Before I Go: My First Fifty-Six Trips Around the Sun

By Jim Walker

Before I Go is unique in the memoir genre. Not only is it a book about growing up in Ohio in the 1950s and "coming of age" in the 1960s, it recounts the authors decade-long struggle against Creationists as a public school science teacher.

Before I Go also presents jim walkers astonishing theological perspective which melds the worlds religious traditions with late 20th-century physics and it briefly outlines his radical ideas about educational reform.

Quite simply, Before I Go is a book that will be talked about for years and, in many respects, marks a "quantum leap" in the realm of autobiography.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Oct 30, 2003
• ISBN: 9781462833481

Jim Walker

Most of my writing centers around the West Coast of Canada, my love for the Rockies and travel. My books reflect the unusual and the exciting one can discover each and every day.

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Copyright © 2003 by jim walker.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

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Contents

PREFACE

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty One

Chapter Twenty Two

Chapter Twenty Three

Chapter Twenty Four

Chapter Twenty Five

Chapter Twenty Six

Chapter Twenty Seven

Chapter Twenty Eight

Chapter Twenty Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty One

Notes

For everyone I’ve loved,

         … everyone I’ve taught something,

         … everyone from whom I’ve learned,

         … and everyone I’ve disappointed.

PREFACE

ONE SUMMER DAY in about the year 1961, my father told me that I would never amount to a shit because I hadn’t finished mowing the lawn. Forty years later, my abbreviated biography appeared in the 2000 edition of Who’s Who in America. I wonder what my dad would have thought about that had he lived to witness it. I still don’t enjoy mowing the lawn, and I still don’t know if he was right or wrong in his prediction.

How does one evaluate a life after all? I am, as a human being, completing my fifty-sixth journey about our Sun. I approach what Confucius called the time of obedient ears, when many of the lusts have abated but robust health yet obtains.

Along the way, I have sought to open the minds of a few thousand students, disappointed a handful of relatives, married one couple, published about a hundred pieces of writing, saved at least one life, belonged to three labor unions, loved about twenty women, fathered one child, delivered baked goods door-to-door, attempted to meld quantum physics with theology, and helped a man my age to urinate as he lay near death having but half the face with which he was born.

As I scratch out all these words for the first time, I am using my mother’s small faux-tortoise-shell Sheaffer’s mechanical pencil for a touchstone to the past. And for whatever reason, it sure seems like a good time for a summing up.

Perhaps I might wait until another score of earth years has passed like my beloved Carl Jung* and still be able to write as eloquently as did he. More likely, I would leave too much unsaid in the manner of poor old Benjamin Franklin, who lived until 1790 but only made it to 1757 in his famous autobiography. Instead, I have chosen to follow the leads of Erasmus and Montaigne who composed their rambling memoirs while in their fifties—the latter of whom only after a tooth had fallen out painlessly and of its own accord. One could do far worse than to follow either of those gentlemen’s lead in any form of essay.

I acknowledge that I did accomplish a somewhat candy-coated ten-page personal narrative some twenty years ago. And at the urging of someone very dear to me, I wrote several times that much for my son, Michael, in the summer of 1995. I wanted him to know more in adulthood about me than I now know about my own father.

So what is it that moves us through life, after all? Is it an arrow of time? Mere biological inertia? Hope? Some folks opt to end their lives when the bad times arrive—those dark winds which blow on everyone as the Lakota* people would say. Others, come what may, push away the covers morning after morning, shower, and march.

Most of us, I guess, come to see life as a kind of bumpy equilibrium, punctuated by times of both exultation and loss. Looking back over more than a half-century, I seem to be able to discern a handful of motivators that kept me—despite several periods of extreme disappointment—from wallowing for long in a psychological chasm. They are:

—My father’s words on the porch step;

—Remarkably good health so far;

—Curiosity about practically everything;

—A stubborn awareness of how many are far worse off than I am;

—The sense that what I had done with my life—and would do—made a difference.

It may well be that nothing in this book is of interest to anyone but myself. I can’t in all honesty say that my own life has been the most eventful one I’ve ever heard of. Nonetheless, I would like to share the truth of it thus far with anyone who might be interested … before I go.

Massillon, Ohio

February, 2003

* Indicates that a note will be found at the end of the book.

Time discovers truth.

