He and Him: An Archeologist's Story of Domestic Abuse

By Claude Britt Jr.

He and Him is an autobiography dealing with both psychology and archaeology in the author's life. He was born during the Great Depression. His parents were an Ohio .farmerette and a man from the Tennessee mountains who had become an alcoholic on moonshine whiskey. It was a dysfunctional family from the start. The mom soon developed very serious emotional problems apparently because she wasn't satisfied with the man whom she had married. When the author was a six-year-old boy she told him that she planned to take him and leave his dad. However, she did the exact opposite and had more kids. Upon adding more offspring to the household; the author, then seven years old, became the victim of terrible physical and emotional abuse, as well as complete neglect.

From the age of seven the author had to essentially raise himself. He tried to avoid his parents as much as possible by spending his days in the fields and meadows by himself collecting butterflies, pretty rocks, and looking for prehistoric Indian arrowheads. After finding a few Indian arrowheads on farms in Ohio he started a collection of Indian arrowheads and other artifacts at a very young age. His collection eventually turned into a very renowned private museum as he got a little older.

When the author was almost thirteen years old his parents quit farming and started operating their own country store in a different community. Chapter 3 in this book describes life in country stores in Ohio during the 1940s and 1950s. The author lived in such a country store environment until he turned eighteen and went away to college. He was the first of any of his relatives to ever go away to college. His mother furnished him money to attend college, but he did it completely on his own with absolutely no family encouragement or support to get a degree. From "the time that the author started getting educated his mom refused to ever call him by his given name. She only referred to him as either "He or Him." Others in the family soon became full of covetousness towards him because they perceived that he had advantages which they didn't have. Competitive jealousy of others in the household mounted, their believinq that they had to try to outdo the educated member of the family. A long, drawn-out, bitter family war against the author ensued. Disrespect for the author's higher education continued in later years by not only the third generation, but also by in-laws who didn't even know the author when he was in college!

After receiving both a BS degree and an MA degree in geology, with a master's thesis dealing with archaeology of Archaic Indian sites near his hometown, the author took a temporary summer job as a national park ranger at Canyon de Chelly National Monument at Chinle, Arizona. Canyon de Chelly is located in the center of the vast Navajo Indian Reservation. Getting to live and work in such a beautiful natural area was like a dream come true. That first summers work at Canyon de Chelly motivated the author to eventually work as a seasonal park ranger in six other national parks and monuments.

After working at Canyon de Chelly for one summer , the author ended up going back to Arizona where he lived for ten more years. He married a woman in Kansas who he hardly even knew, then he went to the University of Arizona where he spent two years working towards a PhD degree. After that, he and his wife spent eight more years back on the Navajo Indian Reservation. During those years on the reservation he taught Navajo Indian children on a substitute teaching certificate. It was a full-time job in the winter. Almost all of his students were Navajo Indians. He taught all grade levels from kindergarten through high school. Chapters 6, 7, and 8 of this book are devoted to stories about life in remote areas of the reservation in the 1960s and 1970s. At that time the author's doctor and grocery stores were 145 miles from where he lived. There we

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 16, 2012
• ISBN: 9781477145616

Claude Britt Jr.

Claude Britt, Jr grew up in Ohio on a farm and in a country store. He earned both BS and MA degrees from Bowling Green state University. His degrees are in geology, but he later switched to archaeology. He also completed two years of doctoral work at the University of Arizona. He specialized in the flora, the fauna, and the appearance of Early Man at the end of the Ice Age. He has published hundreds of popular articles about American Indians and technical articles on midwestern archaeology. He currently lives in Rockville, Indiana with his companion Hessie where he is her POA and caregiver in their golden years.

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Copyright © 2012 by Claude Britt, Jr.

Library of Congress Control Number:       2012912840

ISBN:         Hardcover                               978-1-4771-4560-9

                   Softcover                                 978-1-4771-4559-3

                   Ebook                                      978-1-4771-4561-6

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Contents

Dedication

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Preface

Chapter 1      Early Years

Chapter 2      Farm Boy Years

Chapter 3      Country Store Years

Chapter 4      College Years

Chapter 5      Post-Graduate Years

Chapter 6      Married Years

Chapter 7      Career Years

Chapter 8      Desert Home Years

Chapter 9      Homeless Years

Chapter 10      Recovery Years

Chapter 11      Golden Years

Final Note

Bibliography

Dedication

To the memory of the late Simon Garfield and to the late Tillie L., the author’s grandparents

