Catho Darlington: Lessons Learned in the Space Age

By Sara Marie Hogg

(Five Stars) " An enjoyable and resonating tale of creativity. Catho Darlington: Lessons Learned in the Space Age by Sara Marie Hogg (an original and genuinely talented author) is and archetypal and entertaining novel of a quirky, imaginative young girl growing up in the Ozarks Mountains in the 1950's. Revealing an isolated community rich with tradition and narrarating the trials and tribulations of adolescence in a heartwarming style, Catho Darlington is an enjoyable and re- sonating tale of creativity, perseverence, and fun."

--Midwest Book Review, Oregon, WI USA (January 4 edition)

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Dec 6, 2001
• ISBN: 9781465330567

Sara Marie Hogg

Sara Marie Hogg was born in 1949 in Cabool, Missouri to Laura Marie and Dr. Garrett Hogg Jr., M.D. She attended Stephen F. Austin State University and graduated with a BFA from Texas Christian University in 1972 with a major in painting. She also studied under the instruction of Chapman Kelly and Alberto Collie at Northwood Institute of Texas in the Arts Program. She has been published in Springfield! Magazine, Fate Magazine, Tulsa World and Taney County Times Newspapers. Poetry is her first love and she received an award in the First Annual Missouri Writers' Week Awards for Poetry and she received a Boswell Award for poetry from the English Department of her alma mater, TCU. Her poetry has been spotlighted in many anthologies including one by Enright House of Ireland. Her bound works include Catho Darlington--Lessons Learned in the Space Age (a novel), Blade Chatter (a short story collection written under a pseudonym) and Dark Shadings, Spattered Light, her first volume of poetry. She is also working on a children's book, Mumbledypeg, On Call, and a second volume of poetry, Multiple Exposures. Publishing Update: Blade Chatter received second place awards in short fiction and illustration, Global eBook Awards. Her volume of poetry, Multiple Exposures was the first place winner in poetry, 2012, Global eBook Awards. She has serialized three Detective Thriller novels at Venture Galleries: The Scavenger's Song, Dark Continent, Continental and Gris Gris. All three feature homicide detectives Angus Carlyle and Skeeter Sherwood. She writes a weekly Mystery Blog for Venture Galleries that uses fictional stories to explore unsolved mysteries and is bundling these stories into books the books Quite Curious and Curious, Indeed. The first has been published and the second is almost completed. The eerie work of short fiction, The Spark of Life will be the title story in a volume of short fiction. She also plans a work, It Rises From the Pee Dee, about a young man that gets involved in the Revolutionary War because of his skill as a scout and spy. At times he disguises himself as a Native American while he is working for regiments in the Carolinas. He survives the war, marries and has children.

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Copyright © 2001 by Sara Marie Hogg.

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 is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the

product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to

any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

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Contents

CALHOUN

THE BLAST OFF

MAIN STREET

THE PEOPLE

THE TEENY-TINY HOUSE

BEANIE

THE FRONTIER QUEEN

THE JOB

KIDS’ DAY

THE GIFT

THE NEW NEIGHBORHOOD

THE FIRST GRADE

THE SUMMER BLAHS

A QUICKENED PACE

UNCLE CLIFFY AND THE MONEY MAKING-MACHINE

FUNERALS

HIDEOUTS

FRANCES

THE BIG TIP

PEARLIE PARKER

THE SNOWSTORM

UNI-CUE-LY BEAUTIFUL

SLEEPING BEAUTY

JOURNEYS

A DEADLY POISON

BETSY

THE MONKEY-DO

TEENIE

AUNT GLADIOLA

STARK TERROR AND THE EGG-WASHING ROOM

THE THREE CROSSES

THE CORPS

A SUMMER STORM

THE SCARIEST HALLOWEEN OF ALL

THE TINGLER

ROCK AND ROLL

FLOWERY GARDEN

A DAY IN THE BIG CITY

THE SCHOOL ASSEMBLY

FREAK WAVES

STRANGE OCCURRENCES

THE SPACE AGE

FOUR EYES

THE EAR

THE GYRATING GOURMET

CATHO CHANEL

SIN AND PERDITION

THE PHARAOH’S DAUGHTERS

GLAMOUR

THE UNIVERSE AND BEYOND

STUDY SHEET

I was raised on Rock and Roll

Blarin’ from an Art Deco

Motorola radio

In my room.

