In the Shadow of the Standpipe

By R. Lamar Kilgore

In the Shadow of the Standpipe is a collection of anecdotes. This first published work of Mr. Kilgore reflects his perceptions of small town Ohio in the 1940's and '50's. He celebrates a selection of unforgettable characters drawn from his family and the community. He takes us into his boyhood home, to the golf course and to the courtroom. He rages against the waste and futility of both the Viet Nam and Iraq wars. All of these events and characters are seen through the prism of the author's undisguised pride in his parents' journey from desperately poor and uneducated tenant farmers to wage earners and the resulting expansion of his personal horizons.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Aug 15, 2005
• ISBN: 9780595810437

R. Lamar Kilgore

Lamar Kilgore resides in the western suburbs of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania where he has practiced law since 1960 following graduation from the University of Pennsylvania School of Law. Born in 1932 a child of the Great Depression, he was educated in the public schools of Springfield, Ohio where he remained from birth until graduation from Wittenberg College in 1955.

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Copyright © 2005 by R. Lamar Kilgoe

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ISBN-13: 978-0-595-36614-9 (pbk)

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Contents

THE STANDPIPE

MAE

ONE BOSS

BONNIE

A DIFFERENT MONDAY

THE BULLY

MISS M.

ORLIE

AN AMERICAN GOTHIC SUNDAY

LOUIE

A SMOKY MOUNTAIN VACATION

THE CHAMP

A MIND CAPTURED

AN ENDURING GOLF LESSON

A CADDIE’S REMEMBRANCE OF RICH

DAD AND SON

THE RACK

THE ASSEMBLY LINE

DID YOU SEE A BIRD?

A $20 INVESTMENT

THE LOVE OF THE GAME

CLIFFORD

THE COURTROOM

SOMETHING TOLD ME

RITUALS, RECRUITMENT

AND THE REALITIES OF WAR

ARE WORDS ENOUGH?

AFTERWORD

FOREWORD

MOM AND DAD

In 1955 when I left my Ohio hometown, my Mom and Dad, Mae and Acy, were standing behind the screen door waving goodbye. With my freshly minted Bachelor of Arts degree in hand, I headed for Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania Law School where I spent almost four of the most miserable years of my life. But law school and the practice of law is another story. Mae, Acy and Ohio need to be remembered.

Fast forward thirty-nine years to 1994 when Mom and Dad had both been gone for more than fifteen years. I had remained in the Philadelphia area returning home only for class reunions and obligatory visits to family. By this time, Dad had been gone for almost twenty years and Mom had passed on in 1981. Suddenly, my interest in the importance of their lives, particularly their struggle, was awakened by a newspaper clipping from my hometown newspaper. It appeared unexpectedly in my mail with a note from a boyhood friend. A grainy newsprint photo showed Acy in the center of the back row of the employees, perhaps numbering twenty, of the circa 1940 Eagle Tool and Machinery Corporation, one of many small machine tool shops which were on the eve of the war time boom soon to come. With his cap at a jaunty angle and arms folded, he demonstrated a proud and confident manner born of a life of hard won accomplishments.

Dad was a machinist. He liked to call himself a tool and die maker. However modest or lofty was the appropriate title of his job description, he fully enjoyed and took great pride in his work. At the time of the photo, the war time economy had not yet mobilized and this employer was only the latest in a series of small shops where Acy plied his trade in the feast and famine cycle of available work. It worked like this: the shop owner wins a contract to supply a certain number of machine tool parts, then he hires an enlarged work force to meet the need and then when the contract and work is finished, he lays off the extra workers, perhaps literally hoping that they will remain unemployed and available until the owner lands another job.

My older brothers were also machinists/tool and die makers. Both were adults when this menopausal child of the Great Depression was born. The family supper table was a working man’s forum. The talk evoked the pride of highly skilled craftsmen who worked with steel which allowed very little margin for error. They spoke of nickel and dime raises, the latter demanded, the former grudgingly accepted. They did not conceal their contempt for and fear of tyrannical shop foremen. The fear of layoffs was seldom far from their thoughts. During the war time boom, I enjoyed the wonder and adventure of the sights, sounds and smells of an active machine shop when Mom allowed me to deliver Dad’s fried chicken dinner when he worked all day on Sunday.

Acy’s accomplishments in life were won over formidable obstacles. He was born in 1891 in the crossroads town of Jeffersonville, Ohio, the youngest of nine boys born to Cyrus and Martha (Mock) Kilgore, who were desperately poor tenant farmers. According to the oral history of the family, Acy was one of the first of the boys to summon the courage to escape the bare subsistence of the farm by deciding to travel the then enormous distance of more than twenty miles to Springfield to avail himself of all of the advantages of the Industrial Revolution. Imagine, a job paying wages.