Also to all victims of domestic abuse in its many forms

List of Illustrations

1   Simon Garfield, the author’s grandpa

2   Tillie, the author’s stepgrandma

3   Dance party in Cincinnati, Ohio

4   The author in his private museum of Indian artifacts in Ohio

5   Another view of the author’s private museum

6   Different view of the author’s private museum in Ohio

7   A showcase of the author’s collection in 1958

8   Indian artifacts collected by the author prior to 1960

9   Hide-processing tools from Illinois in the author’s museum

10   A prehistoric Anasazi Indian bowl from Colorado

11   A thirteenth century pottery mug which the author owned

12   An example of prehistoric art from the Southwestern United States

13   A prehistoric pottery ladle from the Four-Corners region

14   A prehistoric pottery vessel from Casas Grandes, Mexico

15   Human head effigy pot from the Casas Grandes ruins

16   Castings which were shown at the Chicago Worlds Fair of 1893

17   A New Stone Age axe from Denmark

18   The Eiscenheimer Tower in Frankfurt, Germany

19   Old town square in Wetzlar, Germany

20   Another view of Wetzlar, Germany

21   Half-timbered building in Wetzlar, Germany

22   Rudesheim on the Rhine in Germany

23   Another view of Rudesheim, Germany

24   Half-timbered store in Landstuhl, Germany

25   Christmas 1959 in Frankfurt, Germany

26   The River Main in Frankfurt, Germany at night

27   Fourteenth century town hall in Michelstadt, Germany

28   Outskirts of Frankfurt, Germany at night

29   Canyon de Chelly in Arizona

30   A rock fall in Canyon de Chelly, Arizona

31   Quicksand in Canyon de Chelly, Arizona

32   White House Ruins in Canyon de Chelly, Arizona

33   Another view of White House Ruins in Arizona

34   Mummy Cave and ruins in Canyon de Chelly, Arizona

35   A Pictograph panel in the Canyon de Chelly park in Arizona

Acknowledgements

I am deeply indebted to my companion Hessie Waterstradt for her encouragement to write and publish this book. Although she started having major health problems five years before my book got published, she continued her support until the last chapter was written. Hessie never knew me during the first ten chapters of my life. She believes, however, that readers will be as fascinated with my struggles and adventures as is she.

Thanks are extended to Millie Sigman for reading the manuscript, for her kind comments about my life story, and for her interest in seeing this book in print. Millie says that she has read other books published by Xlibris and she thinks that this book is great!

Andrea Moore, a psychologist, kindly read the manuscript. I thank her for her kind comments and interest in my book. She said that when this book gets published that she would like to share some of my experiences with her own clients.

Appreciation is extended to my friend Caleb Dickey for giving me lessons on internet and e-mail. He also helped me get in contact with Xlibris Publishing Company through the internet. My thanks to Caleb.

Ralph Zorn kindly read the manuscript and gave me lots of encouragement to get the book published.

Ron Brewer, a high school friend, was excited about my book and could hardly wait to receive an autographed copy. He passed away, however, before the book went to press.

Dr. Stephen Gladding critiqued the manuscript and made some helpful suggestions. My thanks to Stephen.

I also wish to thank Dr. Thomas Nicholas for his interest in my work and his encouragement to publish this book.

Gary Hanner was also helpful in providing me with information about self-publishing. His efforts were very much appreciated.

Finally, I am indebted to Hans Wendler, a free lance photographer, who took photos of Canyon de Chelly, Arizona for me to use for publication. I remember the day that I took him into Canyon de Chelly in my own Jeep so that he could take photos. Thanks to Hans.

Preface

I am now in my golden years so I saw the necessity of sharing my life experiences with others so that perhaps they would find some inspiration in my story. Nowadays, with the number of broken marriages, mental illness, drug addictions, and alcoholism which plague our society I believe that there is a need and a good market for this book. Another major publishing company previously offered me a contract for this book which I turned down. After reading certain chapters that publisher agreed that there is a definite need for this book.

When deciding to write my story I did not do it to try to make lots of money from sales of the book, although that would be nice because I’m now retired with only a small Social Security check for living expenses. Instead, I wanted to share my story with others because I felt that victims of abuse could themselves relate to many of my experiences. Furthermore, I also thought that lots of younger people who aspire to be naturalists, geologists, or archeologists may find my true-life adventures to be exciting, maybe almost as much as the adventures of the fictional character Indiana Jones.

I realize that publishing about child abuse and family feuds can be a touchy situation so as not to infringe on the rights of privacy of anyone. My story could never have been told until after the death of a number of people in my past. Even so, for privacy purposes I have omitted certain names and I have changed the names of certain individuals to disguise their identities. Even my own name is a pen name only. It is not my legal name on my birth certificate. There is no suffix on my name on my birth certificate. I have even applied a fictional name to the community in Ohio where I lived after I was twelve years old.

I did not choose to have my story edited. I am solely responsible for the contents of this book.

Claude Britt, Jr.

Summer 2012

Chapter 1

Early Years

According to geologists, three-to-four-hundred million years ago the area which is now Shelby and Auglaize Counties in west-central Ohio was covered with shallow marine seas. Those seas covered western Ohio periodically for millions of years. Fossils show that animals such as corals, brachiopods, and trilobites lived in those seas. Large calcareous deposits collected on the bottom of those seas and eventually hardened into limestones and dolomites hundreds of feet thick. Such formations make up the bedrock of western Ohio.

Over long periods of geologic time, tiny drops of oil from the cells of micro-organisms living in the shallow seas of Ohio collected into pools of oil in the sediments underground. That oil (along with natural gas) became trapped in porous areas of the bedrock in the sub-surface of Shelby and Auglaize Counties millions of years ago. Back during the early 1900s numerous oil and gas wells could be seen on farmland in the area.

There are few exposures of bedrock in west-central Ohio because most of the hard bedrock is covered with thick deposits of clay, sands, and gravels which were deposited during the Great Ice Age. However, five miles south of Sidney, Ohio, along the Miami River, bedrock is exposed on the surface. A small limestone cavern, known locally as Five Mile Cave, is present at that locality.

Millions of years after the shallow seas deposited the sediments which hardened into the bedrock of west-central Ohio; there is no remaining geological record until about one million years ago when glaciers covered the area during the Ice Age. Any previously-existing rock formations which would have contained fossils from the Age of Dinosaurs and the Age of Mammals have long ago been eroded completely away. During the Great Ice Age sheets of glacier ice a mile thick covered the area four different times in the last million years. The last glacial advance covered the area with thick deposits of clays, sands, and silts which resulted in some of the richest soils in the world for farming.

