My Blendville

By Harry Gossett

My Blendville tells quirky tales of growing up the son of parents who delayed having children until the Great Depression ended. Their version of parenting was based on their own experiences which was separated from that of their children by two World Wars, a pandemic, and the worst economic struggles of the century.
They lived in a community that was established by miners of lead and zinc for bullets and brass needed by the military.
When WWII ended, the many mines, several houses, a few barns, and some wells were abandoned, creating a dystopian landscape where children ran free, between meals, school, and bedtimes.
Helicopter parenting was unknown in Blendville, but spanking was commonplace, for wives as well as children. A sinister pale hung over the place. Youthful enthusiasm could not be suppressed, however. Kids kept their activities secret from adults, who did not worry much about their offspring so long as they knew where they were.
The lack of adult supervision allowed the youngsters to invent their own toys, games, gardens, gangs, firearms, and businesses, with spectacular successes and failures.
Harry Gossett and his sister Annie explored the many home-based companies in their neighborhood. They learned to save their money for long bus trips on Saturdays to visit other cities. Their parents thought they were playing a park near their home when, in fact, they were sometimes hundreds of miles away.
They had to come to terms with the deaths of pets, schoolmates, neighbors, and relatives. Catastrophic diseases, such as polio, took a toll on the community. Lacking experience to base their judgment on, the children saw everything as normal.
Harry had a paper route. Daily, he saw the crime scene where Bonnie and Clyde shot it out with law enforcement officers, killed two lawmen, and got away.
His earning allowed him to buy a dilapidated, three-wheeled, motor scooter, which expanded his world considerably.
Growing up includes puberty. The boys and girls in the author's world started to see one another as different animals, in a good way. Readers get the benefit of his recounting how girls looked to a boy in the 1950s.
Christian music beckoned two elementary school children, who brought their parents to church only to discover both parents had considerable knowledge of the faith. The family got seriously involved in religion and the author later became a professional gospel singer.
He vividly recalls the things he learned from the old people. They had time to spend with grandchildren and the like.
When his father was unemployed, desperation set in, and a Christmas miracle occurred.
These recollections do not proceed in chronological order, but rather by subject matter. For example, high school football coincided with helping triple the size of the family home, but those topics are the subjects of different chapters.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Aug 17, 2020
• ISBN: 9781098320621

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Author

Credits

This book is dedicated to Annie Hoffman, who taught me to write. If you read it, you will find out a lot more about Annie.

I also must acknowledge Barbara Rowan, who has put up with being married to a writer for nearly half a century.

Wayne Barnes must take the blame for editing this little opus. He writes and he investigates, and then he writes about his investigations, but also about art, signatures, his family and very personal things—so you feel like you were there for all of it, whether you were or not.

Special Thanks to Eileen Ruth Whisler Barker, whose memoir Sawdust Girl inspired me to write about my own youth.

Preamble

I come from a place you can never go, nor can I return—the first half of the 20th century. However, I can tell you a bit of what life was like in one special place, back then.

This is not intended to be an accurate history. Others who were there, and are still among us, no doubt remember the people, places, and events differently than I do.

This is merely some of the impressions I still carry from my childhood, which I hope you will find half as interesting and exciting as it was for me. When I was young, I found the stories of the elderly fascinating. They gave me a first-hand view of history. Since I have now lived during nine decades, two centuries and two millennia, I feel obliged to share.

Almost everyone thinks of their youth as the way things should be. The whole kit-and-caboodle seemed so good back then. All was normal. That is how we remember it. We forget, or downplay, our many bad experiences as a child (and when changing into an adult) in whatever time and place we did it. Our fond memories make it seem idyllic because what we recall is our youth. We were young and so was our universe. The possibilities were endless.

Change is always happening, and we hardly notice it, until we look back a few decades, see the trends, and give them names.

Every choice we have made eliminated many other options. For example, I declined a full scholarship to study engineering and joined the Marine Corps instead. We can speculate all day about the myriad ways my life would have been different, but we cannot unravel history to go back and make it so, nor would I want to.

Thus, our ever-shrinking supply of potential adventures leaves us thinking that life was better back then, although life-expectancy was shorter, health was more precarious, and the social order was more draconian. But we were just beginning our journey into a brand-new world.

Though I know I am doing it, I am as guilty of hanging a halo over my upbringing as anyone else. Here is how I remember it, not in chronological order, but in topical clumps.

Chapter One

Bullets made Blendville

It was a dark, quiet night. Eight shots rang out. Rapid fire. A little boy and his dog were showered with glass from the shattered window next to their bed. The dog ran way yelping, the little boy sat bolt upright, and his mother ran into the room, perforating her bare feet with tiny bits of broken glass on the floor.