We had a black and white TV,

It flickered distantly

In the livin’ room.

I don’t know what

I would do,

Without your smilin’ face

In there.

I never could have made it

Through

Those early years without you.

—from a song by Catho Darlington

This book is for the good people of my hometown, which we will simply call Calhoun.

Calhoun, like many other tiny isolated communities in the nation’s breadbasket provided a safe cradle and nourishing sustenance for generations of children who became fine Americans—and only a few frowners. We are all indebted.

It has been my desire to make this an accurate depiction of life in the 1950’s and early 1960’s in the rural Midwest.

The illustrations in the book are my own. Some of them were drawn during the writing of the book and some are retained from my own childhood.

This work of fiction is for adults

—the author

CALHOUN

I was born in Calhoun, a tiny town nestled in the foothills of the Ozarks Mountains. Calhoun had eighteen hundred inhabitants in those days, as it does now, and just about everyone was involved in either dairy farming or poultry production. Surrounding settlements depended on Calhoun for banking, groceries, religion and education. Because of this last necessity, Calhoun had thirteen school buses. Located on a roadfork between the county seat to the east and a larger town with larger stores and some almost country music stars to the south, it was isolated and self-contained. Sometimes it seemed to me as if there were no outside world.

Calhoun had a Main Street running east and west and other smaller but not insignificant streets crossing it north and south. Main Street was the center of activity, except for the Dairy Drive-In of course. At the most eastern point was the Post Office located in a large brown building made of rectangular blocks. It had a metal awning that wrapped around two sides.

There was a cafe on the corner across the street. It drew a fairly large breakfast crowd and a large lunch crowd. This same block had two dime stores and two drug stores, one of each on the north and south sides of the street. There were two ladies’ fine clothing stores and a store that sold less expensive clothing for the whole family. There was an auto supply store with a national name and one with the name of a local family. A sporting goods store and the city bank finished out the end of the block. The leftover spots were filled for short periods of time and changed often. A business would enlarge and need two spaces, for instance, and this is why the grocery stores never stayed in one place for long. These stores, like a few of the people, had false fronts and were built at the turn of the century.

On side streets were neat houses with neat lawns, but every so often there was a ramshackle house plopped down in a field of weeds. Clotheslines stretched across every backyard and half of them always had laundry drying. The dress and petticoat you wore today would be dancing on the clothesline later in the week for all the world to see. Bib overalls took their places next to flannel shirts and miniature blue jeans and crinoline can cans. In March they all hung on for dear life as the same wind that buffeted them lifted colorful homemade kites on the highest hills. Should you pass fairly near an occupied clothesline, you could hear bedsheets flapping like beavers slapping tails on mud.

Just outside the town, pastures and cornfields were divided up by barbed wire and split rail fences. The countryside was dotted with spotted cows and sprinkled with red or white barns. Tree-covered rolling hills surrounded that section of Ozark County, making it a geometrical embroidery sampler with a puffy chenille frame, if you could see it from above, like we did sometimes from Blue Buck fire tower.

Rivers forked through the land like lightening bolts, rivers with rushes of whitewater crashing into rocks, and rivers that sometimes fed still areas with deep green pools. It seemed to me that this water was a mirror for the clouds and trees to look at their faces, adjusting their appearances at a whim. These same patches of land that were striking in winter with layered on snow and thick ice on stock ponds, were purest green in late spring and early summer.

Abundant wildlife roamed the land, and during my childhood there was a bounty on wolves and coyotes. You could see their pelts nailed to trees, tacked to the sides of barns or draped over fence posts. I remember when stop signs were school bus-yellow with black letters, and there were as many tractors and hay wagons on the roads as there were automobiles. A pick-up truck was not fully dressed unless it had a wooden slatted enclosure around its bed to carry hay, firewood or livestock.

We were spoiled in that place and at that time, but of course we never knew. The four distinct seasons that occurred annually in Calhoun left in our memories sensory blueprints for the rest of our lives . . . . . . . . warm summer nights were noisy with the songs of cicadas, crickets, frogs and katydids—the night sky so clear you could see every constellation in the northern hemisphere, and if you stared at them long enough, why, you would get dizzy and they would start to move. You could sit on your front porch and hear conversations in all of the houses on the street through open windows.