Around 20,000 years ago the climate warmed up slightly resulting in the glacial ice sheet melting away and retreating back north into Canada. The area which is now Shelby and Auglaize Counties was ice free by 17,000 years ago. By 10,000 years ago evergreen trees such as spruce disappeared from the landscape. The broad-leafed deciduous trees which we know today forested the area on the newly-developed soils by 9,000 or 10,000 years ago. Up until that time, mastodons (extinct elephants) roamed the area. Fossil skeletons of such large animals have been discovered in at least eleven different localities in Auglaize County, Ohio. Most of those old bones were found by farmers while digging drainage ditches.

Prehistoric peoples (the Archaic Period Indians) started permanently living in the area by 8,000 years ago. Basically, those people were forest dwellers. However, there were also some local areas of prairie grass in west-central Ohio where some of those prehistoric people lived. At a much later date, when the first settlers came into the area the region was home to the Shawnee Indian tribe. Local farmers and archeologists have found numerous stone artifacts such as arrowheads, spearheads, flint knives, scrapers, stone axes, grindstones, and other items left behind buried in the ground.

At one locality in Shelby County, Ohio, at Newt’s place near the tiny village of Tawawa, there was a large pond in a field which had been a home to a large population of beavers back in the 1800s. In 1918 Simon Garfield started farming the area around the old beaver pond. Newt owned four adjacent farms near Tawawa, Ohio, which took up portions of two sections of land. Simon Garfield was Newt’s sharecropper. Back then, farming was done with horses. Simon Garfield farmed Newt’s land up until around 1945. Simon Garfield and his wife had two daughters, Rose and Iris, who spent their entire childhood on that farm. Adjacent to Simon’s farm was another farm owned by Newt. The sharecropper of that farm was Carey Deal who was a cousin of Andrew Jackson Britt from Tennessee. During the Great Depression of the 1930s Andrew Jackson Britt came to Ohio and lived on that farm as a hired hand. The people living on that farm were the closest neighbors of Simon Garfield, Rose, and Iris.

Except for her first grade in a one-room schoolhouse, Iris attended the same country school for all twelve years. Her classmates were all girls except for one boy. During most of her childhood days her parents had no electricity. Kerosene lamps were used for light. A coal stove was used to heat the house. A wood stove in the kitchen was used for cooking. Corn cobs were often used as fuel in the cook stove. By the time that Iris had just about finished her high school, where she took classes in Bible studies, her parents got electricity and an old wall telephone. As soon as they got electricity in their house they could then listen to an old radio. Iris grew up eating lots of their butchered hogs and beef, fried potatoes, corn flakes, and custard pies. During the Great Depression her mother often baked vinegar pies, which were similar to lemon pies, except that vinegar was used instead of lemon juice.

Up until around 1940 Simon did not own a tractor. All of his farming was done by walking behind his horses. Wheat was threshed using old threshing machines. Corn was not picked as it is today. It was shocked in the fields. The corn was then shucked by hand using a hand-held husking peg. Pumpkins were often grown in the corn fields. When Simon would bring his horses in from the fields at night he always gave them a big chew of tobacco (of which they were fond). Often while walking behind his horse-drawn plow Simon found lots of pretty-colored Indian flint arrowheads and spearheads which had been left behind by prehistoric Indians hundreds or thousands of years ago.

When a youngster, Iris milked cows and gathered eggs. During her high school years she wore the same old print dress every day. It was the only dress that she had. It had been made from an old feed bag. Just a while before Iris graduated from high school Simon purchased his very first car. It was an old Roadster.

Meanwhile, Andrew Jackson Britt, Iris’ next door neighbor from Tennessee, was doing farm work for Carey Deal in exchange for a place to live. Andrew Jackson had grown up in the backwoods in the edge of the Cumberland Mountains. Most of his previous life in Tennessee had involved hunting, fishing, trapping, helping raise tobacco, and getting drunk on moonshine whiskey. He was fourteen years older than Iris. He had never been married. He told Iris that he grew up in a big mansion in Tennessee. Iris had never been to Tennessee and was led to believe that he came from a big southern plantation, when actually he came from a little hillbilly log shack in Appalachia. Iris didn’t even know that he drank, yet he was evidently an out-and-out alcoholic before she ever knew him.

According to Iris, while she was growing up on Newt’s farm, she was always the boss. She claimed that as a child she bossed both her mother and her older sister, Rose. She may have thought that she was the boss of her mother, but many times in later years she always complained that her mother raised hell with her. While still living at home with her parents when she was twenty years old, apparently Iris’ mom raised so much hell and pressured her to leave home and get out that she started having sexual relations with the only available man in the community. That man was Andrew Jackson Britt, her neighbor from Tennessee.

While Iris was still in high school, Rose got pregnant out of wedlock. Iris then followed in the footsteps of Rose and got pregnant out of wedlock too. Such behavior was completely unacceptable for girls to be pregnant who weren’t married back in the days of the Great Depression. After getting pregnant, Iris had to force the neighbor man to marry her. Andrew Jackson did not want to get married. He did not want to be around children. He did not want the responsibility of having a wife and a child. Having grown up with moonshiners in the mountains of Tennessee, he only wanted to drink alcohol. However, after being pregnant for about eighteen weeks Iris finally shamed the man into marrying her. It appears that Iris intentionally got pregnant believing that she would then be in a position to get away from her mother’s hell raising.

About twenty weeks after Iris and Andrew Jackson’s shotgun wedding at Tawawa, Ohio, I made my first appearance on planet earth. I was born in Grandpa Simon’s farmhouse. After I got a little older and was curious as to where I came from I was given the euphemistic story that a stork had dropped me off and given me to Iris. Did that stork come to Ohio from France?

