If You Think You Are Beaten, You Are.: A Memoir

By Xlibris US

IF YOU THINK YOU ARE BEATEN, YOU ARE.
This is the memoir of Richard Hickslawyer, author, activist, volunteer, world traveler, and ardent sailorwritten primarily to record, for his grandchildren and their progeny, the salient events of his life. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1937, he moved to San Diego, California in 1949, following the death of his father. After graduating from the University of California, Berkeley, as an undergraduate (1959), and from Berkeleys Boalt Hall School of Law (1962), he spent three years in the U.S. Army, as an officer in the Judge Advocate Generals Corps, before embarking on a twenty-three year career as a business trial lawyer, in San Francisco and Los Angeles. For twenty years he and his wife, Phylliswhom he met and married while in college were actively involved as participants and facilitators with the non-profit educational foundations, Creative Initiative and Beyond War.

In retirement he wrote and published seven novels, served as pro-bono executive director of Habitat for Humanity-Los Angeles, and has helped over 2000 victims of domestic violence as a volunteer attorney at the superior court restraining order clinic operated by the San Diego Volunteer Lawyer Program. A passionate sailor, he has sailed extensively, including over thirty-five bareboat charters throughout the Caribbean and Pacific.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 27, 2014
• ISBN: 9781499042795

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Copyright © 2014 by Richard Hicks.

Author Photo: Tess Kimber

Cover Design: Xlibris

All photos are from the author’s family photo collection.

21 Suggestions for Success by H. Jackson Brown, Jr. is reproduced here with the permission of the copyright holder, H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

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.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 08/25/2014

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Contents

Dedication

Prologue

PART ONE: FAMILY

Chapter 1   For My Own Good

Chapter 2   Love at First Sight

Chapter 3   The Roaring Twenties

Chapter 4   Billie Jayne

PART TWO: SCHOOL YEARS

Chapter 5   I Think I Can, I Think I Can

Chapter 6   Life On The Road With Plastic Man and The Three Musketeers

Chapter 7   Bay Village

Chapter 8   Daytona Beach

Chapter 9   All In—World War Two and The Greatest Generation

Chapter 10   The Worst of Times

Chapter 11   The Best of Times

Chapter 12   There’s No Business Like Show Business

Chapter 13   From Show Low to So Low

Chapter 14   If You Think You Are Beaten, You Are

Chapter 15   Ab Diving, Angst, and Charles Atlas

Chapter 16   Find a Need and Fill It

Chapter 17   The Commissioner

Chapter 18   A Small Fish in a Big Pond

Chapter 19   Honey-butter

Chapter 20   The Ceramic Mouse Ploy

Chapter 21   Look Right, Look Left

Chapter 22   Life Beyond the Classroom

Chapter 23   Belt and Suspenders

PART THREE: WORKING YEARS

Chapter 24   You’re in the Army Now

Chapter 25   Fort Devens

Chapter 26   The ANTs

Chapter 27   The Master Class

Chapter 28   Be Careful What You Wish For

Chapter 29   Family Ties and L.A. Law

Chapter 30   Behold the Turtle

Chapter 31   Jesus as Teacher

Chapter 32   Mazel Tov

Chapter 33   War Stories

Chapter 34   Beyond War

Chapter 35   Parenting

PART FOUR: RETIREMENT

Chapter 36   A Leap of Faith

Chapter 37   The Global Walk

Chapter 38   Driving Miss Phyllis Crazy

Chapter 39   Transition

Chapter 40   Habitat for Humanity

Chapter 41   New Beginnings in Cardiff-by-the-Sea

Chapter 42   My New Day Job

Chapter 43   Bareboat Chartering Is Not Nude Sailing

Chapter 44   This Boat Is Going Down

Chapter 45   My Fifteen Minutes of Fame

Chapter 46   Reflections

Acknowledgments

NOVELS BY RICHARD HICKS

Slender Fantasies

The Alpha Wolf Conspiracy

Wrinkles

Whistleblower

Murder by the Numbers

Crossing Borders

The Devil’s Breath

DEDICATION

With gratitude, love and respect,

this memoir is dedicated to

Phyllis.

