True Stories from a Baby Boomer

By Stephen B. Satterwhite

Twenty years ago, Mr. Satterwhite received a letter from Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman, suggesting that Mr. Satterwhite share his writing with the rest of the world. At the time, he had to support his family, and he wanted to wait for the right moment. In his business career, Mr. Satterwhite has been featured in the New York Times, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, on NBC News, and in Newsweek magazine. Mr. Satterwhite has been in the poor, lower, middle, and upper classes. He is a futurist, having predicted many of the inventions of his generation, as well as what is coming in future generations. He is a humorist who loves to observe people from his favorite stuffed chair at the mall. He is a survivor who has said good-bye to multiple family members and friends. Ultimately, he likes to say that he is just a simple man who found God. This is his story about his incredible journey through loss, fear, and despair to a conclusion that will give the reader an uplifting message of joy, heaven, song, bravery, love and hope. It is now the right moment. Mr. Satterwhite has finally kept his promise to his father.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Jul 10, 2013
• ISBN: 9781490801223

Stephen B. Satterwhite

Stephen B. Satterwhite was one of millions of baby boomers born after World War II. He was raised in upstate New York by his father, who was a successful businessman, and by his mother, who was a clinical psychologist.

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Copyright © 2013 Stephen B. Satterwhite.

Cover image and author photo by Patrick Luke Photography

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ISBN: 978-1-4908-0121-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4908-0123-0 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4908-0122-3 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013912249

WestBow Press rev. date: 07/23/2013

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface

The Destroyer

Isn’t He Cute?

The End of War

The Brave Man on the Mountain

A Mother’s Love

My Brother, Skippy

My Sister, the Doll

The Joy of Rose

Grandpa’s Garden

See the USA in Your Chevrolet

Bullied on the Bus

The Beatles and the Band

The Love of My Life

The Garbage Collector

College

1969

Broadsided on Broadway

Hollywood

Coming Home

Drowning in the Lake

The Divorce

Peter

The Television Star

The Psychiatrist

The Miracle

The Entrepreneur

The Ideas

The Spike

The Marine

Our Son

Our Daughter

Now It Became Warfare

Syndication

It’s Over

The Screenplay

Alcohol and Drugs

Cigarettes Up in Smoke

Discovering the Letters

Marriage

The Waterpark

What Have I Done?

Trying to Survive

The Sunshine State

My Friend, My Angel

The Gift

Uncle Bill

Twilight

My Dream

The Nature of My Life

To my wife, my father, my mother, my son, my daughter, my grandson, and the generations before me and those yet to come…

PREFACE

The wind and the rain hit my face as I stood alone. After everyone had left and after I had taken my mother home, I came back to the cemetery. I had heard stories about a master’s dog staying at the gravesite of his owner, and on this day, I felt that way, lost and abandoned. I didn’t know what to do. My father was gone forever. Our short existence together was not ideal, for we had so much unfinished living to accomplish.

Everyone was now home, taking off their black clothes and moving on with their lives, but I could not move. I asked him what he wanted me to do, and I heard nothing but the howl of the wind and the rain mixing in with the tears falling down my cheeks. For he had asked me at every dinner what I had accomplished that day, even when I was a little boy.

I fell to my knees, not caring about my ill-fitting suit getting soaked. There was no one left to bawl me out anymore about all I would do wrong. It felt like I was there for hours. Off in the distance, I saw the two grave workers and the man from the funeral home waiting for me to leave, so that they could remove the flowers and fill in the hole.

This was my last chance to say good-bye. I told him that I was so sorry for letting him down. I stood up and looked over at my car, like Silver waiting for the Lone Ranger. So much of my life would be spent alone, with my feelings unknown. I had the keys in my pocket, but I was frozen. Where would I drive to? What would I do with the rest of my life? He was the mountain of my life. Who would care?

I knew one person who would care and who was probably worried about me—my mother. I knew that I needed to go back home, for she was going through unimaginable pain. She loved my father so much, and she had been by his side as he was dying. She was the one I was thinking of as I looked down and saw my legs begin to move. As I walked away, I suddenly stopped and turned around.

