Letters to Chloe

By David Griffith

These are real-life stories of a grandfather telling his granddaughter about events in his life that were amusing, nostalgic, and often dangerous. These were probably not your usual childhood events unless falling down mountains, spending nights in jails, and smuggling goods across Europe were typical of your growing up. The settings are the South of the 1950s, and Chicago, Europe, and the national parks in the '1960s'. The letters detail his experiences and reflect his rejection of racism and other values so prevalent in Southern society while he was growing up. In his final letter, he comes full circle by enjoying the country lifestyle of his youth and revels in its natural place in his heart.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Dec 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9781543991451

Book preview

Letters to Chloe

A Grandfather’s Tales of His Adventurous Youth

David M. Griffith

ISBN (Print Edition): 978-1-54399-144-4

ISBN (eBook Edition): 978-1-54399-145-1

© 2019. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Although this book is addressed  to granddaughter Chloe, it is equally dedicated to all my beloved grandchildren: Chloe, her brother, Henry, and Jenna and her brother, Petey.

Acknowledgments

It would have been impossible to complete this book without the many hours of proofreading and editing by Kati Griffith, my dear wife and Chloe's doting grandmother. Her comments and criticisms were immensely valuable and appreciated. I also specifically acknowledge the support of Norene Neaylon, my wonderful friend who encouraged me and enjoyed the letters as they unfolded.

Table of Contents

Welcome to My World

Moving to a Farm

Fat Fred

Alan Greenbaum

Fourth of July

Chloe’s First Birthday

Chloe‘s Second Birthday

Saturdays at the Movies

To Kill a Robin

Belle Meade Mansion

Bobby Woods

Fortnightly

A Proud Kappa Phi

Do Negroes Have Souls?

Defore Bailey

The Highway Pup

My Minnesota Adventure

West Yellowstone

Going to College

Traveling to Cuba

Crofton, Kentucky

The Great Lobster Rip-off

Falling Off Mount Teewinot

Near-Death Experiences

My Summer Job

Becoming a Union Member

Drinking Parties in the Mountains

Marie Flaubert

My Best Friend - Peter Harrison

Crossing into Yugoslavia

Posing as a German

Hitchhiking the Atlantic

Corruption in a Chicago Jail

The Center of the Universe

The South’s Greatest Frog-gigger

P. S. to Chloe

About the Author

Welcome to My World

Dear Chloe,

Today we celebrate your first month’s birthday. I have become a grandfather for the first time. Now, as I grow older, I think of all the stories I want to tell you about my life so you will begin to know who I am and not just as Grandpa. The letters in this volume recount the events that shaped me as I grew up in Tennessee and during my later years in Chicago. My experiences were likely very different from those that will shape you. Some of the stories may make you laugh, and some will make you feel a little sad. Some remembrances of a time gone by may strike you as strange or perhaps unbelievable. They are all true, although I do sometimes use fictitious names and occasionally change the locales and some details.

Things we did as a child will seem very unfamiliar to you, such as frog-gigging, family parties in a forest, and life on a farm being chased by a pig. As I reflect on events in my life as a teen and young man, I invite you to see how it was to work in the Teton Mountains or hitchhike across the Atlantic Ocean. A few escapades were very scary, like almost drowning in a lake and falling down a mountain while climbing an ice glacier. I even spent a couple of nights in jail, but don’t get the wrong idea, Chloe. I am sure you won’t spend a night in the drunk tank of a city jail, as I did twice. Yes, these adventures did happen, but even the negative ones were exciting, if not very pleasant.

I want to tell you about other crazy things I did, such as illegally exchanging money during my travels in Europe (at age 19)! That could have landed me in jails in Yugoslavia and communist East Germany, but pure luck saved me. By the way, these countries don’t even exist today, so don’t try to find them on a map. I even smuggled goods twice across country borders without getting caught. That was pretty stupid of me, but I was always a risk-taker. By now, Chloe, I think you get the drift of how your ole grandpa was a little different than most of the grandparents you will meet in Beverly Hills.

Yet other stories I want to share with you concern events that changed me. When I saw a robin die, my life was forever altered as I watched its struggle. I’d like you to appreciate how free we were as children, even as preschoolers, to explore life around us without much parental planning or oversight. Or the opportunities we had to just hang out with friends at the creek, entertaining ourselves for hours on end, fishing and hunting snakes. And how young I was when I held down various jobs at thirteen or traveled alone to Yellowstone Park before I had even turned sixteen. These experiences were unusual for most kids, even then, never mind in your time.