Each season had its own smell. Fall was the smell of oak and maple leaves burning; winter the smell of mentholatum, kerosene, woodstoves and coal burning furnaces; spring was the smell of fresh-cut grass, damp dirt and blossoms; and summer was the smell of moss-covered water, the nutmeggy smell of some flourishing weed combined with the smell of melting blacktop—or sometimes summer was just like the smell of the window screens you were smelling it through.

Calhoun was tiny all right, but it was plenty big for all of us. During that time when we were being nurtured there, shortly after World War II, there were three or so girls who would not stray far from your remembering. They were not memorable for their beauty, or their brains, or their accomplishments, although they could at times possibly claim some of these, they were instead remembered because they were quirky.

I knew all of these girls well, you do in a town that size, but this is a story about the MOST quirky, and I can tell it because I am one of her closest friends. Her name is Catho Louise Darlington.

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THE BLAST OFF

TO say Catho Louise Darlington is quirky, would be as much of an understatement as saying hill people like jug-band music, or that Pearlie Parker is a busy-body—but you’ll hear more about Pearlie Parker later.

Catho had this creative streak, this vivid imagination. Nothing would stop her. If she could not enlist the help of others, she would try to carry out grandiose schemes on her own. It was a compulsion. When was it first noticeable? Who knows? When she was just a tot, she filled her tiny red wagon with dead grass and placed her naked Negro babydoll on it. As she pulled the wagon throughout the neighborhood she was asked frequently the baby’s name. She replied matter-of-factly, Why it’s the baby Jesus, and it wasn’t even Christmas! She wanted to turn the basement into a skating rink, a spaceship and a scientific laboratory at different times. I want to have test tubes bubbling and beakers, beaking. That’s what she said they were doing, beaking.

She actually was convinced she could build an elevator that would take her to the treetops. The darned thing almost worked!

I guess the weirdest thing she ever said to me was that she remembers being born. Everyone she has released this information to has tried to argue it away, but she is adamant.

Books say you can’t remember anything before you were three, I argued, the last time I heard the tale.

Well, I DO. What books, anyway? Don’t you remember our birthday parties, our second and third? Technically they were before we were three and we remember them, right? Catho was making her point with questions that I could not answer right off the bat.

Yeah, I remember the parties, BARELY. I remember when I got my finger caught in the gate and mashed it, but isn’t it just because we have photographs to look at, and because we have been told these things over and over again? I was sure that was why we remembered.

NO! She shot back. I really remember, and so do you. You have to practice remembering memories, or they will fade. I want to remember this memory—when I was born—so every so often I make myself remember it, usually around the time of my birthday every year. If I start remembering it at other times, then I go ahead and re-live it in my mind, if I’m not doing something else. Once, it had been quite a while since I had made myself remember it, and it was hard to dredge up. It is a weird memory, but I STILL don’t want to let it slip away.

Okay. Well, I’ll try to remember that, no pun intended! She shot me a look.

Do you ever wonder what your parents were like then? Catho had a faraway look in her eyes.

Sometimes. It is hard to imagine.

I do. I wonder what they were like. They were so much younger. They were OLD, thirty-four and thirty-six, when they had me, but they were still so much younger than they ever were when I really knew them. They would have been more energetic, I think, before I was born. Catho stopped for a moment and I could almost see the gears shift in her head. I knew the rest of the story was coming and I couldn’t stop it, so I went ahead and started it for her. I might not remember my own birth, but by now I knew everything about the night Catho was born. Didn’t your father deliver you? I asked, already knowing the answer, as he had delivered almost everyone else in the county during that time period, including me.

He did. It was sort of a tradition to have old Doc Denby, who was retired come over and supervise everything—clear from Mountain Springs—he came over when my brother Howie was born in 1940. But Doc Denby was LATE, both times. We were already born! He signed the birth certificates and checked us out, way after the fact.

I think Doc Denby delivered my mother, I added.