As soon as the wedding ceremony was over Iris realized that she had not been successful in getting away from her mother’s hell raising because her new husband immediately left Carey Deal’s house and moved in with her in her parents’ house. Her husband had no income and no way to support a wife and me. During the first year of their marriage their only income was from selling furs of animals which he had trapped in the winter. My parents also had no car when I was first born. According to subsequent statements by Iris, her mother’s hell raising continued and worsened because she then had her unemployed husband living with them. Before Iris even became acquainted with her husband he had taught himself to do taxidermy. When he came to live in Grandpa Simon’s house he moved a whole room full of his stuffed animals in with him. Old family photographs show me when only a few weeks old sitting among his stuffed raccoons, groundhogs, foxes, owls, frogs, turtles, pheasants, rabbits, squirrels, skunks, weasels, and other animals which he had mounted.

What happened when I was only six weeks old caused Iris to go into a state of denial regarding her husband’s condition for the rest of her life. One day my dad, while hunting in Newt’s woods, did not come back home that evening. Finally, Grandpa Simon went into the woods in search of him. My grandpa found him lying under a huge tree where he had been struck by lightning during a thunderstorm. He was unconscious. A large Collie dog with him was dead. It had been noted that the dog had acted real strange all morning prior to going into the woods. It seemed that the dog had sensed that something was about to happen. My Grandpa Simon discovered that a bolt of lightning had hit my dad on the back of his head, splitting his big straw hat into two pieces. The bolt of lightning had traveled down his back and leg, where it bounced off his leg and killed the dog beside him. My Grandpa Simon got my dad onto an old horse-drawn sled and got him back to the farmhouse. The family did not know whether he would ever wake up. Iris cried and cried because she had a baby (me) and didn’t think that she would have a husband.

My dad laid in a coma for six days before saying anything. After six days he talked a little, but kept slipping back into a coma. His very first comment when he first woke up was his asking my mom to get him a bottle of whiskey. My mom obviously didn’t know anything about him when she forced him to marry her. She didn’t even know that he drank alcohol. One of his cousins then told my mom we thought you knew that your husband was the biggest drunk in the entire town. Many years later when I was an adult three different men who knew my dad before the lightning strike told me that my dad suffered lots of brain damage. All three of those men also told me that he stayed in bed for nearly six months. My mom never was able to face that fact or the fact that she had married an alcoholic. Another elderly man who I knew when I became an adult told me that my dad was never the same again after the lightning hit him. When I became a little older my mom never even told me that my dad had been struck by lightning. Grandpa Simon told me about it when I was a youngster. My mom apparently spent her whole life denying that the lightning had harmed my dad.

During the time that my dad laid in bed for nearly six months, according to my mom, her own mother’s hell raising with her continued. After my dad finally got himself out of bed he would not do anything around the farm to help. He refused to even try to carry buckets of milk from the barn to the house for my grandma, stating that his hands tingled too much. During the first year of my life when my parents lived with my Grandpa Simon and my grandma, my mom would never let my grandpa hold me. She was staying in her dad’s house, but would never let her dad hold me. What was she thinking? Was she still trying to be the boss?

After about six months my dad got out of bed and asked to drive Grandpa Simon’s car to a nearby town. Grandpa Simon let him borrow his car. However, my dad never came back home that night. They had no idea why he didn’t return. The next morning my mom and my Grandpa Simon went to town (nine miles away) and looked for him. They located my grandpa’s old car parked along the Miami River, but my dad was nowhere around. With the assistance of the police they searched for him all morning. Finally, the local authorities were getting ready to drag the river. They believed my dad may have committed suicide. However, before the dragging operations started someone found him walking around stone drunk in an alley. That was the last time that my dad ever got to drive my grandpa’s car. My Grandpa Simon never drank alcohol in his life. My mom had never in her life ever been around anyone who drank alcohol. She stayed married to him for approximately fifty-four years until he died. She never did face the fact that she had married an alcoholic. She spent her entire life denying the situation and trying to hide from everyone that he even drank!

When I was about a year old, before my parents owned a car, I was taken all the way from Ohio to Tennessee on a Greyhound bus. When my mom got to see for the first time the living conditions in the Tennessee mountains she certainly was disillusioned. Anyway, prior to leaving, my dad told my mom that he wanted to go to Tennessee by himself because he couldn’t have any fun with her and me along. My mom did take me, as a tiny baby, with her on the long bus ride to Tennessee so that my dad wouldn’t lay down there by himself drunk on moonshine whiskey. My mom was probably afraid that if he went to Tennessee by himself that he would abandon her and me and never come back to Ohio again. Why didn’t she just let him go if he couldn’t have any fun with us?

When I was about a year old my dad had made enough money selling furs from animals which he had trapped that he was able to buy an old car. That car was a 1929 Pontiac coupe which had a rumble seat. That was the first car that I have memories of riding in as a small child. That car was very cold in the winter, the little heater not being very effective. The car constantly had blow outs in the inner tubes. At about the same time that my parents bought the car they also rented a house from Vern, so we then moved away from Grandpa Simon’s house on the farm.

I have no memories of living at Vern’s place until I was about two-and-a-half years old. That house had six rooms, four downstairs and two upstairs. My parents gradually got a little furniture. I was with my mom when they bought their first dinette set. The table and chairs were beautiful. The set cost $75.00, which was hard for my parents to obtain at the end of the Great Depression.