Surely the wisest person I know,

about all that really matters.

Prologue

OF MY FOUR grandparents, three died before I was born: my father’s parents, Catherine Hicks and Richard Hicks, and my mother’s father, Anton Meiman. During the first ten years of my life, my other grandmother, Bernadina Meiman, was in extremely ill health and living with my mother’s sister, Lillian Meiman, in Covington, Kentucky, miles away from our home in Cleveland, Ohio. I saw her only a few times during the waning years of her life when she was infirm, unable to hear, and hardly spoke.

What little I know about my grandparents I’ve learned mostly from my mother and from my sister, Billie Jayne Halliday, who was eighteen years older than I and had more contact with them. I’ve always felt the lack of any firsthand knowledge of my grandparents’ lives. What experiences did they have growing up? What did they care about? What did they believe and what life experiences shaped and formed their beliefs and values?

On the other hand, Phyllis and I have had the opportunity to spend time with our grandchildren—Jennifer, Jeffrey Stephen, Caitlin, Ryan and Tyler—and presumably they have more insight into our lives.

But what about their children … and grandchildren?

Of course, as I write this, we have no great-grandchildren; but I’m optimistic that one of the five will procreate.

So this memoir is being written for my grandchildren and their progeny—should they appear—in an effort to share with them some of the events that shaped my life and beliefs. Like all memoirs, it will only approximate the truth. No one can remember, in detail, exactly what happened or was said during the course of a lifetime. As Mark Twain said: The older I get, the more clearly I remember things that never happened.

And, leaving aside the limitation of memory, there is also the problem inherent in writing any autobiography—as Mark Twain also said:

I believe it is impossible for a man to tell the truth about himself

or to avoid impressing the reader with the truth about himself.

Nevertheless, what follows is an honest attempt to depict the central events that made up my life. And, because Phyllis and I have now been married fifty-five years, it’s also her story, as seen through my eyes from the time we first met in her sorority dining hall in Berkeley, in February, 1957 … But now I’m getting ahead of the story.

Cardiff-by-the-Sea, California

June, 2014

PART ONE: FAMILY

1

For My Own Good

I WAS EIGHT years old and clinging to a branch, two thirds of the way up a heavily-leafed tree in the woods that extended behind our bungalow in rural Bay Village, just outside of Cleveland, Ohio. It was dark. Night had already fallen, and I was terrified: trying my hardest to control my shaking so as not to make any noise that could lead to my detection. I could hear my mother walking in the woods below, calling out my name. She’d been drinking and she was a mean drunk who, on more than one occasion, had taken out her repressed anger by hitting me with a belt—usually my own, but sometimes my father’s. The whippings never lasted very long—a half-dozen hits on my backside—but they were delivered with sufficient force that I would almost invariably cry.

I don’t recall what had triggered her anger on this occasion—it could have been anything. I was not in any sense a disrespectful or defiant kid who rebelled against, or pushed the limits of, authority. Whatever the trigger, when I ran away into the woods on this particular evening it was because I could tell from the tone of her alcohol-fueled voice that this was going to be one of those nights. My father was home, but I knew I could not count on him to protect me. He’d suffered the first of several heart attacks the year before I was born, and his continuing illness made him largely dependent on my mother and, in times like these, rendered him passive.

In the childhood I remember, I lived a life that swung from the adored child to the abused child—all at the whim of my mother, whose unpredictable demons seemed to come out of nowhere. She was a binge drinker, often going for weeks without getting drunk. During those sober days, her personality and attitude toward me was so radically different that it was like living with two different people: the good mother and the bad mother.

The good mother was hard working, capable, creative, and self sufficient. She’d grown up in a family where she’d learned to cook, to sew, and to clean (Oh, how those Germans loved to clean!) And despite the fact that we lived on a very modest income—my father’s ill health having impacted his earning capacity—my mother was able to use her homemaking skills to provide us with a very comfortable lifestyle. Until my father’s death, I had no recollection of feeling poor or destitute or in want of anything.