The escape from the hard scrabble life as a farm laborer was a process, not an event. First, he traveled the several miles to South Solon, Ohio where in 1910 he met and married Mae (Steen), whose sharp mind, steely determination and uncommon wit were very substantial factors in the transition. After their marriage, there were stopovers on the path from the farm to the city as they hired out as resident laborers to more than one land-owning farmer, Dad in the fields and Mom in the kitchen.

The courage and foresight which were required to fuel this then great adventure should not be underrated. Because of their families’ poor circumstances and the number of mouths to be fed and because both suffered in childhood from very poor eyesight, neither Mae nor Acy had any formal education beyond the third grade. But do not think that both could not cipher. For more than thirty years, Mae was the treasurer and chief custodian of the funds of the Ladies’ Bible Class. Through lessons received by mail from the then popular International Correspondence School, Dad taught himself basic arithmetic and developed sufficient skills in basic geometry, even trigonometry, which were necessary to do advanced machine tool work. Armed with only these basic self-taught skills, it required a lot of guts to step forward the first time and say to a shop foreman, Yes, I can run a vertical boring mill, and yes, I know that if I ruin one piece of very costly steel, I will be fired.

Acy was justifiably proud of his vocabulary which he grew and nourished by crossword puzzles and his faithful study of Reader’s Digest’s monthly articles on growing your vocabulary. Much later in life, he passed the written examination for licensing as a real estate broker, an achievement which was proclaimed to the world by a sleek custom made sign mounted on the front porch of the modest frame bungalow which was the homestead for more than thirty years.

Dad was a died-in-the-wool union man. His heroes were John L. Lewis, the mine workers’ champion, and Walter Reuther, the man who gave birth to the CIO which later combined to form the AFL-CIO. Despite his humble beginnings on the farm, Acy had an instinctive understanding of the concept of collective bargaining, although he probably was unfamiliar with the terminology. Both on the farm and in the factory, he had experienced the powerlessness of trying, alone and hat-in-hand, to negotiate with a shop owner. Nothing made him angrier than the words of my older brother, an unrepentant individualist, who disparaged the unions who take your money and don’t do anything.

Before finding a secure job with a union shop, Dad lost more than one job as a result of his standing up for his principles and his sometimes exaggerated sense of his dignity as a working man. A case in point is the employer in the 1940 newsprint photo. Although only nine years old, I have a very sharp recollection of the scene at the supper table when he announced that he had quit at Eagle Tool. While he tried mightily to show no remorse, in retrospect I believe that Dad regretted his fit of indignation which caused him to, figuratively, tell the foreman to take this job and shove it. You see he was greatly disappointed, embarrassed and humiliated by being offered a raise of five cents per hour, when he had asked for twenty-five and believed himself entitled to ten.

Hourly rates were not the only subject of Acy’s disagreement with a nonunion employer. Before I was born, when the labor movement was in its infancy, Dad lost a well paying and sorely needed job because he objected to unsafe working conditions. Very heavy iron castings were transported by conveyer directly over the heads of the machine shop workers. After more than one casting fell, he attempted to organize his fellow workers in the machine shop to protest the failure of the company to install safety netting. He was fired. Across the years, he told and retold this tale, probably his finest hour as a working man. In a very real sense, Acy was a one man labor pioneer.

Now, Mae. The collection of stories to follow will tell much about this lady, my Mom. If Acy was steel and he was, Mae was tungsten steel. If Acy was determined, and he was, Mae was relentless, incapable of being deterred and more than clever in working toward her objectives. In the marriage and particularly in the context of any dispute involving her sons, Acy was the clay and Mae the sculptor. She was The Boss. She was the embodiment of the country music refrain, He wears the pants in the family and I tell him what pants to wear. Read and you will see.

Dad died in 1976 at age 85 and Mom in 1980 at age 91. So far as I know, they never spent one night apart during sixty-four years from 1910 until 1974 when Dad had to go to a nursing home. The amusing but well established fact is that they seldom agreed on anything, but they shared a lifetime of devotion to marriage and family. This collection of memories and ruminations on matters great and small is offered in most humble celebration of their steely determination and will to improve. In the process, in the brief space of little more than one generation, they put the writer in a position to benefit from many more of life’s opportunities than they. Their experience is only one of many such stories reflective of the history of small town America in the first half of the twentieth century.

THE STANDPIPE 

…not just a water tower.

THE STANDPIPE

Our town was surrounded by seemingly endless fields of wheat, beans, alfalfa, corn and grazing farm animals. It was the birthplace of the 4H Clubs of America. But it was an industrial oasis. At one time the rival of Chicago, we had foundries, we assembled trucks, and we manufactured everything from piano plates and lawn sweepers to diesel