Vern’s house was only one mile from Grandpa Simon’s place by highway, but only one-half mile going straight across the fields. There were about three acres of land with Vern’s house. Also on the property were an old garage, a chicken house, three old sheds, and an old outhouse for a toilet. The yard was large. We also had gardens and an orchard. Surrounding our house were lilac bushes, honeysuckles, roses, and pussy willow trees. Lots of flowers such as irises, gladioluses, and peonies surrounded the buildings on the property. In the orchards there were plum trees, cherry trees, apple trees, gooseberry bushes, and raspberry briars. I have early memories of my mom baking delicious cherry, plum, and gooseberry pies. Whenever my dad was home he never spent any time with my mom and me. He was busy growing vegetables in his gardens.

During my very early childhood years at Vern’s place my dad was never at home to eat lunch with my mom and me. For our lunches my mom usually fixed us either tomato soup, macaroni and cheese, custard pies, gingerbread, or graham cracker sandwiches which were made by spreading a paste consisting of margarine and powdered sugar between two graham crackers. We also raised chickens, so we had eggs and sometimes we ate fried chicken. By the time that I was six years old I raised tame rabbits to sell. We sometimes ate one of my rabbits. Each spring we had lots of ascomycete morel mushrooms to eat which were abundant in meadows and wooded areas. Sometimes my mom would scramble the mushrooms in with eggs. In addition, when hunting season was in effect we ate lots of small wild game such as rabbits, pheasants, and squirrels which my dad had shot. We also ate lots of fried fish which came from local creeks and lakes.

Among my earliest memories at Vern’s place was that of my being upstairs playing with my dad’s stuffed animals. One of the upstairs rooms was completely full of animals which my dad had mounted. When I was a tiny little guy I used to like to sit on a stuffed fox and ride him. Solely by studying my dad’s stuffed animals I taught myself to do taxidermy at a very early age. I must have been a born naturalist because I became fascinated with nature and wildlife.

Another of my earliest memories was my fascination with pretty rocks. I recall that when I was no more than three years old I used to sit in our lane and sort out pretty pink and black granitic pebbles from the gravel. Also, at Vern’s place my dad had a few specimens of cave calcite dripstone which he had gotten in a cave in the Cumberland Plateau near his hometown. I studied those pretty cave rocks for hours at a time. An old family photograph shows me at the age of eighteen months with my dad and two of my uncles at the entrance to Bob Hill’s cave in Tennessee. I have no memory of being at the cave at such an early age. When entering such limestone caverns, old carbide lamps were used for light.

At Vern’s place my mom often sat up with me late at night listening to our old radio. Televisions had not yet appeared on the market. My dad was always out running around somewhere. He never would stay home with us at night. Seemingly, my dad wanted no part of a family. He usually stayed a mile away at one of the two country stores in the small village of Tawawa where the local men congregated each evening to play checkers or cards and to drink soda pop which sold for five cents a bottle. But, often my dad never even came back home at night after the country stores closed. My mom always thought that he was out drinking alcohol in a nearby town. During those long evenings when my dad was never around to be with us, my mom had me listening to real scary and terrifying programs on the radio. By the age of four, every evening I listened to Intersanctum, which was a program of squeaky doors and tales of people tripping over corpses in the dark, as well as other very morbid stories. Nowadays, any child psychologist would know that was a very unhealthy and poor environment to which a little kid be subjected. In addition, at an early age, I listened to my mom telling me stories of people stabbing other people in the heart with ice picks. She also told me about dead people turning over in their graves and pulling their hair out.

Vern’s old house even seemed sort of spooky at night because our living room and other rooms were dimly lighted. Late at night my mom used to tell me lots of ghost stories at the time that there was no father attempting to help raise me. Those early childhood experiences certainly changed who I became as an adult. I was scared as a child, and then when I got a little older I became scared of my parents and wanted to run away from them. Incidentally, much later, when I was an adult, I once tried to mention to my mom the fact that when I was a child I sometimes cried myself to sleep at night. When I told her that, her only reply to me was the vulgar word, Sh**! That was her only comment.

My mom consistently talked to me about old cemeteries. She told me stories of tools in the basement of the cemetery caretaker’s house rattling around and making noise the night before the caretaker got a call to dig a new grave. She told of a very old cemetery out behind a neighborhood house and the fact that she herself had heard something coming down the stairs of that house when no one else was present. Her biggest joy in life seemed to be Decoration Day (now known as Memorial Day) each year so that she could put lots of vases of cut flowers on the grave of each of her relatives. She grew lots of irises, lilacs, peonies, and other flowers so there would be plenty for each grave. She seemed very happy when she decorated graves. She seemingly tried to compete against other people who also put flowers on graves. My being taken to cemeteries, along with my mom telling me lots of ghost stories when I was a child was scary to me. My mom seemed to have very morbid thoughts, even telling me about people bleeding to death by cutting their jugular veins. I even had to listen to stories about cemeteries from my dad too. For example, one summer he took a temporary job removing the weeds from old cemeteries with a hand scythe. Sometimes he would come home to eat his supper and tell of his experiences in the old cemeteries such as his finding casket handles in groundhog holes.

In addition to my early memories living at Vern’s place, I also have vivid memories of Tennessee back to the age of three. After my dad bought the 1929 Pontiac he always wanted to make trips to Tennessee to be with his relatives and moonshine-drinking buddies who my mom called a bunch of old drunks. There were no super highways back then. On the old highways such trips from Ohio to Tennessee were a nineteen-hour drive. We always left Vern’s place around 2:00 a.m. and drove before daylight, often with dense fog around Cincinnati, Ohio, and Louisville, Kentucky. My dad was a very reckless driver. He drove fast and often went around curves in Kentucky on two wheels. He often drove on the wrong side of the road with traffic coming head on towards us. It was a miracle that we ever made it to Tennessee in the old car. I remember one night in Kentucky he pulled in at a restaurant and threw lots of firecrackers in front of the building. After he had disturbed everyone in the area he jumped back into the car and took off again.