I remember my early childhood winters were spent in Florida. On the advice of my father’s doctors, we would go to Florida to avoid the harshness of Cleveland winters. This was the best medical advice they had to offer, there being little real knowledge of the causes or treatment of heart disease in the Forties. Then, when winter was over, we’d return to the Cleveland area, where my father was still employed in the advertising department of The Plain Dealer, Cleveland’s newspaper.

For several years we lived on the back of a small farm in Bay Village, a suburb of Cleveland, surrounded by orchards, vegetable gardens, and wild berries. The fruits and vegetables were ours to pick, and mother would preserve them in glass Mason Jars with reusable screw tops. She had an untrained but distinctive artistic sense, and the ability to take hand-me-down items from friends or the local thrift-shop and transform them into attractive and useful household items. We had a screened-in porch on the back of the house which she’d furnished in this way, hand painting all the furnishings in bright colors, like you’d expect to find in a Mexican hacienda. She sewed and made her own clothing and sometimes mine (although not my father’s, who still reported to work in a suit, tie, and fedora, and a camel’s hair coat on the colder days.) Such were the accomplishments of the good mother.

But it was not the good mother who was prowling in the woods, below the tree in which I was hiding that night.

It was the bad mother, the alcoholic mother, and I was terrified that she would shine a flashlight up into the trees and find me. The bad mother seemed to lie in wait for the good mother to take a pause, a breath as it were, from her cleaning, cooking, sewing— and then the bad would overtake the good, almost like a multiple personality. My sister, who knew both mothers, commented that she could always tell when mom was about to start drinking. Once she had completed a project—cleaned the house, decorated a room—and there was nothing more to do, that’s when she’d pull out a bottle.

My father often took public transportation to work, leaving my mother with the car. I dreaded those days since it meant she would have access to the local bars. It was not unusual for her to announce we were going to my sister’s house across town, and then stop at a bar along the way. She always had an excuse—taking some canned food to the bartender—and would leave me outside in the car to wait for her return.

Except that she usually didn’t return. After waiting what to me seemed like hours, but was probably shorter, I’d go into the bar and find her on a bar stool with a glass of booze in front of her, chatting away with the bartender. At this point she was usually happy, but I knew that my asking her to leave could turn her mood dark, so I usually just waited. She’d give me some nickels to play the pin-ball machine, and, if I tilted it, the bartender would come to my rescue, making sure I had another game to play.

My father also drank, but I have no recollection of his ever being drunk. I do recall that when we traveled, especially to Florida, the two of them would park me at the beach, or an arcade, or a swimming pool, while they spent the afternoon in a local bar at St. Augustine, Jacksonville, Daytona Beach, or Miami.

My mother finally gave up her search for me that night and, sometime before morning, I got so tired and cold that I climbed down out of the tree and returned to the house. She was waiting, as I knew she would be. I no longer recall what she said, except for the one line that I’d heard time and time again. As she wrapped the buckle-end of the belt around her hand, she told me that, this is for your own good.

Ten Years Later

It was June 6, 1955, and I’d turned eighteen the day before. I was standing at the podium at the open-air Greek Theatre on Point Loma in San Diego, California, wearing my cap and gown, and about to deliver the commencement address at my high school graduation. In my senior year at Point Loma High School, I’d twice been elected Student Body President, and the senior class had voted me the graduating male Most Likely to Succeed. I’d received letters of acceptance to Harvard University, Stanford University, Pomona College, and the University of California, Berkeley (where I was scheduled to attend as a freshman in September.)

It was a warm, sunny day, and, with the Pacific Ocean at my back, I looked out at the faces of my fellow classmates, teachers, and parents. I found my mother—sober, and beaming with pride. We’d come a long way from that night in the woods in Bay Village, Ohio.

This is the story of that journey and beyond. But the threads of my story began long before I was born.

