Snakes on the Porch: A Memoir

By Patricia McCarthy

Could it be said you had potential for a career in medicine if, with the first breath of your life, you contradicted the prognosis of your mother's obstetrician?
If, from the day of that birth, you had to make your way through daily life using only one arm and hand, could you:
dress yourself? tie your shoes? fix your bike? ride a bull? drive a tractor? type a letter? play a trumpet? run your own sewing machine? supervise a toxicology confirmation laboratory?

We all fail at something, sometime, but failure to try may be the biggest failure of all - especially if you start out facing higher hurdles than the rest of the team. The girl in this story - her story, spent her life refusing to recognize the hurdles before her. She saw them but chose to ignore them, starting with the first day she looked in a mirror and realized her shoulders were at different levels -- unlike everyone else's. Most of us probably don't have what it takes to face that kind of reality every day for eighty years but, those who can should write a book -- and she did.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: May 31, 2020
• ISBN: 9781098317522

Book preview

Print ISBN: 978-1-09831-751-5

eBook ISBN: 978-1-09831-752-2

Published by BookBaby, Pennsauken, NJ 08110

Patsy Edelbrock, all grown up …

Table of Contents

Foreword

1. The Putnam County Farm, 1937

2. The TB Scare

3. Captured by the County

4. Life in the Neighborhood

5. Hoot Owl Hill, 1945

6. Life at the Farm

7. Fleas & All

8. Patsy, and the Ford Tractor

9. The Threat of Foreclosure

10. Ride the Bull!

11. Grade School Days

12. High School Days

13. Doing Time, in the Convent

14. After Graduation

15. New York City, 1967

16. Visits from Home

17. Escape from New York

18. Back to Kansas City

19. To the Woods

20. Finale

List of Figures

Figure 1 Building the Barn that ‘Broke’ the Family

Figure 2 The ‘Torture’ is Decreed

Figure 3 Patsy, before the Bronchoscopies . . .

Figure 4 Patsy, after the Bronchoscopies . . .

Figure 5 Boy meets Matilda

Figure 6 Patsy, and one of her playmates

Figure 7 One view of the Dream Farm

Figure 8 The Barn, The House, and BOY

Figure 9 The Mean Bull, in the Iron Mask

Figure 10 The Dream Farmhouse

Figure 11 My DUKE, and nephew, Eddie

Figure 12 With Grandma and Our Car from California

Figure 13 Pat, at work in the lab

Figure 14 About to become Empty nesters. . .

Figure 15 Visiting Bavaria, 1989

Figure 16 Our New Backyard in the Ozarks

Figure 17 On a trip to the Oregon Coast, 2008

Foreword

What makes this story different from another that might feature an abused or disabled child is that, at an early age, this child chose to prevail over anything life threw at her and prevail she did.

Notice I refer to her as Disabled, rather than Handicapped. This is because – as you will see, the handicapped people in her life were largely those who failed to recognize her accomplishments as evidence her determination could often be more than enough to compensate for her disability.

Could you tie your shoes with one hand? Diaper your baby with pins, before Velcro was in use? Make your children’s clothing on your own sewing machine? Play a trumpet in a marching band?

How about sticking a needle into a vein to draw a blood sample, and getting it done the first time, every time?

Playing the violin with the use of only one arm might be an exception, but many other obstacles in life can be overcome simply by the continuous application of ingenuity and perseverance.

So, this is a story of victory – of daily triumph over physical barriers in one girl’s lifetime. It begins on the day of her birth, when she refuses to confirm her doctor’s prognosis that she would be dead the same day. It continues through the day she finished typing the 40,000+ words of this, her story, with one hand, of course.

–ed–

The Putnam County Farm, 1937

The Doctor was 84 years old, I’ve been told. The horse and buggy were much younger. They arrived at the old farmhouse to help Mom with my delivery. I was arriving in the usual way babies do, but with more difficulty. A large baby, I had become stuck in the birth canal!

Old Doc Warner had not bothered to bring any instruments that might have eased the delivery because I was Mom’s fourth offspring. He expected no problems. In his opinion, unfortunately, I appeared to be dying.

He wrapped a towel around my neck and pulled hard. This action crushed the nerves in my right shoulder as he pulled me forth. Today, we know the injury this caused as Erb’s Palsy. The Doctor placed me on the open oven door to breathe or not and tended to Mom’s torn tissues. I started wailing!!!

There was not much joy in the room that day. The family was trying to make a living on only 80 acres of farmland, which was heavily mortgaged. The earlier generation had foolishly indulged in building a large barn - much larger than what such small acreage could support.

As a result, there was little money left for the family to live on. Dad was a Catholic and the Church expected him to have many children.

Mom noticed that, unlike her other children, my right arm moved very little. In fact, it was my oldest sister who noticed it first. The old doc treated the injury as though it were a broken arm, and he put it in a sling. Had he extended the arm in a butterfly cast, it would have enabled the nerves to knit back together perhaps, but this was 1937. The Doctor’s advice was to exercise the arm in some hope of improving the condition.

Mom rubbed the damaged arm with her cow salve whenever she got the time to do it, but the arm never improved.