Once in Tennessee when I was no more than four years old we stayed overnight at the small log house where my dad grew up. My grandpa’s house was quite a distance from an old dirt road and was on the Calfkiller River. That was where my dad had grown up hunting, fishing, and trapping. I remember following my dad up the river where large bamboo cane was growing wild. Such cane was used for fishing poles. I was amazed with what I saw. As a little boy, it appeared that large fishing poles were growing straight out of the ground all along the bank of the river. As for my dad’s childhood home, there was little furniture. I remember an old kitchen table, a couple of cane chairs, and a couple of old straw tick beds with quilts. The house was heated with an old fireplace. Out behind the house were an old outhouse and a small tobacco patch. All in all, it was quite a contradiction to the story that Andrew Jackson had originally told his future wife in Ohio that he came from a big mansion in the South.

As a little boy I remember the old dug wells for water in the Tennessee mountains. That water made me sick in my stomach. My parents always hauled two or three gallons of Ohio water to Tennessee for me to drink while there. Many of the old log cabins didn’t even have a well. People carried buckets of drinking water from springs located a mile or more from their homes. There were lots of springs in the area. No one ever questioned as to whether the water was safe.

Every four or five miles there was an old country store in the Tennessee hills. None of those stores or homes had electricity back in the 1930s and 1940s. The stores sold food which did not require refrigeration. Basically, the stores stocked such foods as sugar, salt, spices, flour, canned goods, eggs, cheese, crackers, and bottles; of five-cent soda pop. All stores sold kerosene for use in lamps. Some of the locals often brought their guitars and fiddles with them to the stores. Moonshine stills were everywhere. Coon hunters frequently stumbled on to moonshiners at night. Until electricity was introduced into such rural areas there were no radios to listen to the Grand Ole Opry out of Nashville.

On one occasion when I was four years old in Tennessee my dad was out somewhere drunk on moonshine whiskey. My mom was crying because she didn’t know where he was at. She then walked me down an old dirt road for a couple of miles to another of my dad’s relative’s log house. While we were there my dad drove up in the old 1929 Pontiac. He was drunk. He had a bottle of moonshine in his hand. He sat outside in our car, not even knowing that my mom and I were in the house. Instead of confronting him, what did my mom do? She took me and hid from him, apparently being afraid of him or ashamed of him. Back home in Ohio she enabled him and tried to hide from everyone the fact that she had married an alcoholic. She then became a co-dependent enabler for the rest of her life.

Aside from all of the trips to Tennessee when I was a child, once my parents went from Vern’s place where we lived to Indianapolis, Indiana, to visit Grandpa Simon’s brother. I was five years old. That trip to Indianapolis and back in our old car took all day. At my relatives’ house in Indianapolis displayed on the walls in their living room were huge pictures that had been made by mounting butterflies and moths on a cotton background in antique frames. I was so intrigued by the beautiful butterflies and moths that I talked about them all the way back home. I remember my dad telling me that the best way to catch moths was to take a lantern into the woods and the moths would come around the light. I immediately started tramping the fields in Ohio to catch pretty butterflies. By the time I was six years old I had amassed quite a collection of butterflies and moths. I mounted them on white cotton in pretty picture frames.

At the age of six I heard about Gene Stratton Porter’s classic book, A Girl of the Limberlost, a story of a little girl who collected moths and butterflies in the swamps of eastern Indiana. The girl of the Limberlost stated that one type of moth, the Imperial moth, was very rare and sought-after. I was thrilled when I found a few of the rare Imperial moths at Tawawa, Ohio. I proudly displayed them in my room. The beautiful yellow and black Tiger Swallowtails, the Giant Swallowtails, and the pale green Luna moths were especially lovely creatures when mounted under glass. I also collected caterpillars and kept them in glass jars. I often observed the caterpillars spin cocoons. I also searched for moth cocoons in the woods. I kept the cocoons in glass jars until they underwent metamorphosis and changed into a pretty moth for my collection. Although the brilliant-colored Cecropia moths were abundant in Ohio when I was a child, at the time of this writing Cecropias are now extinct from the face of the earth. Planet earth had been home to the lovely Cecropia moth for millions of years, yet in less than forty years herbicide sprays completely destroyed the plants on which the Cecropia caterpillars fed.

During the times while I was tramping the fields and woods in search of butterflies and cocoons, I often came across snakes, of which I was scared. My mom had put a fear of snakes into me at a very early age because she herself was afraid of snakes. Snakes were common around Vern’s and Newt’s places, although there were no poisonous ones in the area at the time. Some of the blue racers and black snakes measured up to six feet in length. Water snakes were abundant around swamps and ponds. There were also lots of garden snakes in the yards where I played. Once, when I was picking raspberries in a nearby thicket, I came upon a six-foot-long black snake sunning himself. I didn’t like the looks of it, so I immediately went back home. In the small ponds and swamps near Vern’s place I used to catch redbelly turtles, frogs, and salamanders to take back home with me. I did have a little bowl of goldfish, but it got so cold in Vern’s house one winter that my fish bowl froze into solid ice. That was the end of my goldfish. By the time that I was six years old Grandpa Simon started coming to get me to take me fishing and turtle hunting with him on Mosquito Creek. He caught turtles and big carp. I caught tiny sunfish and bluegills with my little fishing pole.