2

Love at First Sight

WORLD WAR ONE was still raging in Europe when two American soldiers on leave were sharing a meal at the St. John’s Arbor restaurant in Detroit, Michigan. One of them, my father, turned to the other and said, You see that cashier over there. That’s the girl I’m going to marry.

My mother, the cashier, claims it was love at first sight. I might have doubted the veracity of the anecdote if I had not experienced a similar encounter with my future wife some forty years later—but that’s a later story.

Whether the account is true or apocryphal, on October 3, 1918—when my father was thirty-one and my mother was nine days shy of twenty-one—they were marred in Detroit. My father shared a birthday with Adolph Hitler (April 20, 1887), for which he took considerable ribbing in later life; and my mother’s birthday (October 12, 1897) was always easy to remember since it fell on Columbus Day.

My father, Herbert Warne Hicks, was born in Cleveland, Ohio. His father, Richard Clifford Hicks, was a house painter who was born in England. His mother, Catherine M. Herbert, was born in Canada the daughter of William Herbert and Catherine Herbert. The date of her marriage to my grandfather, Richard Hicks—for whom I was apparently named— is unknown, but it was sometime after the 1880 United States Federal Census, when Catherine M. Herbert was listed as a single woman, age twenty-one, living in Cleveland, Ohio. My grandparents, Catherine and Richard, had three children: Jeannette (Jane) B. Hicks born around 1885, my father, Herbert Warne Hicks, born in 1887, and Nettie G. Hicks, born around 1889. My grandfather, Richard, died on May 14, 1891, when my father was only four years old. Four years later his mother, Catherine, married Erwin Lybarker of Cleveland, with whom my father and his two sisters were still living in 1910, according to the census of that year.

My mother, Amelia Elizabeth Agnes Fredericka Meiman, was born in Covington, Kentucky, one of nine children—three of whom died very early— in a German Catholic family. Her parents, Anton (Tony) Meiman and Bernadina Meiman, were both the children of German immigrants. Anton’s parents, George Meiman and Lena Lauman Meiman, operated a boarding house, grocery store, and saloon during the Civil War. Bernadina’s father, George Schulkers, came to the United States and married Teckla Brinkman Schulkers in Covington. George worked as a tailor until the Civil War, when he enlisted in the Northern Union Army. Strangely, he was stationed in barracks located at 337 E. 17th Street, Covington, Kentucky, which later became the site of the home of my mother’s parents, Anton and Bernadina Meiman.

My mother, by her own account, had a rebellious nature. She dropped out of school after the fourth grade—probably because of her encounters with the Catholic nuns who tied her left hand behind her and insisted she learn to write with her right hand. By the time she was a teenager she’d dropped her birth names—Amelia Elizabeth Agnes Fredericka—and called herself Mildred Elizabeth, the name she went by for the rest of her life. At age seventeen she wanted to accompany her best girlfriend, Ethel Kinsella, to Detroit, Michigan. When her stern mother, Bernadina, refused permission, Mildred packed a suitcase, threw it out the window to a waiting Ethel, and later stole away on a train to Detroit, where she met and married my father.

The exact date my mother and father met is unclear. It had to have been after June 5, 1917 when my father signed up for the draft. And, since the meeting took place when he was on leave, it’s likely that he had completed some basic military training course. His duty assignment was that of military recruiter in the Army, stationed at the Army Air Force base at Kelly Field, San Antonio, Texas. In all likelihood they met in 1918.

The length of time between my parents’ first meeting and their marriage on October 3, 1918 is also not clear. According to my sister, our mother claimed it was only two weeks. Whatever the duration of time was, they did not have a traditional family wedding. In recounting her wedding, my mother said, (W)e went to the Protestant church; that was the only way we could get married. We got the license and we saw the minister. (According to the Marriage Certificate, the Minister was one W.F. Crossland.) My mother had been raised Catholic, but my father’s family—in particular his sister Jane—were very prejudice against Catholics and he’d asked my mother not to tell his family that she was Catholic. So this may have been why she said their only choice was to get married in a Protestant church. But it was apparently not a final act of rebellion against the church. She continued to practice Catholicism in later life, took my sister, Billie Jayne, to Catholic church, and even sent me to Catholic church when I was very young.