Her cow salve was always a real winner for healing the many scraped knees I would get while running and playing, though. She would apply the salve and have me sit quietly as she called the dogs. They loved the taste of that salve and would lick it off my bleeding knees. It hurt, it tickled, and it always healed well. Dog saliva has healing properties, and I can attest to it.

Mom’s responsibilities for her farm duties on top of all the rest (cooking, gardening, laundering, etc.) were overwhelming. In fact, the day after giving birth to me, she had to resume all those chores again. So, she turned me over to my oldest sister to care for as her own. Betty was 15 then.

Mom could not breastfeed me as she had the others. She had a breast infection. That meant lancing and draining her breasts because there were no antibiotics. Instead, they fed me a concoction that tasted much like a chocolate malt! Yum!

Dad and Mom had gotten married in the Priest’s office during Lent. They were 17 years old, and she was pregnant. Neither family was happy about this union.

Mom’s family was anti-Catholic and Dad was Catholic. Dad’s family was German with a bit of Irish thrown in. They expected that Dad would marry a young Catholic woman of good stock. Mom was neither.

There was no celebration involved. There were, however, some comments made through the years concerning my oldest sister’s true paternity.

The families of Mom’s parents had emigrated from somewhere in Europe.

Neither of her parents had much education. In fact, Grandpa couldn’t even read.

Grandma was a seamstress and sewed for some ladies in their community. To me, she appeared to be just a bent-over, mousey-looking woman.

She made good cookies, though, but even I recognized that their little house was barely fit to live in.

Grandpa worked as the town watchman at night. He didn’t carry a gun in his work. The town supplied him with a nightstick with a fancy lanyard attached to it. Besides that, Mom told me he spent a good deal of time looking for rocks that would serve as weapons. He carried them in his uniform pockets every night and developed a good and accurate throwing ability. Our son now has and treasures that nightstick.

My fraternal great-grandparents were Germans who emigrated with their many children and settled outside a village in northwestern Ohio. The area was German to the core. The family was wealthy and owned a lot of land. When each son married, he would get an 80-acre piece of that land with the expectation he would procreate and raise more German-to-the-core offspring.

One of those sons became my Grandfather Edelbrock. He betrayed the wishes of his parents by marrying a young Irish schoolmarm.

Kate was Irish and had taught in the local school for a few years. She also wrote and sold articles to some farm magazines of the time.

She even wrote the following concerning her courtship with my German grandfather:

At the age of 18, I began my first term of teaching school in the district adjoining a German settlement. I soon formed the acquaintance of John. He was the son of the wealthiest farmer in the settlement and was much sought-after by the German mothers and daughters. Their attention only made him feel that a prize like himself was above the commonplace. So, he began looking elsewhere for a bride.

He found his bride in my grandmother, Kate Summers. Her parents had immigrated from Ireland, but not before her father had racked up many experiences in the gold rush in California. He even wrote a treatise about his many adventures on the seas as well as on land. I still have a copy of his story of those travels.

I wish I could have known my Irish grandmother in those days. The relatives said she even built a new chicken house by herself for her own flock. Sadly, she only knew me as that little girl who would probably die from consumption.

Their marriage produced three children. The first baby boy died of pneumonia in infancy, then my Aunt Mary arrived. In later years she would become a very good friend to me. We liked to sew together, and she often commented that our relationship was rather like being with her Mom once more.

Their third and last baby was a boy named Edward Albert. He was beautiful and especially spoiled since Grandma’s first son had perished.

Figure 1 Building the Barn that ‘Broke’ the Family

At that time, builders traveled the countryside encouraging farmers to erect huge barns. I believe it was an ego-boosting project of some sort, and my grandfather bought into the idea, like many others. I have several very impressive pictures of that undertaking. The barn was very large and could accommodate many animals, equipment and products, but it dwarfed their nice family home. The mortgage put them deeply in debt and, with only 80 acres and two children to raise, they were not in a good place, financially.

When Dad turned 16, his father died in an auto accident. His only sibling, my Aunt Mary, had married and moved into the nearby German town, Kalida, Ohio.

Dad and Grandma Kate farmed alone until Dad brought Mom into the mix. She was a town girl who knew nothing about farming. She soon learned, but they treated her like hired help.

Grandma Kate was always in charge. She felt her son should still go to town every evening and live it up with his buddies, then come home and sleep till noon. Pregnant Mom was to do the chores and stay home with Grandma. Kate reasoned that Dad was so good-looking and charming that he should not deprive the townsfolk of his presence at the dances, etc.

In 1931, Mom started a diary. She kept it until the last days of her 85 years. After Betty died, I went through her papers and found Mom’s diaries. Reading through them, I realized that during those early years Mom had worked extremely hard every day without help or appreciation of any kind. Dad obviously felt he had been duped into marrying her. Another man had impregnated her, and that was unforgivable in Dad’s eyes.

Dad had a pair of hardworking mules to assist him every day. He also had a live-in hired hand by the name of Jess, who slept somewhere in that huge barn. He not only helped Dad in all things, he also went to town with Dad every night to party, etc. Then they could sleep till noon most days.