It was then that I made this promise: that one day I would tell my father what happened to me in my life, that maybe he would finally be proud of me, that someday I would write a book describing what happened to me. It was then when I turned around, got in my car, and drove away. It is now the twilight of my life, so it is now time. I have kept my word to my father.

I could have been raised anywhere and experienced the same life. I suspect there are people on every continent who have their own comfort food, who have some of the same stories that make them laugh or cry, and who have experienced school, marriage, life, and death. That is what this book is about. I am not telling people how to live, only how I lived.

But I wanted to finally write this book, as I promised my father I would. It is that simple. I don’t expect to change the world. I don’t have a theory about relativity or how to lose weight without really trying. This is a book about a simple man who lived during a significant time in the history of the world, who slowly and eventually found God.

THE DESTROYER

It was lights out at sea, for you could see a cigarette from miles away in the black, as the mighty ship silently plowed through the waves. This was World War II in the Pacific, and my father was an officer in the United States Navy, second in command of an LST on its way to the invasion of Japan, with hundreds men, including the captain, who was fast asleep.

All of a sudden, one of the lookouts saw an unmistakable outline of a Japanese enemy destroyer on a collision course with the ship. In the navy, the rules were quite strict: you simply could not change the course of a ship without approval from the captain. Imagine the chaos that would follow if this were not the case; ships would be diverted in search of beautiful women at ports everywhere.

My father quickly got on the squawk box and radioed the captain to request a change in direction, for they were on a secret mission and had strict orders not to engage the enemy. But this was different; a collision at sea in the dead of night would kill hundreds of men. My father frantically called the captain, and the captain picked up his phone.

Request to change course. We are on a collision course with an enemy ship! my father said. Request denied! Stay on course! replied the captain.

My father could not believe what he was hearing. If he changed course, he would face a court-martial. The helmsman froze at the wheel. My father had no choice but to grab the wheel and turn as hard as he could.

He looked out the window and saw the faces of the enemy in shock, as these two giant ships passed by each other within yards, and then disappeared into the dark of night. My father was shaking and felt sick to his stomach. The next morning, he went down to the captain’s stateroom and offered to be relieved of command for disobeying orders.

The captain turned white and told my father that he’d had a sleeping problem for years and that he talked in his sleep. He hadn’t known what had happened that night.

This is the first of many stories in this book and perhaps the most important story of all, for if my father had not turned the wheel, hundreds of men from both sides of the world would have died that night and their children would have never been born. The invasion of Japan never happened since the United States decided to drop a nuclear bomb on an enemy population. My father changed course and sailed home.

ISN’T HE CUTE?

I vividly remember being in my crib and playing with Arthur. He was my first friend—a floppy sock doll with no sharp points, only a happy face. I wonder if at birth we are attracted to become our first friend, for I was much like Arthur. It is my belief that by the age of five, we become who we basically will be for the rest of our lives. This is when we learn how to fear, how to love, and how to hope.

I have found life to be a fascinating journey, with more questions than answers. From a very young age, my grandfather taught me that the younger we were, the more we thought we knew, and the older we became, the more we discovered we didn’t know. I know this much: we are a compilation of everything we experience. Our environment creates who we are and what we choose to become. We are programmed, much like a computer.

This is why I love FireBalls. Somewhere along the line, I ate my first FireBall, and everything in the world became perfect. I can’t imagine how many I have eaten over the years, probably tons—same with grilled cheese sandwiches. When I stayed at my grandparents, my grandmother would make the best grilled cheese sandwiches in the universe. I associated this food with being loved, so I have eaten millions of them.

I was the youngest of three children—baby boomers we were called, a result of the pent-up desire to have families from all those men and women who lived through World War II. There have been baby boomers born throughout the world on every continent. As people read this book, maybe they will identify with some of my life experiences.

My parents already had a boy and a girl when I was born. As the third child, I was—as my mother told me—their pleasure baby. I don’t know if my father felt the same way. It is expensive to have a child. People have been having children all over the world since time began. It is sad that enemies have been created just because we were born in different places. No one can change where they come from—and no one should apologize for it—but they can change how they leave this world.

