous little structure, too small to really be useful as a workspace or for serious storage or much of anything else except for it's original intended use: a playhouse.

My father built it for me when I was about eight or nine-years-old. My childhood friends and I had spent a number of damp, itchy, nights in small, smelly canvas pup tents and had built a number of makeshift structures in our backyards out of whatever we could get our hands on including a hodgepodge of wood for framing, cardboard boxes, and even on occasion old scatter rugs, which really got funky when rained on.

I voiced my desire for some kind of a clubhouse or "fort" to my dad, who at first dismissed the idea. Undaunted, I drew up plans for what would have been, if built, larger than some of the neighborhood houses. I conceived a structure which would be large enough to house around four fold-down cots, at least a couple of chairs, a table, a cook stove - hey, a kid's gotta eat - and even a ladder leading up to what would have been a small cupola for a "lookout." Dad informed me I was nuts.

A week or so later I spied my Dad pulling into the garage one evening with the trunk of his '55 Olds ajar, the lid tied down with sisal twine. Protruding out the rear were four or five wood pallets he brought from his business.

My father was a partner in a small offset printing company. Paper was delivered to them on wood pallets. These pallets had well made '2 by' frames and the tops were solid 1'x8' pine wood planks unlike most skeletal type rough hewn pallets one usually sees today. Over the next couple of weeks, Dad appeared with more of these pallets, odds and ends of lumber, and other paraphernalia. Through it all, he remained mute regarding his intended use for all this stuff.

One Saturday morning I arose to the sound of hammering coming from the back yard. I threw on some clothes and sauntered out to see what was up. My dad had laid out two of the pallets now braced together with three 2x6s vertically affixed underneath. This was the base and floor of my "fort." Other pallets were fashioned into the walls and roof. Over the course of the next several days, evenings after dad came home from work and a couple more weekends, what ultimately became

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