I was that little boy. More about this later. I need to fill you in on the place and era in which this happened.

During daylight hours, Blendville was a fabulous place. It had jungles, complete with snakes and critters, a swamp with rabbits and mine shafts, a forested mountain with caves, and a swimming pool—all less than half a mile away from my house. At least that is how it seemed to a lad who had not seen a real jungle, the Okefenokee, the Rockies, or an Olympic-size pool.

The tree-lined streets and alleys provided a forest canopy I did not appreciate, because it was normal to me. The places with fewer trees which I later visited seemed odd.

We kids could play out the fantasies we had seen in the funny papers and in the movies. (TV had yet to arrive.) We defied the ghosts and goblins who haunted the abandoned houses, barns, and mine shafts. We played sandlot baseball and driveway basketball, but more frequently we were in combat, inventing various forms of wrestling, boxing, and sword-fighting with sticks.

Where were the parents? Helicopter parenting had yet to hover in our neighborhood. Mothers ordered us to go out and play and, so long as we stayed within the sound of her voice, we were free to go and do whatever we wanted. When meals were ready, you had better be able to hear your mother shout your name. Sometimes we would leave one child behind with a loud whistle to alert us if someone’s mother called out while we played a block farther away.

On sunny days I was usually the only shirtless kid in the neighborhood because I was thought to be an albino. My transparent hair, pasty-white skin and light blue eyes led the family doctor to think I suffered a vitamin D deficiency. Everyone else in my family had dark hair and eyes. He prescribed sunbathing, rather than medication. My childhood featured upper body nudity and sunburned, peeling skin.

Sub-freezing winter days and other inclement weather was particularly difficult for the mommies. They had to keep their rowdy kids in the house where we often accidentally broke things.

When we were still in elementary school, my older sister and I learned a trick that served us well for years. We would tell our mom we were going to Cunningham Park, five blocks from home. It was out of earshot, but so long as she thought we were there and we got home on time, she did not worry. We were sometimes as much as 200 miles away. Keep reading and you will find out how we did that.

Long before my time, Blend City, Missouri, was named for an ore which contained a blend of lead and zinc, mined to make bullets and brass for World War I. Another combination of those metals was called Ginger Blue and a lucky nearby community got that lovely name. Fortunately, no one named their town after Hog Chaw, a conglomerate of hard, shiny, malleable material that nineteenth century folks thought looked as though it had been chewed by swine.

Several villages were cobbled together to expand the City of Joplin, Missouri, in 1873. (It was not named for Scott Joplin the composer who lived in Missouri, but for a preacher named Reverend Harris G. Joplin). Blend City, which had its own post office at the time, was one of those little communities which were gobbled up by Joplin. It was renamed Blendville and became the neighborhood where I grew up.

It blended many people from near and far, brought together during World War II (when I was born) by the huge demand for bullets and the supply needs of Fort Crowder, 30 miles away from the railhead in Joplin. While the census population for Joplin did not exceed 40,000 during my youth, it was said that during World War II, about 100 thousand people lived there. Thus, at the end of the war, after all the temporary residents left, there was an abundance of abandoned houses, barns, wells, mine shafts and mining tunnels for kids to play in.

Earlier, during the Great Depression, unemployed men had mined ore on their property with nothing more picks and shovels. They were called wildcats and later, when they found jobs, they left their dangerous digs unattended, so children played in them for decades, sometimes with fatal results.

We lived at 2309 Murphy Avenue, which is easy for me to remember because 2309 was the license number on my dad’s car, and our telephone number was 2309 until a dial telephone system was installed. Then it was 6-2309. There were no area codes in those days.

My first slice of Blendville was limited to the 2300 block of Murphy Avenue. There were 14 houses peopled by:

A divorcee with a mentally and physically challenged adult daughter, who were supported financially and emotionally by the ex-husband who worked three blocks away, but did not live with them,

A native American veteran and his blind mother (the only non-White residents),

A retired couple living on Social Security with the sister of one of them (I don’t know which one),

A lone widow also living on Social Security,

Five World War II veterans with their wives and children,

Five World War I veterans with their wives,

And my family.

There were seven cars but only three one-car garages.

As a child I thought Blendville had every sort human, a real blend of humanity, but I was wrong.

My dad was too young to serve in World War I and too old to be drafted for World War II. He married my mom at the onset of the Great Depression, and they held off having children until they could afford it.

Hence, my sister and I were contemporaries of my street’s eleven children of the World War II vets, but our parents were the same age as our playmates’ grandparents. We ran in and out of one another’s homes at will, but avoided the elderly, who seemed to evade us as well, complaining to our parents if we damaged their fences, trampled their gardens or broke one of their windows.