Imagine, most everyone on earth will be replaced within 100 years. The future can be anything we choose it to be. Over my lifetime, I have seen many injustices and it is my hope that I helped make a better world. I have been in the poor, lower, middle, and upper classes. I have experienced great change like the sea—sometimes relaxing, sometimes turbulent, and always out of control.

I have been in search of something—something inexplicable—that goes to the heart of why each of us is here. Are we happy? Are we doing the right thing with our lives? Are we making the right choices? When we come to a Y in the road, which way should we go? These are life-altering decisions. It’s just that my search was a little more frantic, for I have had over forty different jobs.

That’s pretty tiring just to think about. For most of this time, I was reacting to my father. After all, he had one job. I know that he was frustrated, working for a huge corporation that eventually went bankrupt. I know he wondered what he could have accomplished, had he set out on his own. I felt his frustration in my relationship with him.

When it came to my mother, she was the exact opposite. With her, I could do anything. I was Superman. I wonder why I have a split personality! When I look back at the things I have done, I can see each of my parents in all of those things. I have been either wildly successful, or I have been the biggest loser in the world. Now, I am at the end of my life.

I remember talking nonsense as an infant (much like today, according to my wife). I had just started to make noise, when my older sister translated my gibberish into English. She had started school, and now I had to learn how to speak. I really didn’t want to speak, for I was saying all sorts of things about people that nobody could understand, but now it was serious. I wanted food.

As the months went by, I progressed from Cookie to Me want cookie to If I don’t get a cookie, I’ll scream! That didn’t work out so well. It was then I learned to act cute. This formed the identity of who I was to become for the rest of my life. My brother was the rebel, my sister was the caretaker, and I was the cute one. Revolting, isn’t it?

But this is the cold, hard truth that I came to realize after looking back on my life. I used cute to get attention. I used cute to become the class clown. I used cute to get noticed as a teenager. I used cute to get the leading roles in the school plays. I used cute to attract the girls. I used cute to get through college. I used cute during the sexual revolution, as many times as humanly possible.

I used cute to get married. I used cute to get my first job. I used cute to get promoted. I used cute to transfer jobs. I used cute to try to get out of traffic tickets. (It usually didn’t work.) I used cute to syndicate a television program to cities everywhere. I used cute to raise seventeen million dollars. I tried to use cute when I lost seventeen million dollars, but that didn’t work out very well either.

My wife has brought this to my attention thousands of times in disgust (and still does to this day). I still use cute with waitresses who look at me as the washed-up old guy that I am. I try to use cute at stores to get my way, which just creates hundreds of rolled eyes. Or worse, if I use cute with little girls at the mall, their mothers reach for their cell phones to dial 911. Cute doesn’t seem to work for me anymore.

But at least I am aware of it. Take a look around. I believe everyone has an underlying personality disorder that they use subconsciously to get what they want, starting from their first cookie. Think about it. Do you know any screamers? I do. I have a childhood friend who is married to a screamer. You don’t want to go out in public with her. I once went out to dinner with her, and I wanted to hide under the table.

How about the manipulators? They go round and round and round until somehow you end up doing exactly what they want. And the flare noses? There are many of those, usually men. They flare their noses and give you the death stare. Do you know any bottom-lippers? These are usually women who started out pouting for the cookie and now pout for the Lexus.

Throughout this book, I will share more observations and theories about human types. It’s a lot of fun to look at everyone and identify them, because everyone has created a way to get what they want, like Jerry the Jerk or Susie Aren’t-I-Pretty? If I get to be an older man, I plan on taking the advice of my grandfather.

One day he was whistling at girls in the park and they just smiled at him. He winked at me and told me that at his age, he could say and do anything because everyone thought he was senile. I plan to use my secret weapon extensively. I plan to live with some of my friends in an assisted living facility. We are going to be cute. People will say, They are just old turkeys who don’t know what they’re saying.

I have had multiple near-death experiences. My close calls include seeing the USA in a Chevrolet, finding out that my future father-in-law saw what my girlfriend and I were doing in the swimming pool at night, almost having my feet cut off by a garbage truck, drowning twice, almost being killed by a rattlesnake and an alligator, swallowing a spike, having my leg crushed, and almost being killed by other humans beings.