My dad never would take me fishing with him, although he did occasionally take me along with him to one of the two country stores in Tawawa, Ohio. At those stores I got to play with the other kids in the community. At those stores my dad usually bought me a huge candy bar for five cents or a bottle of orange-flavored pop for five cents. Sometimes I had a dime in my pocket. As a small child I had lots of earaches and ear infections. That was before the days of antibiotics. I recall that I would often cry because I had the earache. My dad would give me a dime believing that the money would make me feel better! It usually did! Sometimes I spent my dimes buying huge double-dip ice cream cones at the Tawawa store. I remember back in the 1940s when Dr. Pepper first came on the market. A good cold glass bottle sold for five cents. I remember the local men tasting it and commenting about the flavor of the new drink.

Up until I was about seven years old at Vern’s place almost every day Grandpa Simon and my grandma would drop by to bring me something which they had just bought at the local country store. Were they trying to, spoil me? They never did get out of their old 1936 Chevy. They just drove in and handed me either a little can of pineapple, some malted milk balls, or a candy bar, then they left.

My dad was unemployed while living at Vern’s place. He usually went fishing two or three times a week. I used to cry my head off because he wouldn’t take me along with him. He always said, I can’t be bothered with you while fishing. Sometimes when I was crying and begging to go along, Grandpa Simon would talk my dad into taking me along with them. Once, while on the lake with my tiny fishing pole, I got the fishhook caught in my pants. I couldn’t get the hook out of my pants leg. I was crying. Although my dad ignored me, Grandpa Simon came to my rescue and removed the hook from my pants. My mom used to complain to me constantly because my dad was having fun fishing, while she and I sat at home. I recall lots of times towards the end of the Great Depression all we had to eat for supper was fried fish and some cornbread.

When I was a small child, in addition to all the trips which my parents made from Ohio to Tennessee, trips were also made to Muncie, Indiana, several times a year to visit my dad’s sister and her family. When my dad and his sister would get together all they wanted to talk about was to compare notes as to which of them was the sickest. They used to have big arguments as to which of them was sicker. Each was convinced that they were in worse shape than the other. Both my dad and my aunt claimed that they were not responsible. I remember them having big arguments about who was less responsible than the other.

As a little boy, I liked our trips to Muncie, Indiana, because my cousin, Louise was my little playmate. She was two years older than me. She took me to see my very first movie in a movie theater. She also took me swimming in the first swimming pool that I was ever in. I was around five years old when we went swimming. We both got bad sunburns. We both blistered and our skins peeled. Louise used to take me to nearby drugstore soda fountains where we sat and enjoyed ice cream and cherry cokes. Sometimes she and I spent all day playing in a nearby city park where they had birds, bears, monkeys, and other animals in cages. That park also had a hot dog and ice cream stand.

An ice cream man used to push a little cart full of ice cream around over Muncie, Indiana. He would ring a little bell on his cart so the kids could hear him coming down the street. Ice cream bars sold for five cents each. Louise always made sure we had a supply of nickels to buy Eskimo pies or popsicles. Although Louise and I were tiny kids, her parents usually gave us some money to walk to a nearby grocery store to get bread, lunch meat, olives, etc. for our lunches.

Whether I was in Indiana or Louise came to Ohio, she and I were always put into the same bed to sleep together. Her mom had us sleeping together and so did my mom. That went on clear up into adolescence. I vividly remember when I was about six years old that Louise initiated sexual behavior with me in her bed in Indiana. After we had gone to bed she whispered in my ear that she would teach me things that boys and girls do which she had learned at school. After everyone else in the house was asleep she went into her bathroom to try to find sex toys for us to experiment with.

When I was no more than six years old, my parents put me on a train all by myself and sent me from Ohio to Muncie, Indiana. I had never even been on a train before. I remember riding along and seeing all the corn fields out my window as the train went through western Ohio. I was not afraid of the train. But, I was scared to be by myself. I was afraid that I might get off the train at the wrong place. I was also afraid that no one would be at the depot to meet me when I got to Muncie. However, the conductor told me to get off, that the train had stopped in Muncie, Indiana. When I got off, Cousin Louise was right there to meet me and take me to her home.

When I got off the train I stayed in Muncie about two weeks that summer, my cousin Louise and me sleeping together every night. Although my mom had assured me that she knew how to raise kids, Louise and I continued sleeping together until I was almost eleven years old. Anyway, that summer, in addition to our sexual experimenting in Louise’s bed at night, we also engaged in such activities upstairs in the house in the daytime, Louise being the nurse and me being the doctor. Back then as children we never dreamed that Louise would become a registered nurse and I would become a medical records specialist as adults!

In addition to the goings-on in Muncie, Indiana when I was a little boy, I was sexually molested by a different girl relative in Ohio when I was only three-and-a-half years old. I was so tiny that I didn’t understand what the girl was trying to do to me, but fortunately my grandma caught the girl and made her get away from me. Also, when I was six years old my neighbors (Vern’s little daughters) talked me into sexual behavior with both of them. Vern’s daughter who talked me into fondling her and her little sister was, like Louise, two years older than me. Along about that same time a neighbor boy, one of my classmates, talked me into fondling and messing with his younger sister. Incidentally, many years later I found out some information about the boy who had me to fondle his sister when we were kids. I was told that the boy, as an adult, went to prison for trying to kill his wife! What kind of neighbors did we really have at Vern’s place?