In the divorcee’s backyard stood an old abandoned red barn and she did not mind if we played in it, particularly when it was raining. She might have objected if she had known boys and girls were examining each other’s private parts on her property, but we never got caught.

A mere hundred feet from my back door was the Tarzan jungle. It was a huge complex of mulberry trees filling an entire vacant lot where little Tarzans and miniature Janes could climb and eat mulberries at the same time.

Two-hundred feet the other way was another vacant lot, overgrown with weeds four and five feet tall. We burrowed trails through it and crumpled down little clearings where we could get away from civilization and feel truly wild, still within the sound of our mothers’ voices.

A third vacant lot was covered with a waist-deep layer of leaves, which people had raked to the curb. The city had collected them with a big vacuum truck and dumped in places where folks wanted to make mulch for future gardens. This playground was 50-by-150 feet of irresistible tumbling and burrowing for the kids. Never mind that snakes liked it as well. We were too young to be afraid of them. That is a learned trepidation. One of my playmates started to collect snakes and, although famous for a different set of skills, he is still an authority on their biology and behavior.

When we got a little older, we found the swamp, three blocks away, and Cunningham Park, five blocks away, after our mothers had marched us over to Alcott School and put us into the First Grade. That was the last time they walked us to school. We had to take that three-block hike without adult supervision every day no matter the weather, for six miserable years.

Chapter Two

The Reign of Terror

What she needs is a good spanking, said my mom. She was not kidding, and she was talking about a 33-year-old woman!

My dad said, "Nah. What she needs is a good

schtupping."

My dad was neither Jewish nor a New Yorker, but he used a few Yiddish words routinely. Schtupping was one of his favorites. He would later tell me a woman could get screwed by a man, but schtupping takes two willing participants, neither taking anything away from the dignity of the other, both cooperating as equals in their passionate enterprise.

Whether that is true or not, my mom knew schtupping was a dirty word, so she always said, Little pitchers have big ears, whenever my dad used any word which she did not want us to learn. Literally, Little pitchers have big ears meant small liquid containers have the same size handles as larger ones. What it conveyed from my mom to my dad was: The kids can hear you.

My dad thought orgasmic sex would calm an out-of-control woman better than beating her butt, but my mom held with the traditional treatment, and she was not alone in that view. During my youth I heard that exact exchange between my parents on two or three additional occasions. My mom was always talking about another mother.

Thus, if I have made Blendville sound like paradise, let me correct that misimpression.

My neighborhood was not unique. Behavioral management in the 1940s and 1950s was based on fear and intimidation.

Responsible men and women spanked women and children who misbehaved. Not only could all children (that is anyone under the age of twenty-one) be spanked, adult females could be spanked just like the children. That included all the mommies of my playmates.

How could I possibly know the mommies got spanked? Two ways:

I was an ear witness. Neither residential air-conditioning nor home insulation had arrived in Blendville, so in fair weather all the windows were opened, and the neighbors could hear it whenever anyone was getting a licking.

We children discussed our painful punishments and so did the women, usually recounting spankings they received when they were younger, often within earshot of the kids. I think that was intended to terrorize us, and it worked.

My mom was the only mommy on the block who did not get spanked. She was at least a decade older than the other five, and my dad was born 20 years before the next oldest daddy of unemancipated children.

The distinctive sounds of a spanking only rang out every month or two, but it reminded all who were subject to such discipline what could happen to us, in much the same way dozens of drivers slow down when they see a traffic cop giving a ticket to a speeder.

If growing up listening to spankings all around, and getting my share, was not menacing enough, when I started school, I learned every teacher in the public-school system had been issued a wooden paddle which they applied to any pupils they wished to discipline. No parental permission was needed and there was no appeal from the teacher’s summary judgement—only prompt punishment.

There is a legend about domesticated elephants which may apply here. It was said that baby elephants were tied with twine to little stakes so they would not wander off. Once they found they could not get away, they stopped trying to escape, so the string and the stake never had to be replaced with a more substantial tether as the animal grew bigger and stronger. Hence, huge, powerful pachyderms stood tied with the same little thread which had restrained them when they were infants.

That story may be apocryphal, but it illustrates why we did not have police officers or security personnel in our schools. We had teachers with paddles. Once the first graders learned to behave themselves, or else, they carried that lesson with them for the next dozen years. The tiniest, youngest high school teacher could order the largest student to bend over, and she would get no physical resistance while she blistered the big bottom of a young adult twice her size.

Of course, just like the spankings in my neighborhood, a school paddling was heard by all the other students. Only every month or two, but that was often enough to keep everyone on their best behavior.

Some teachers had students bend over the big desk at the front of the room, facing the class. Others took the miscreants out into the hall (particularly those who paddled on underpants) and some sent the unruly pupils to the principal’s office with a note. In whatever location, the whacking of a