—Seneca

Chapter One

TIRETOWN

AKRON, OHIO IN 1947 was, for many folks, the northern terminus of U.S. Route 21. Its post-WWII tire factories were spitting out the carbon-blacked rubber tori as fast as they were taking in all the workers who had transplanted themselves from West Virginia and other southern states. Ex-G.I.s were signing on in droves at Goodyear, Firestone and B.F. Goodrich.

Depending upon exactly where one walked downtown, the smell might be either overwhelmingly one of toasted oats (the Quaker Oats Company) or pungently rubbery. The farther east you went, the less oats you smelled and the more rubber.

My most vivid recollection of the former was one morning near the old Scotts 5 & 10 store on Main Street. I was probably about six or seven years old. My mother had just parked our old Nash at curbside and had taken my hand to go shopping. I remember looking up at her (nice gray suit, longish black hair, and a hat with some netting that slightly covered her forehead) and thinking how proud I was to be walking with her. Or so it seems now. Maybe I was just happy to be doing what we were doing—shopping was very much a special occasion in those days.

I well remember a bunch of women tossing brassieres every which way as I stood with my mom next to a sale table piled high with the garments. I also remember that I had a hot roast beef sandwich with gravy and mashed potatoes and a chocolate milkshake in Scotts cafeteria.

But I find myself way ahead of my story—olfactory recollections can sweep us away before we know it.

I WAS BORN at 7:51 AM on the morning of February 5th in Akron’s City Hospital. My birth certificate declares that doctor J.W. Ponds was the attending physician and that I weighed eight pounds and one-half ounce.

My parents were both in their mid-thirties as I came into the world. Arthur Hobart Walker had been born in Bee, West Virginia on October 30th, 1911. He was raised near Gallipolis in southern Ohio on a farm with a couple of brothers and, I think, one sister. (I’m not sure I ever knew exactly how many siblings my dad had, isn’t that awful?) The only one of his brothers I was ever around long enough to really know was Paul—Uncle Paul was how both my mom and I always referred to him. I’ll have more to say about Paul Walker later.

Ella Mae Slade had been born in Shawver’s Mill, Virginia on December 11th, 1911. For the greater part of her young life, she lived in Bluefield, Virginia. Mom would always hastily correct anyone who slipped and said Bluefield, West Virginia. Her hometown was split when, in 1861, the mostly non-slave-holding residents of northwestern Virginia refused to secede from the Union. I don’t recall there ever having been any discussion of mom’s family owning slaves—the homestead she took me to visit in my late teens was very humble indeed.

Then there is the mystery of my mother’s other child. On my birth certificate it is recorded that Ella Slade already had one living child. Now, I knew that my mom had been married before she met my dad, but I was raised to believe that her little girl had died before I was born—as an infant or toddler. I don’t imagine that I’ll ever know whether the certificate is in error or whether I had a half-sister whom I never saw.

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Fulton Street, 1947

My father had a daughter by a prior marriage also—her name was Reta Jean Walker. I would get to know her, at least a little.

I used to believe that I could remember being carried into my mother’s hospital room during her delivery stay. Now I’m given to think that it was probably a dream I had at some point. Seems like an odd one though.

I don’t remember the home my parents took me to on Fulton Street in Akron. My first absolutely vivid and certain early-childhood memory is of leaning toward a window while sitting on my mother’s lap and burning the living hell (one of mom’s favorite expressions) out of my hand on a cast iron radiator. I was trying to watch my dad change a taillight lens on a car.

It was 1948 or ‘49 and we were living on the second floor of a building on South Arlington Street which would years later become a well-known baked goods shop—Parsell’s Doughnuts. Right then, though, it was where A.H. Jimmy Walker sold used cars. I’m not sure why he always liked to use the Jimmy nickname. Maybe it had something to do with the flamboyant New York mayor of the late 1920’s. For sure, his affection for the name is why I have it now.

For as long as I lived with my parents, my dad was a salesman. First automobiles (he loved Buicks), then real estate, along with some auctioneering. Starched white shirts and a tie seven days a week. He had fancy handwriting and was quite good at basic mathematics although he, like my mother, had only completed the eighth grade. This was a very common level of education in the U.S. prior to World War II.

I think people took more pride in their writing and their cyphering in the ‘40’s and ‘50’s precisely because even high school educations were comparatively rare. Folks liked to display whatever level of literacy they possessed. You can see this in old letters and old ledger books with rows and rows of neatly-curlicued numerals.