Another great change for me was when, as a teenager, I began to view my segregated environment differently from other people I knew, including my friends. In my letter titled Defore Bailey, I try to show you the experience of racism, even though I could not understand its causes. Religion was another area where I simply could not accept the beliefs of my community. I couldn’t come to terms with the hypocrisy. To me, religion was another form of segregation. Black people were not allowed to enter the churches of white folks. The Episcopalians and Presbyterians were not about to worship with the more fundamentalist Baptists. Later, as an adult, I wished I had known of more open denominations, such as the Unitarians or the Quakers or maybe the various humanist groups. I might have learned to view religion more positively.

Class structure was another factor of my youth which bothered me a lot. The upper classes had social and economic power over the rest of us. They had privileges we so admired and envied. They had private clubs, social networks, business relationships, and even marriage connections that kept them powerful and inbred. We used to call the marriages between prominent families mergers because they kept family fortunes intact for the next generations. Class stratification ran through all parts of Southern culture, but in our small community of Belle Meade, Tennessee, it was even more apparent. A minority of upper-class folks dominated the social and economic scene. The middle classes, like my family, were largely ignored in the pages of the local paper. This class distinction is reflected in some of my stories, like Fortnightly. Chloe, I’d like you to be aware of how these differences affected my life. As you grow up in affluent Beverly Hills, you might encounter this problem in reverse.

My stories are about experiences at an age when I had no responsibilities. I could take risks - and did - because I wanted to explore life fully. Even when I did illegal things, they did not hurt anyone. (I guess I did steal from the governments of Italy and the U.S. by smuggling goods, but I was a very moral thief.)

Chloe, please enjoy these letters and share them with friends and family when you get older. They are written with love for you and meant to be shared. In the future, Henry, Petey, and Jenna will also get a copy; these letters are equally meant for all of you.

Love,

Grandpa

Moving to a Farm

Dear Chloe,

In early 1944, my family lived in Belle Meade, Tennessee, a short distance from Nashville. We rented a very small house with one bedroom for the five of us - my parents, my brother, Chuck, and my sister, Gay. My sister slept in an alcove and my brother and I had a space in the attic. When I had just turned five, my family was informed that we had to move because the landlord wanted to live there himself. Chloe, this was during World War II and housing was in short supply. My dad could only find a place in the country near Franklin, Tennessee, about fifteen miles away. Up until then, we had hardly lived in luxury housing, as you see, but at least we were used to indoor toilets and central heating. Without them, life was going to be a challenge.

On a nice fall day, I found myself saying goodbye to my only friend in the neighborhood, a kid named Pud (which rhymes with should). Pud was short for the name his mom called him, which was Puddin’ Pie. Don’t ask me where the name came from, as I don’t have a clue. Well, Pud lived across the street in a very small wooden house that was always dark. There was an old abandoned truck in the backyard which was overgrown with weeds. I guess that looked ornamental to Pud’s family. His father and two brothers never seemed disturbed by this sculpture cluttering up their property. Pud’s mother sat all day in an ancient overstuffed chair and listened to the radio. Periodically, she yelled to Pud. Pud, ya’ll git me a glass of water! or Pud, ya’ll’s gotta hep me up and git me to the bathroom! This went on all day. You see, Chloe, she was enormously fat, maybe three hundred pounds. Not having known too many fat people as a five-year-old, I really couldn’t have hazarded a guess. When neither of my friend’s brothers was home - and on school days they would be gone most of the day - we had to stay within earshot. Playing on that ole icon of a truck got to be a little boring after a while. But Pud and I always played together and had become inseparable. I was going to miss him.

When the day came, I was put into the back of a moving van, and, without much fanfare, waved goodbye to Pud. We began the drive to our new home in the country, not realizing what it meant to live in the country. We thought it would be like where we lived now, just cows and pigs around and with the houses further apart. Chloe, a kid that collects snakes and baby birds from his yard doesn’t exactly live in the Bronx, but he also does not live in the wild.

After a while, we turned off the highway and began driving down a gravel road. There were only simple farmhouses and barns. There were low hills all around and cornfields, pastures, and vegetable gardens along the way. It was pretty much as we had expected. This was what we Southerners called a holler, but Northerners would pronounce it hollow, not knowing the language of the South. Finally, we came upon a river with a set of railroad tracks running along it. The tracks had long been abandoned, but the slow-moving, muddy river looked awesome compared to the little creek next to our home in Belle Meade. My dad said the river was a branch of the Harpeth. I immediately saw it as a place to play and have endless fun. (The same river comes up in another one of my later stories about frog-gigging.)