Catho paused a moment then continued her story. "Since I was their third child, I think it was no big deal. My mother had probably cooked up food for the rest of the family to last throughout her recovery period. On the night I was born, my brother and sister had been put to bed. It was getting close to midnight. They say they remember it, so I guess they were awake for part of it. Got them an education. At about eleven fifty-five p.m. I emerged into the world. I weighed about seven and a half pounds. I had a full head of straight dark brown hair. I had two of everything I was supposed to have two of and one of everything else. Right after I was born, my mother jumped out of bed and straightened up everything. She even changed the sheets, then she asked Vernie to bring her a comb and compact and lipstick so she could freshen up. As she was doing so, she heard ice tinkling in glasses in the next room. ‘I’d like a hot toddy, Howard, please.’ Her own father had kept a bottle of whisky in the desk during prohibition for medicinal purposes only. He used to make Mama a hot toddy when she had the cramps as a girl. It relaxed her a bit. It was a tradition.

You were born two months before I was Catho. Of all the kids in our class, there were only two birthdays in February, yours and Willene’s.

Yes, and it was so cold that February. I don’t know, it might have been a record. Instead of letting all the neighborhood kids in to see me, they held me up to the window. I was pink, wrinkled and squalling. Outside, the cold noses of neighbor children pressed against the glass. Their excited facial expressions soon returned to normal. Not much to make a fuss about after all. They wandered from the window, one by one, colorful plaid mufflers flapping behind them.

Catho pursed her lips a moment then said, I don’t remember the window part and I don’t remember the womb, but I do remember emerging from the long darkness. I remember that first sight of an overhead light fixture, out of focus, a black and white glowing image, with bluish tints. The light had a blurry halo around it and there was the sound of voices I already knew, louder now and not muffled by amniotic fluid. It is not remembered as a painful experience, but it was a terrific SHOCK!

In 1949 Harry S. Truman was president. The allies organized NATO. The minimum wage in this country increased from forty to seventy cents per hour. RCA introduced forty-five-rpm records. The most popular music being tuned in on the radio was Riders in the Sky, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, and show tunes from South Pacific and Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend. The New York Yankees won the World Series. The best picture was All the King’s Men, starring Broderick Crawford. He won best actor for the part. 1949 was the year the Russians developed the Atomic Bomb, and 1949 was the year Catho Darlington and I were born.

Catho’s birth experience would be repeated in many dreams throughout her life, as would her memories of California, a place she had never visited. When Catho said her first word, it was not Ma Ma or Da Da but California of all things! She spoke of California from the moment she could speak, the sea, the sandy beaches, the warm, balmy breezes, the swaying palm trees. It became a family joke. If they wanted to tease Catho, all they had to do was say, That was when you were in California, ha, ha.

Yet these memories were very real to Catho and she could provide vivid description. The rest of the family had actually been in California living for a short period, but it was eight long years prior to her birth. Her Aunt Gladdie who had been a teenager in the Roaring Twenties summed it up quite nicely: Who’d a thunk it?!!!!?

MAIN STREET

THERE was a house there on Main Street. It was a two story white frame house with gray composition shingles, four white Doric columns inviting you onto the front porch, and it sat on a corner lot near the end of the road where the pavement ran out and the blacktop began. It was in this house that Catho Darlington spent the first five years of her life. It was the other houses, the people there and the various assorted animals that made life interesting at this time in this secluded part of Middle America.

Catho’s world consisted of the area rugs, hardwood floors and kitchen tiles she crawled around on looking for other forms of life. She knew of five. The largest was her father, whom everyone called Howard, or Daddy, there were two half that size whom everyone called Howie and Vernie, and of course there was Mama. Mama was her constant companion and source of food. Daddy or neighbors often called her Laura Mae. Then, there was a large furry object that never said anything, but was nice, friendly, and did not do much but take naps and eat. When someone in the house yelled, Rusty! it went.

The fifties had just been born and there were many things for Catho and the rest of us to go through. The first monkey wrench to be thrown into Catho’s works was infantile paralysis or polio.

As Catho crawled about her world on the floor of the house on Main Street, she began dragging one leg behind. She pulled herself along, using her tiny arms for locomotion. One day she was very fussy and begged to be held constantly. When Laura Mae picked her up, she noticed Catho was feverish. She consulted her husband. The two parents became panicky. They really did not want to know what was wrong with Catho as they were currently nursing their older daughter, Vernie, through bulbar polio.

Vernie had been critical, at times almost losing a grip on life. The turning point in her battle had been when her wonderful Uncle Cliff had secreted a hamburger and chocolate malt into Vernie’s hospital room and painstakingly fed it to her. Just as a nurse and a Sister of Mercy entered the room, Uncle Cliff was disposing of the remaining evidence and assumed the position of a worried family member in the visitor’s chair, while turning to wink slyly at Vernie. Was it the food or the special attention of Uncle Cliff? Vernie steadily improved from that day on, and was soon back home again.