While my mother says it was my father who fell in love at first sight, I’m not so sure it wasn’t the other way around. At the very least my father swept her off her feet—maybe quite literally. Or maybe she used her own charms to lure him out of the bachelor’s life at age thirty-one. One could speculate (and that’s all it is)—that given my mother’s rebellious nature, the hurry-up wedding in Detroit instead of Covington or Cleveland, with none of my mother or father’s families in attendance, and the birth of my sister Billie Jayne in Detroit on June 23, 1919 (eight months and twenty days after the wedding date)—that mom and dad’s stars collided in more ways than one.

The war-to-end-all-wars ended with the Armistice being signed on November 11, 1918, and my father was discharged from the service. According to my sister the three of them went back to Cleveland on a boat when she was only twenty-two days old. She would only have known this from conversations with her parents in later years, but it was the kind of anecdote that my mother loved to tell. But, before the war ended, my father’s life almost ended in a military hospital in San Antonio, Texas.

After the wedding my father returned to Kelly Field in San Antonio, Texas. While there he was struck down with influenza, which had reached a world-wide pandemic stage, killing more people then died in World War One. My father was severely ill when my mother and her mother-in-law (whom she called ‘Mother Hicks’) made a train trip together from Cleveland to San Antonio. The two women were met at the train station by a couple of service men who were yelling out, Hicks … Hicks … Hicks. On hearing this, Mother Hicks said, Oh, he’s dead! He died.

He had not died, of course, but was hospitalized and apparently near death. While in San Antonio and walking from the hospital, my mother and grandmother passed a Catholic church. My mother turned to Mother Hicks and said, Mother would you mind if I stopped in here and said a prayer? This was the first time she’d revealed her Catholicism, and the fact that she did so is probably an indication of how concerned she was about my father’s illness.

Why, Mildred, are you Catholic? asked Mother Hicks.

Well, yes I am.

Well, Mildred, that’s just fine, and I’ll be fine, so go in there and pray.

My mother must have been relieved at such an open response, and after that went back to the church to pray on numerous occasions. During those Catholic church visits she encountered a soldier and confided in him her concern about my father and that they were getting ready to return to Ohio. The soldier is reported to have said, Well if there is anything I can do for you, I hope you’ll get in touch with me.

That the two made a connection is not surprising: the soldier’s mother, an American of German descent, was a devout Catholic who had guided him to prayer whenever he was troubled. This soldier, one of eight siblings, was Conrad Hilton and in the years to come he would found the world-wide Hilton Hotel chain.

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My mother’s grandparents, George and Teckla Schulkers. He was a tailor who came to America from Germany, married Teckla, and fought in the Civil War in the Northern Union Army. This is the oldest family photo I’ve found in researching this memoir.

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My mother, Amelia Elizabeth Agnes Frederica Meiman (2nd row center in white) in Covington, Kentucky on the day of her confirmation in May 1910. She is surrounded by the Meiman and Deters families, including her mother, Bernadina Schulkers Meiman (second person to her left in black), next to her father, Anton Meiman (hat and mustache.)

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My father’s parents, Catherine Herbert Hicks and Richard Clifford Hicks (the only photo I have of him) with my father, Herbert Warne Hicks and his younger sister, Nettie G. Hicks (circa 1889).

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My father, Herbert Warne Hicks, and his sisters, Jeannette (Jane) B. Hicks and Nettie Hicks (circa 1891). His crossed feet suggest a jaunty attitude at an early age.

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My mother’s bridal photo. It appeared in the Detroit paper under the heading: BRIDE OF SERGEANT—Mrs. H. Warne Hicks. You can see why she captured the eye of my father (below) … and then his heart.