I don’t recall my father’s ever reading a book, just the newspaper and, occasionally, a copy of U.S. News and World Report magazine. I remember picking up an issue of U.S. News once and finding it the most deathly dull stack of paper I had ever seen. On the other hand, mom subscribed to Reader’s Digest condensed books and I remember quite well being excited by one which contained The Day Lincoln Was Shot—it had photos of the Ford Theatre and of the public hanging of one of the conspirators. Good flammable stuff as Anatole France* might have said.

Arthur Walker was a good-sized man for his day. At five-feet and eleven inches and about two-hundred pounds, his fedora-type hat could be easily seen above most of the crowd at his auctions. From the time I could notice until he and my mother eventually divorced, he had over a forty-inch waistline. Mom always said it was a beer belly.

We took several car trips when I was small. I remember one to Canada in a 1948 Ford two-door sedan when I cried and cried because dad wanted a photograph of me sitting on a cannon of some kind. I wasn’t having any of it.

AROUND 1950 or ‘51, we moved suburban to a small white house northeast of metropolitan Akron on Darrow Road. I remember that you could just barely see a drive-in movie theater which was north of the house—the East I think it was called.

I was a chubby little boy. I have little square black & white photos taken of me in the front yard wearing a cowboy suit of some kind and riding a tricycle. For a short time we had a German Shepherd but he was taken for a ride after he snapped at little Jimmy one time in the garden. So I was probably an over-protected chubby kid to boot!

My mother made a lot of my clothes when I was small. She could just lay cloth out onto a bed and start cutting with pinking shears, barely taking notice of the pattern which lay nearby. Her sewing machine was in an upstairs attic-like room with an angled ceiling. She would always warn me not to play on the steps, but I thought they were great (naturally) because there was a wide ledge beside them that made a perfect road surface for my toy cars and trucks.

Our neighbors were Greek immigrants and I often played with their daughter, Becky. I don’t recall my parents ever saying a bad word about Mr. and Mrs. Kasopis. I don’t know why I remember their name after a half a century. I do know why I remember the church a couple of blocks south of our house, though. It was to be the scene of my first criminal act.

Usually, on Sunday mornings, I would be sent to Sunday school with Becky Kasopis. One sunny summer morning I decided to lie to my teacher about needing to use the toilet, slip out to the parking lot instead, and toss about a dozen gasoline caps into a nearby stand of sweet corn. Many cars still had their gas caps exposed on the rear someplace which made the process much more convenient for me—it also made the deed obvious when the cars’ owners came out to leave.

What spawned this wildly-irrational act I’ve often reflected upon to no satisfactory result. I had then run immediately home, cleverly leaving my cotton jacket on a chair in the room, and hid.

Mom thought my behavior strange. (You can’t fool mom Captain Penny would always say.) She asked me about the jacket. I began to leak out carefully-selected pieces of the story just about the time four or five men came up the walk toward our house, one of them carrying the coat. In those days, the whole neighborhood felt a responsibility to set errant children aright.

What happened next is not quite as clear to me now. My dad sat on the front edge of the porch and talked with the men as they waved their arms around and pointed in the general direction of the church. Later on I found myself in the corn patch hunting for the parts I had thrown.

I don’t remember getting the belt on this particular occasion, but I got it lots of other times—many of them less deserving after dad had been drinking. So much for Darrow Road.

Chapter Two

WESTWARD HO

!

I THINK IT was early in 1952 that our little family of three loaded up a U-Haul trailer, hitched it to the rear of a black 1949 Buick four-door sedan and set out for California. Maybe it was a greener pastures thing for my parents. Maybe it was perceived as an area of rapid growth and, therefore, more promising for a salesman. Whatever the impetus may have been, it was a long, long ride in the Buick’s spacious back seat.

Crossing the desert was the worst. I clearly remember the signs along Route 66 with warnings like: Next Gas Station—105 miles. I also recall a canvas water bag tied to the front of the car. But most of all, I remember being served at a filling station by a woman who had a full mustache and hairy forearms. She approached the driver’s side window to ask how much gasoline my father wished to buy. The woman’s appearance made me cry and mom took me inside where she bought a large multi-colored lollipop which must have occupied me for the next hundred miles or so.