It started when I was very young. As a baby, I fell down the cement cellar steps and crushed the right side of my forehead. The plastic surgeon who operated on me was a talented doctor, in that he shaved off my right eyebrow and reshaped the bones underneath. Once in a while my eyebrow twitches, and I smirk. I must have given my parents strokes, because I became a frequent flyer to the emergency department.

When my older brother and sister were swimming in a pool, I followed them in. As it was told to me later in life, I waddled to the side of the deep end in my diapers, and then I jumped in and sank to the bottom like a rock. All I remember is that it was really quiet, and then it was really noisy. Surprisingly, to this day, I have no fear of water. In fact, I love water.

When I finally learned to talk, I gave my mother a heart attack while she was ironing one day. I told her that I had been here before. She almost burned a shirt. She asked me to kindly explain. I told her that the first time I was here, I was on a big wooden ship. We finally discovered land, but before we could set our feet on shore, I died of a disease and was buried at sea.

The second time I was holding my mother’s hand as we were walking across a bridge. I pulled away from her and fell into a river and drowned. At the time I told her this, I was three years old. I didn’t know who Columbus was. I didn’t even know what a disease was, only that I was sick. It wasn’t until I was much older that I learned some of my ancestors hunted whales.

Do I believe in a spiritual world? Oh yeah. I know people who believe that when we die, we are like squirrels in the road—simply run over and squashed. No way. I have seen too much that I simply cannot explain. I have come to believe we are part of something enormous, beyond our comprehension. Later in this book, I will try to describe it, but at the age of three, I was too busy trying to kill myself.

The next trip to the hospital began on my grandfather’s red couch in his living room. I was one of the first television babies of my generation. Here was this amazing box in our living rooms where we could watch stories. My hero was Superman. This day I was attempting to fly back to earth. My head landed on the coffee table. That table and my head still have big dents.

This is one reason why I can’t shave my head. I have considered it many times, because the top of my head is now a tragedy. I don’t know why, as men get older, they lose hair from the top of their heads, and it sprouts out their ears and noses. There is a long Superman scar on the back of my balding head, and if I don’t trim, I could braid my ear and nose hair.

In my attempt to complete the ring around my head, when I was five years old, Jerry Webster and I were playing spear the leaf in his backyard. This was a game where I had a large knife, and he had a chisel, that we were throwing into leaves on the ground. These were the days when you let your child out of the house in the morning and asked him to come back home at night.

We could have been building land mines or cleaning our assault weapons, and our parents wouldn’t have had a clue. (It is like the piano teacher my mother insisted I go to, who sat way too close to me in a very dark house. She had no idea.) So, Jerry decided to do a back flip and a toss of the knife at the same time, a stunt he had seen on The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Only the chisel stuck into the right side of my head.

I had never seen so much blood. Jerry was terrified. He suggested that we could go into his house where his mommy would put on a Band-Aid. I told him that I thought it was worse, that I’d better go home. Jerry then ran away. As I walked down the sidewalk, I heard a strange squishing sound. It was my right sneaker filling with blood. I could hardly see as I kept wiping the blood from my face.

There were a lot of cars in my driveway. I decided to walk in through the front door, since it was close and I was getting dizzy. I walked in to find my mother and three ladies playing bridge, drinking coffee, and smoking cigarettes. I called to my mom from the hallway, since I didn’t think it was a good idea to step onto the white living room carpet.

She automatically replied, Not now, honey. You can make yourself a sandwich in the kitchen. Great, another knife in my hand. Finally, one of her friends looked up and screamed in horror. It was pandemonium. My mom picked me up, grabbed a kitchen towel, ran to the last car in the driveway and jumped into the backseat. Mrs. Cavanaugh then drove like Mario Andretti to the hospital. It was blast.

I saw the same doctor again, going up and down and up and down with his needle and thread. I overheard them say something about being a fraction of an inch from my temple and my right eye. The best part of this near-death experience was my sister’s side of the story. She was skipping home from school that day and saw bloody footprints on the sidewalk.

The poor thing decided to follow them, and lo and behold, they went right up to her own front door! The door was open, and she saw blood everywhere. She called for my mom as she entered the living room. There she saw four chairs, some knocked over; hot coffee still in the cups; cards strewn everywhere; and no one home. Something really bad happened to my sister that day.