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3

The Roaring Twenties

IF THERE WAS a period of time in my parents’ lives that must have been the most enjoyable for them, it would have to have been the ten years after the end of World War One— right up until tragedy hit them on Saturday, June 9, 1929.

It was the Jazz Age, the Roaring Twenties. Prohibition was the law of the land, but, with speakeasies and bathtub gin (which my father is reported to have made) no one—least of all my parents—was going without their cocktails. It was also a period marked by the emergence of dozens of new technologies: electricity, telephones, radios, movies, and the invention that rivaled the computer for its dynamic impact on societal change—the automobile. Some of these technologies had been invented earlier, but it was during the twenties that they were first mass-produced and available to the great majority of Americans, at prices they could afford. It was a dizzy, vibrant, exciting time to be a young, newly-married couple living in America.

Assuming, of course, you had a job. Many people did not.

Before entering the service, my father spent eight years in the sales department of B.F. Goodrich Company in Akron, Ohio, a small town just forty miles south of Cleveland, which was on its way to becoming the Rubber Capital of the World. And, with the automobile and truck manufacturing revolution about to happen, there were dozens of companies, including Goodyear, Firestone, and General Tire, competing to get a part of the market share. Goodrich—not to be confused with Goodyear—was one of them. My father went back to Goodrich after his discharge, but, when they offered him less money than he’d earned before entering the service, he turned his back on Goodrich and applied for a position with Mason Tire & Rubber Company in nearby Kent, Ohio.

My father’s employment as a salesman, and then sales manager, with Mason Tire & Rubber, lasted six years, and may have come as a result of his knowing the right person. His cousin, William Cluff, was a wealthy businessman who lived in Kent, Ohio and owned an interest in Mason Tire & Rubber Company. He later donated the initial land on which Kent State was built, and, in 1926, the William A. Cluff Training School was built and named in his honor. How much help Cluff was in getting my father his job is not clear. What is clear is that, in 1924, Cluff became President of Mason Tire and Rubber Company, so one can reasonably infer that the family connection was of some help to my father.

My sister’s earliest memories were of living in Kent, initially in a boarding house, and then in a garden apartment called Mason Terrace, built by Mason Tire & Rubber Company for its employees. Later, they moved to a house across the street from Kent State and had students rooming in their attic who often baby-sat my sister. At about this time my mother decided she was going to learn to drive, and claimed, in later years, that Barney Oldfield—the famous automobile racing driver and first man to drive an automobile sixty miles per hour—was her teacher. Since Oldfield had retired from racing by 1918, and had developed the Oldfield tire for Firestone Rubber Company in the twenties, he could very well have been in Kent. Firestone advertised that: ‘Firestone Tires are my only life insurance,’ says Barney Oldfield, world’s greatest driver." This connection to the world’s greatest race car driver helped promote Firestone’s tires in much the same way as Michael Jordan’s Air Jordan athletic shoes enhanced Nike’s sales, a half-century later.

My father had a gregarious personality. And in those early years of marriage mom and dad had an active social life that included frequent card parties. (They were both excellent card players and passed the love of cards on to me.) There was dancing and singing. My father had a beautiful tenor voice, and loved to get up in front of a group and entertain (another characteristic I exhibited throughout my own life). Although they both drank, and the illegal booze flowed freely, there’s no indication either of my parents was drinking to excess in those early years of their marriage. My father was an avid sportsman. He loved to fish and there are photos of him with a group of friends fishing in the lakes that surrounded Akron and Kent, Ohio. But he was also interested in baseball and football and, according to my sister, was very good at bowling, golf, and billiards. My mother claimed that, as a youth, dad played pool with Bob Hope, the famous comedian who appeared on radio, television, and in the movies. There may be some truth to this: Bob Hope’s biography asserts that Hope lived in Cleveland in his youth and used to hustle in the pool hall located in the Alhambra Theatre, where his mother took him to see vaudeville shows.

