“The neighborhood thought we were insane.”
September 2022, Brockport N.Y. — Eric Bruder
By Elisabeth Blair
“My mom always said, “You can tell a Bruder, but you can’t tell him much.” I had a bizarre childhood. My dad was a picker. My dad collected antique toys and everyone laughed at him. Now my dad is gone but his collection was better than some of the museums uptown. He had some of the best stuff. I still got some of his stuff.”
“My dad was 6’2” and I was really tiny. I was always the smallest person in school. I didn’t start growing until I was in the airforce. Anyways, my dad would take me picking because it would make him seem less intimidating if he had a scrawny kid along with him.”
“We went everywhere. We stopped at old farms, we stopped at abandoned farms. You meet a lot of characters like that. We met a lot of old farmers. We went around doing that stuff. We got car parts…mostly car parts. He worked at the ford plant in Buffalo so he didn’t make a lot. The economy wasn’t doing great so that’s what we did to pay for the house, taxes, and stuff. My dad would just come across this stuff. But for me, I think I’m gonna make money from buying this stuff but I always lose so I stopped buying junk to sell. It’s like going backward.”
“We used to go everywhere. There was a junkyard in Angelica down near the Pennsylvania border. There was a crazy guy called Old John Herdman who was in his 70s and his mother was in her 90s. He used to sit out front in this old bathtub. In the 30s his father would run the junkyard. When people would go out of business during the depression, people would just come over to his place and drop stuff off. He had a horse-drawn hearse with a coffin in it. I didn’t dare open it. One corner had an old western-type jail cell with a skeleton in the corner. A real skeleton. He was a weirdo. His mom had a cure for the common cold and she had a cure for gangrene twice. Herdman had his bone showing on his heel, it was the ugliest looking thing, it almost made me want to puke but the next time we went there, it was healed. I asked “well how do you do that?” and he said, “Oh uh, cow shit and roots.” That was his answer to everything. But he liked my dad because I came along. Sometimes people would take stuff to their cars and not tell him but my dad always made a pile outside the car. We’d always put it outside the car so he knew that we weren’t stealing stuff. So we were one of the few people he actually let inside his house…which was as bizarre as the outside was. He had a candy dish which was a skull with the top cut off of it. And he had a pickle fork that was a skeleton hand. He was just a crazy character.”
“When I was 10, we’d drive down those old back roads, I’d sit on my father’s lap and he’d press the gas while I steered the car. So I learned how to drive when I was 10. I am one of five but my dad only took me picking. My brothers were too obnoxious and I was really interested in it. I was quieter. My older brother could care less and my brother who is 14 months younger than me was a wild man. My dad wouldn’t dare take him. But we were all sort of like that. You know we didn’t hurt anybody, we were just loud and obnoxious. We weren’t breaking things. We weren’t painting things. We were just kids. We were like free-range kids. The neighborhood thought we were insane.”