It’s funny what the mature mind retains of its childhood and what it doesn’t. I remember studying again and again the heraldic ornamentation which Buicks incorporated into their steering wheels’ horn rings. I recall the echoing sounds of my parents voices as they talked while I lay in the rear.

Image516.JPG

Somewhere in the desert …

At one point, my father tried to stoke my enthusiasm about something called the painted desert. I wanted none of it, though—it was too hot and we had been in the car for too long to get me interested in anything other than, perhaps, some kind of dinosaur attraction. Somewhere else, we stopped to collect black walnuts.

Oakland was where we finally landed. I got teased immediately as a soft new kid from Ohio and got pushed off a neighbor’s porch face first onto their cement driveway. Mom sat up with me all that night because I had trouble breathing through my flattened nose.

A.H.W. had a bit of an activist streak in him. Not very long after we had arrived, he attempted to organize the city’s car salesmen into a union. Soon, we were off to Riverside. As would become apparent some twenty years afterward, I inherited—among other things—my dad’s tendency to want to set things straight when I thought that they weren’t, quite.

We rented a small yellow stucco-coated and red tile-roofed bungalow and dad went to work for another car dealership. I learned to ride a bicycle and made a few friends, especially one little girl who lived in a house trailer just down the street. Before very long my parents took me to the local Firestone store and bought me a new red and white twenty-inch bike. For a short time we had a Scottie dog, but one day he bolted across the yard and I never saw him again.

I attended kindergarten in Riverside and got my photo into the newspaper turning over the record during our nap time. My mother was very proud of that. I seem to have majored in clay that year because I made both a cowboy (which I eventually gave to my son) and a hand print plaque which have survived to this day. I can look over my left shoulder and read Jimmy, 1953 at the bottom.

On Christmas Day of 1953, dad hosed me down while I stood in a small inflatable pool in our backyard. My presents that year consisted mostly of what were called take-a-part cars. I got a red Jaguar roadster, a blue Mercury station wagon and a tow truck whose color has faded from my memory. All of them had movable trunk lids and hoods, and they had wheels which were removable by applying a small wrench which was supplied to a single acorn nut in the center. The Mercury wagon—coolest of all—had a transparent engine block so the movement of the crankshaft and pistons might be observed as the rear wheels rotated. I wonder what ever happened to take-a-part cars?

My parents made friends with a couple who operated a liquor store not too far from Riverside, Stella and Gene Burton. The Burtons’ daughters were made to wait until they had finished a meal completely before they were permitted to drink any of their milk. I thought at the time this was an absurd regulation. My regular and copious consumption of milk, however, probably contributed greatly to the chubbiness that would stay with me until the summer following my seventh-grade year. Tanking my mother used to call it.

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Dad and Gene, 1953

The Burtons, sans daughters, accompanied my family on a short trip south of the border to Tijuana, Mexico. I can remember my mother being uneasy about both the hotel we planned to stay in and the neighborhood in which it was situated. (Years afterward, she would tell people that a one-inch scar on her back was where she had been stabbed in Mexico—I don’t know how she really got it.) My only other memory from the trip was having our photograph made sitting in a donkey cart with me on the animal’s back. !Las turistas locas!

My father’s reputation from Oakland eventually caught up to us and he was black-balled from area car lots. This time it was back to Ohio, but not before I had managed to smash a thumb real good in the rear gate window of a station wagon where my dad last worked. Mom was up again to make sure that I kept the throbbing digit soaking in a warm epsom salts and water solution overnight.

California had, I think, been rough on all of us.

Chapter Three

FIRESTONE PARK

THE PART OF Akron to which we returned in 1954 is still known as Firestone Park. Twenty years later I would live in another part which carries the name Goodyear Heights. Both areas had many modest homes (two bedroom bungalows, slightly larger two-story Cape Cods with front porches) which were built by the rubber giants primarily for employees who had returned from the war in the mid-1940’s.

Our house at 1403 Dietz Avenue was a two-story with a large back porch and a detached garage to the rear. I had a pet rabbit freeze to death on that porch—it died stretched out rather than curled up which surprised me since it must have known it was cold before the last sleep came.

We tried the pet business once more (having had rather poor luck with them thus far) when dad brought home a Pointer we called Sarge. That beast could pull his dog house all over the vacant lot which adjoined the property we were renting. One day he ran in front of me while I was riding my bicycle down the sidewalk and all the subsequent physics resulted in my taking yet another face-first dive onto concrete.

This time, the impact had