Around 1941 one of my dad’s brothers moved his family from Tennessee to Ohio so that he could work in a factory. I remember when a big truck load of their furniture and other possessions drove in at Vern’s place. That was during World War II. My uncle had no problem getting factory work in Sidney, Ohio. My cousin was the same age as me. We collected lots of the ten-cent comic books such as Batman, Spiderman, Plastic Man, Red Rider, Gene Autry, Captain Marvel, and others. Back at that time there was a little popcorn stand on the courthouse square in Sidney, Ohio, where one could buy used comic books for five cents each. The man also bought used comic books from kids. He paid three cents each for used ones. During the time that my cousin from Tennessee lived in Sidney, Ohio, he and I used to walk a few blocks from his house to the local creamery which sold ice cream bars (Eskimo pies). Those ice cream bars sold for five cents each, but the creamery sold slightly mashed bars for three cents each or two for five cents. Sometimes my cousin and I used to eat three or four of the mashed bars at one time, depending on how many nickels and dimes we had. That aunt, uncle, and cousin only stayed in Ohio until the end of World War II. They then moved back to the Tennessee hills to farm with mules.

As a small child I often had severe skin reactions to contact with poison ivy plants which seemed to be everywhere that I went to explore or pick berries. I remember Grandpa Simon taking me to a couple of the old blacksmith shops when I had rashes due to contact with poison ivy. At the blacksmith shops the water in the big tank where the red hot irons were dipped was the best cure for poison ivy rashes. I remember dipping my hands and arms in the tank of water and washing the rashes with it. The next day the rash was always gone. Sometimes we would take a bottle of the blacksmith water home with us for future use. On another occasion, I wasn’t feeling very well, so Grandpa Simon took me to see his old family doctor in Rosewood, Ohio. That doctor examined me and gave me some pills to take (aspirin, I assume). The doctor talked to my grandpa for about an hour. The doctor shared stories with my grandpa about where he had gone fishing and how many fish he had caught. As we were getting ready to leave, Grandpa Simon asked the doctor how much he owed him for seeing me. The doctor asked my grandpa if he thought that fifty cents would be too much? So, my grandpa paid the doctor fifty cents for the office call and the medicine!

Once when I was a real young boy I went with Grandpa Simon to a public auction of farm and household goods at the town of St. Paris, Ohio. Grandpa was helping the auctioneer collect money. Among things being auctioned that day was a small bowl full of pretty rocks which had apparently been brought back from out West. I knew that I had never seen any rocks like them in Ohio. I was so intrigued with the pretty stones that my grandpa told the auctioneer that I wanted them. The auctioneer could only get a ten-cent bid on them, so he bought them for me himself! I was thrilled. I had never seen rocks before except the ones around Newt’s place and Vern’s place. Someone told me that one of the rocks in the bowl was a piece of Arizona petrified wood. As a little boy I hoped that some day I could go out West to look for pretty rocks and stones.

I found my very first prehistoric Indian artifact when I was no more than seven years old. I was thrilled! I did not find it in a plowed field. Instead, I found the Indian artifact with a snow covering on the ground as I followed my dad along the bank of Mosquito Creek at Tawawa, Ohio. My dad was getting muskrats out of his traps when I came upon a newly-dug groundhog hole. There was no snow covering on the hole. Lying in the fresh dirt of the hole was a prehistoric Indian five-inch-long knife blade made from glossy black Ohio flint. I immediately recognized it as being an Indian relic. I was really proud of my find. Even my dad thought that it was a miracle that I ever found such an artifact that had been dug out of the creek bank by a groundhog! The next time I saw Grandpa Simon I showed him my find. After grandpa saw my enthusiasm he then gave me about a dozen white chert and black flint arrowheads which he had found on his farm while plowing with horses. He had previously found lots of other nice large pretty-colored Adena and Hopewell Indian arrowheads over the years, but he had given them away before I was born. Anyway, after my find on Mosquito Creek, along with the Indian arrowheads from Grandpa Simon’s farm, I could hardly wait until summer came so that I could search the plowed fields for more prehistoric Indian treasures.

Vern owned another house besides the one where we lived. He and his family lived in a very old large brick house about three-quarters of a mile from the house which we rented from him. Back in the early 1940s there were no auto repair shops. People changed their own oil and repaired their own cars. Vern was a good auto mechanic. My dad wasn’t knowledgeable mechanically, so he always had Vern to work on our old 1929 Pontiac when it needed repaired. I remember lots of evenings my dad would take our car to Vern, who would crawl under the car and sometimes work on it almost all night until the wee hours. Vern’s two daughters (Marilyn and Patty) were my playmates. Sometimes after Vern had repaired our old car my mom and dad stayed awhile and played cards with Vern and his wife. That was the only thing which my dad ever did together with my mom. However, that rarely happened. I was at Vern’s big brick house one evening while Vern worked on our car and we got the news that World War II broke out. I was five years old. I was scared. I was afraid that the Japanese would bomb Vern’s house!

Usually when I got together with Vern’s daughters we would play either Chinese checkers, dominos, marbles, or a card game called Old Maid. However, sometimes we played hide-and-go-seek. Once, Patty and I hid in Vern’s barn. Marilyn never did find us. After a prolonged period of time, Patty and I got hungry, so we came out!

Back during the Depression Era, Sidney, Ohio, had two five-and-ten-cent variety stores on the courthouse square. Nowadays, the Dollar General and the Family Dollar stores advertise items for one dollar. The variety stores we had in Ohio when I was a little boy catered to people who only had five or ten cents to spend. Those old stores sold bulk candy such as fudge, peanut brittle, Hershey’s candy kisses, chocolate-covered peanuts, peppermint, and bonbons. I remember my mom used to take me to one of the variety stores and buy me a huge bag of candy for a dime. It was probably the only dime she had. Those stores also sold various kids’ toys for ten cents. Children’s story books and coloring books cost ten cents each. In front of many of those stores were one-cent peanut machines. For one penny kids could get a little handful of salted peanuts from the machines. One-cent bubble gum machines were also quite common around town.

Lots of toys were