The same virus that had attacked Vernie’s throat muscles had attacked little Catho’s spine. Dr. Darlington surmised they had both gotten it from a food source. Catho was fortunate that she was so young that she still carried some immunity from her mother. It helped her fight off the disease. If she had been a year or two older, the outcome could have been much different. They were spared. The Darlington girls were spared the ravages of a disease that had not been kind to many children in the early fifties.

Catho’s first vibrant memory, after the birth memory, came at approximately age two. Her parents rushed into the living room prompted by the tinkle of broken glass, and the racket of Catho’s screams. A broken baby bottle was in the space on the hardwood floor where the rug ended, the rubber nipple pointing toward the ceiling. I want my bopple! Catho squealed.

That’s the last bopple you are getting! scolded her father as he scooped her up off the floor and took her out the front door. When they returned in a half-hour, Catho had a huge grin on her face. She was hugging tightly a doll that was so much bigger, than she was that she had to drag his legs along behind. Boy was his name, as she explained to interested parties. She never again mentioned the bopple, and Boy became her replacement companion.

Catho remembers her life during this era as one of pleasurable simplicity. In an effort to get back to the womb, perhaps, she spent many hours underneath her parents’ antique trundle bed. There was a dust ruffle all around the bottom, and if the dust ruffle was flipped up at any point, searches for her were discontinued.

She could entertain herself for hours and never get bored. This would be a lifelong trait. Her creativity required aloneness. It was a normal state for Catho. Ideas were being hatched. Ideas that would not or could not be intruded upon.

In the evenings, the family would watch television. Catho remembers seeing scary shows like, The Creaking Door, Caught in the Jaws of the Vice. There was a show called The Heart of The City, and Catho liked to dance to its theme song. She liked William Bendix in The Life of Riley. Sometimes they all listened to the radio, especially on Friday nights when Howard listened to heavyweight fights. When the theme song to the fights came on, Catho and her father would pretend to conduct the music in a very animated way. Catho always dissolved into giggles.

In these earliest of years, Catho was afflicted with a strange medical condition known as pica. She craved non-food items and was discovered eating grass, modeling clay, paper, paste and once was discovered under the kitchen sink gorging on starch crystals. She could not be coaxed into eating commercial baby food, but had a diet of canned vegetable soup, pabulum and mashed potatoes.

The dark hair she was born with had since been shed and was replaced with blonde, straight hair. Her mother fixed it in tiny pigtails, or pigtails on top of the head, or a configuration known at the time as dog-ears. Her eyes had become pale green and were described as squinty, probably due to high round cheeks. She was a study in contrasts, her light blonde hair, light green eyes, her black brows and lashes and from the first long exposure to summer sunlight, golden skin. It would often make her wonder,

Who am I? Am I related to the rest of these people? They have brown hair and brown eyes? Where did I come from?

She slept each night in a crib with slatted sides at the foot of her parents’ bed. Dr. Darlington hung his white, long-sleeved, starched shirt on the tall cannonball bedpost, as he often had to leave on an emergency in the middle of the night. If the windows were open, the sleeves would wave in the breeze creating an apparition that terrified Catho. She would climb over the sides of her crib, whimpering. As if by magic, her father would fling one arm out of bed. Catho would straddle it and he would flop her into the big bed to spend the rest of the night between Laura Mae and himself. She was usually sopping wet, but they were not picky.

She missed Howie and Vernie when they went to school every day. When they got home, sometimes Howie would watch Jungle Jim with her when it came on TV. Then he had to practice the trombone. Sometimes he let her blow on just the mouthpiece when he was finished. She could play every tune she knew in her head on the trombone mouthpiece. When Howie went outside to see his friends, Catho would rifle the pockets of his discarded jeans. She usually found candy called Kitts in them. They came in strawberry, chocolate, banana and peanut butter flavors. She carried the belief, as she grew older, that he had left them for her on purpose. Catho longed to trail along behind him everywhere he went convinced he had the most fascinating life and fascinating friends in the family. Howie’s buddies didn’t seem to mind the tagalong little sister, but when Howie had had enough, he