All I know is that my mom, my sister, and I took a long time to recover. My sister and I still don’t watch horror movies. The great news is that when I got back to kindergarten, all the girls felt sorry for me with my head wrapped up. It was fantastic. As I have always told my wife, all I need now is an injury to the left side of my head, and I will be able to take off the top of my head when I meet people.

And this is how my life began.

THE END OF WAR

Usually every weekend, my father went golfing. It wasn’t just his sport; it was his passion. I grew to hate the game, since he would golf every Saturday and Sunday. He worked from seven to six during the week, he came home for cocktail hour until seven and then conducted the inquisition at dinner from seven to eight. I pretended to be doing my homework after dinner until my bedtime, so I rarely spent any time with him alone.

One Saturday morning, it was raining really hard, and my mother, sister, and brother were gone. My father was on the phone and as he hung up, he looked at me and asked if I would like to go for a drive with him to see someone. This was one of the only times in my life when I was alone with him in a car. I was five years old.

We drove into the city, where I rarely ever went. He pulled over to the curb and asked me to get out of the car. He came around and held my hand as we crossed the street. We walked up to an apartment. It took a long time for someone to come to the door. Finally, I heard a dog barking, and the door slowly opened to reveal a man wearing sunglasses, sitting in a chair that had wheels on it.

My father introduced me and asked me to sit on the couch; he sat at the dining room table with the man. The dog stayed next to the man, and the man asked what I looked like. My father told me that the man was blind. There were medicine bottles everywhere. There was a big bottle under the man’s chair that was full of stuff that looked like it came from a toilet. The place smelled really bad.

On his walls were photos of planes and ships and men in uniform. My father got one photo off the wall and showed me a picture of the man in uniform. It was the same man, except he was standing, and I could see his eyes. He looked a lot younger. As my father talked to him, I overheard the man tell my father that he lived alone and that his wife had left him. I also heard my father ask if the man’s wounds would heal.

The man wept as he told my dad that this was probably the last time he would see him. My father held the man’s hands and told him that a lot of people loved him. Then my father wrote down his telephone number and his address for the man, and he told the man to call him at any time, even late at night. They talked about medicine, doctors, and hospitals for a long time.

It was dark in that place, and I wanted to leave. My father finally got up, knelt down, and put his arms around the man. They hugged each other. I had never seen my father do that with another man. My father stood up, and he told me to say good-bye. We walked out of the front door, down the steps, and across the street, back to the car.

He put me in the front seat and went around the car and sat behind the wheel. He held the wheel with both hands, looked straight ahead, and then he burst out crying. I sat there, not knowing what to say. He cried and he cried. I was really uncomfortable. Finally, he started the car, and he drove home without saying one word. We never talked about it.

A couple of weeks later, my father came home from work early. He and my mom were getting ready to go to something called a funeral. My mom told me a funeral was when someone died. I asked her who had died. She said I didn’t know him but that he was a good friend of my father’s who had also fought in the war.

I walked into the bedroom as my father was changing into a black suit. I asked him if the man who died was the man we had visited. He paused, and then he said, Yes, he was the bravest man I ever knew. He received a medal for saving other men. My father’s eyes began to glisten. He put his hand on my shoulder, stood up, and walked out of the room.

I never knew who that man was, but I knew that the thing called war made people cry. If the baby boomer generation stood for anything, it would be for the end of war.

THE BRAVE MAN ON THE MOUNTAIN

My first memories of him were his blue eyes and his strong arms. He would catch me as I jumped off the kitchen shelf, and he would lift me high into the sky. It was a feeling of being completely safe and secure, with the sweet smell of his cologne and the crispness of his starched shirt. He was my dad, the strongest man on the block. No one messed with my dad.

When we went for a walk, he would let me ride on his shoulders. I could smell the combination of the Lucky Strikes and the Vitalis in his hair. During his weekend parties, he would ask me to lip sync to the songs from My Fair Lady. When he put me to bed, he would take me for a walk through the forest, where the animals would tickle me, as I hid under my covers, squealing with delight. He always said that he was going to give me to the garbage collector.

Then there were the Randys. These were handy projects that would end up really bad. My father was a businessman, but he always wanted