In November, 1923, when my sister was four years old, my father came home with some exciting news: He had been chosen to open a new branch for Mason Tire & Rubber Company in Jacksonville, Florida. My mother was so excited that she started jumping around on top of the sofa. When my sister asked what was happening, she told her they were going to move to a beautiful place.

My parents actually only stayed in Jacksonville for about six months, returning by boat from Miami to Baltimore on my sister’s fifth birthday, June 23, 1924. When they returned to Kent they bought a two-bedroom bungalow, which, as far as I have been able to ascertain, was the only home they ever owned. After their return, my sister, age five, attended kindergarten at Kent State.

Within a year after his return to Kent, my father was offered a position with The Plain Dealer, Cleveland’s primary newspaper. He sold them on the idea of starting a new department, a national advertising department. Having been on the opposite side of the business for so long—he’d purchased advertisements for Goodrich and later Mason Tire & Rubber—he was convinced he would be able to make the switch, and offered to train salesmen to sell newspaper advertising. There was a short period of time when he left The Plain Dealer to start up a newspaper, The Lakewood Post, with a friend; but the relationship soured and he returned to The Plain Dealer, where he continued to be employed until his death in December, 1947. As my mother often pointed out, with pride, he worked for The Plain Dealer for twenty-one years.

My sister recalls my father’s initial position with The Plain Dealer was as the head of the national advertising department, but that he gave up that position and title after his heart attack in 1936. When he died in 1947, his obituary, published in The Plain Dealer, said he was in the national advertising department and had charge of drug and toilet company accounts. I suppose they should know.

In the summer of 1925 my father and mother and sister moved to Lakewood, a neighborhood of Cleveland, to a house on Clifton Boulevard, where they lived on the second floor. My sister took a streetcar to Lincoln Elementary, a public school some distance away. She was in the first grade, and her experience was not unlike my own. When I entered the first grade at Taft Elementary School, also in Lakewood, my mother put me on a streetcar. Today, of course, there would be few parents willing to send their six-year-old children off by themselves to take public transportation to attend school across town, and then return by themselves at the end of the school day. Today’s parents would be wracked with fear or guilt, and probably have their children taken from them by a child-protective service agency.

We lived in different times.

Nevertheless, in order to allow my sister to attend a closer school in a nearby district, my parents moved to the Traymore Apartments, also on Clifton Boulevard, in Lakewood, where they purposefully chose an apartment on the fourth floor because my father didn’t like anyone living over him. The move took place on Halloween, 1925. My sister, then age six, was soon introduced to a neighbor boy, Wallace Halliday, then age five—whom she would marry in another sixteen years. Billie Jane (who changed the spelling to Jayne sometime around 1930) was able to walk to Emerson Elementary School from the Traymore, and eventually to Taft Elementary School, where she continued to attend until the third grade, when her life—and my parents’—was changed forever.

In reflecting on my parents’ marriage, I’m struck by the differences in their backgrounds. My mother had only a fourth-grade education. As a teenager, she ran away from her German, Catholic family on the banks of the Ohio, to Detroit, to take a job as a cashier in a restaurant. Her father was a vinegar maker—who allegedly went to Mexico to teach them how to brew beer—but her extended family were farmers. My father was ten years my mother’s senior. His family, while not upper class, came from Great Britain—English, Irish, and Scottish stock—via Canada. His maternal relatives, the Herberts, were reportedly quite successful. And he lived most of his life in the larger, urban environment of Cleveland.

I know very little about the first thirty years of my father’s life, before he met and married my mother. He grew up in Cleveland, but I’ve discovered nothing about his formal education or how many years of schooling he completed. However his life experiences before marriage suggest he was more worldly and sophisticated than my mother. He worked as a sales manager for Goodrich Tire & Rubber Company in his late twenties and continued in sales for the rest of his life. He had some affiliation with the Canton Bulldog professional football team before World War One and (as discussed in Chapter 10) may have been involved in signing Jim Thorpe up to his first professional football contract. By all accounts my father was charming, had the gift of gab, and was intelligent. These talents