Crossing the bridge, we saw fencing and the entrance to a farm. When dad stopped the truck, I realized that we were going to be living on an actual farm! This would be great! I couldn’t wait to do farm things, like feed chickens or milk cows. It appeared so easy to do when you saw it at the movies, but it was not as easy as one thinks. Farming was a whole lot of work, and soon even a kid could see that. The farmhouse had another, simpler house just east of it that had been hidden from the road. That house was somewhat smaller than our previous home, but it seemed okay. I didn’t care, except it didn’t have a barn. I had had visions of playing in a hayloft, diving into the newly mowed hay, or milking the cows. I was beginning to understand that my idea of farm life was not very accurate, and maybe my mother hadn’t prepared us for what was to come. Reality was setting in, and life in the country was going to be more rustic, uncomfortable, and lacking things that we had taken for granted.

We all tried to make the best of the situation until we realized that we had a log burning stove and that the toilets were outside the house! No, Chloe, it didn’t have one of those quarter moons cut out of the door to air out the smelly inside, but it should have. We had never used an outhouse before. This was a bad omen. It turns out that our new home was a large cabin built for hunters and fishermen who would stay for only a few days and couldn’t care less about these niceties. We did, but we had to make do with what we had.

Much to our surprise, we got used to things rather quickly. We loved the fresh vegetables and smoked meats we got from our neighbors. The neighbors were incredibly friendly and would bake pies for us or bring us fresh shucked corn. They would occasionally bring us things from the nearby town of Franklin if we asked. We learned from them how to enjoy swimming in our little portion of the river, although I couldn’t swim yet, so I just paddled around. We started to like living in the country, but we never got used to the outhouse. The worst for me was that there wasn’t another boy to play with like I had with my friend Pud. I was bored a lot after my brother and sister went off to school each day.

The local one-room schoolhouse was less than a mile away, so Chuck and Gay enrolled the next Monday morning. It was a single room with a stove in the front heated with logs split by the older boys. A long blackboard lined the front of the room, and was washed by the girls.

Younger girls beat the erasers, creating clouds of dust and making them cough. There was a well with a cup and a bucket used for drinking and washing. There were other chores for us kids too. All this was overseen by the lone teacher who was also the principal of the school. The teacher couldn’t teach all the students at different grade levels at the same time, so she had the older students to teach the younger. She also liberally used study time for each student to read and use workbooks while she taught the others. It didn’t work for everybody, as my sister was put back a year when she transferred to city schools later.

Because Gay and Chuck were away at school all day, I often had little to do. As a result, usually around noon, my mother would tell me to go get the mail, even though we rarely had anything in the box. When I would complain that the old sow from the farm next door often chased me to the mailbox, my mother scoffed and called me various names such as fraidy cat and challenged me to just outrun the ole pig. Honestly, I was really scared. That ole sow probably weighed close to three hundred pounds and seemed to want to swallow this five-year-old whole. I would go to the door, check out where she was and then start my mad dash for the mailbox. It seemed like I always just made it. To return, I had to wait until the sow got bored waiting for me and wandered off. Then I ran the return lap and again just made it. Boy, I hated that daily mail run!

A little girl lived in the farmhouse next to our house and we sort of became friends. Since our brothers and sisters were away at school, we only had each other to play with. Unfortunately, she didn’t seem to like playing with make-believe trucks, and she didn’t want to go to the river to capture minnows. Her interest in dolls and other girlish things held no interest for me either. Besides, both of us were kept busy with chores dreamt up by our mothers, such as taking out the garbage or washing dishes. On Christmas Eve, Betty Jo came to our house and timidly knocked on the door. My mother answered and called me to come. Betty Jo stood there for a moment and then stuck out her hand that held three ears of popping corn. They were tied together with a simple red ribbon. She said Merry Christmas as I reached out and took her gift. I muttered, Thanks and that’s nice but, before I could say anything more, she turned and left, walking the short distance home. Wow! I had been given my first Christmas present from a member of the opposite sex! It was somehow very special. I couldn’t think of anything to give to her, so Mother convinced me just to show what a good friend I could be in the future and let it go at that. And that’s what I