Just a Guy: Some Memories and Reflections of William L Horton 1947-2014

By William L Horton

My dad, Lew Horton, always had a place to do woodworking. After he retired from Penneys he rented places in Lincoln, Illinois to store his stuff and work on projects. I helped him to move his shop twice-- a hard, dirty job. On one move an older fellow helped, probably because he had a pickup and Dad was using part of an old chicken shed on the guys property for his new work space. I didnt know the man, and when I asked Dad about him Dad explained, Hes just a guy, meaning, I suppose, that he was no one special and that Dad did not know him well.
That phrase stuck in my mind for years, for some reason. Most of us are just guys, unworthy and unknown and forgotten in, at most, a generation. We are the common folk. But all of us guys really have some memories stored away that we dredge up for pleasure, contemplation, regret, analysis, and entertainment, and often they pop into my head as part of an unrelated chain of memories caused by something unknown. Some are triggered by events, others just come.
I thought it would be nice to share them with someone else whether or not they wanted to know them. Perhaps this memoir will give some future historian or descendant a feel for how it was to be just a guy during my years on earth.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 30, 2014
• ISBN: 9781499025453

Book preview

Copyright © 2014 by William L Horton.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2014909601

ISBN:      Hardcover      978-1-4990-2546-0

                Softcover        978-1-4990-2547-7

                eBook             978-1-4990-2545-3

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: 05/22/2014

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris LLC

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

[e-mail]

633441

CONTENTS

Preface-Forward-Preliminaries-Prelude-Foreboding-Tantalization

In The Beginning—Kenosha, Wisconsin

Milwaukee

Louisiana, Missouri

The Farm

Grandma And Granddad Busby

Mom And Dad

Dad

Lincoln, Illinois

Camp Lincoln

Back To Lincoln, Illinois

Lincoln Community High School, Class Of 1966

Millikin

Millikin Choir

Courses

Methodist

Back To Millikin

The Draft

The Reception Station

Basic Training

The Training

Mp School

Corrections School

The Correctional Training Facility

Decatur, Illinois

Fuller Seed

Teaching

Marriage

More Teaching

Cambridge Drive

Ouch

Elmer’s Midway

The Young College Girl

Back To School

Teacher In Space

Aastra

Colleagues At Dennis

Classroom Timeline

Masters Degree

Change On The Ground

Genteel Poverty

Retirement

Cars

More Dogs

Freedom City—From my original notes-the Mariel Boat Lift

The Army Reserve

The Army

National Guard

Theology

More Hurts

Type Ii

More Hooks

Fishing

My Kids

My Personal Timeline

Opus 24

More Church

The Three Guys

Canoeing

My Pockets

Trips, Vacations, And Stuff Like That

The Rules Of Life

Y2k

9/11

I Saw The President

Thankful Timeline

Lists

Plays

Reading

Famous People I Have Seen Or Met

Tv Shows I Have Enjoyed

Places I Have Been

Food

My Favorite Buildings

Poems

Changes

Rusting Away In Retirementville

The End

PREFACE-FORWARD-PRELIMINARIES-PRELUDE-FOREBODING-TANTALIZATION

M y dad, Lew Horton, always had a place to do woodworking. After he retired from Penney’s he rented places in Lincoln, Illinois to store his stuff and work on projects. I helped him to move his shop twice—a hard, dirty job. On one move an older fellow helped, probably because he had a pickup and Dad was using part of an old chicken shed on the guy’s property for his new work space. I didn’t know the man, and when I asked Dad about him Dad explained, He’s just a guy, meaning, I suppose, that he was no one special and that Dad did not know him well.

That phrase stuck in my mind for years, for some reason. Most of us are just guys, unworthy and unknown and forgotten in, at most, a generation. We are the common folk. But all of us guys really have some memories stored away that we dredge up for pleasure, contemplation, regret, analysis, and entertainment, and often they pop into my head as part of an unrelated chain of memories caused by something unknown. Some are triggered by events, others just come.

I thought it would be nice to share them with someone else whether or not they wanted to know them. Perhaps this memoir will give some future historian or descendant a feel for how it was to be just a guy during my years on earth.

I would have preferred to have written this strictly in chronological order, but so many unrelated experiences occur in basically the same time frames, that I found that to do this was not practical. My guide for organization also had to be by categories. This is not a completely perfect method of recording my story, but it seemed to work well enough. I did spend a lot of time trying to put the categories in some sort of order, but the truth be told, I have not been completely satisfied with the result.

Another problem I had was where to end the story. First of all, I am reasonably sure that I am not dead yet. Secondly there was a gap of about five years from when I finished the last draft, and when I started typing. The story didn’t stop, and it isn’t over. At the rate I write this it may take another couple of chapters to finish. I am a slow typist and will have to get a lot more computer skills.

How I wish that my parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles had written their stories. They didn’t. I am sure that none of them felt they had anything to write about, or the skill to write their stories. They surely all felt that they were just a guy—plain, unimportant, boring, modest folk who would have thought that doing such a thing was presumptuous and silly. How wrong they were. I have tried to extract some information from them, and while they seemed to enjoy sharing their memories, I somehow got the feeling that they couldn’t believe that I would really be interested in their pasts.

Finally, who do I include in my story? I don’t want to hurt feelings. We are all shaped by our involvement with others, those brief encounters or intense moments or long-standing relationships. My answer to my own question is that this is my story, and I just didn’t remember everybody or every thing, nor did I have anything to say about many good people who I have associated with over the years, or have time to include all my favorite people. I feel bad about this, but that’s how it is.

IN THE BEGINNING

—KENOSHA, WISCONSIN

I t is a shame that scrambled eggs, and not ice cream, is my earliest memory, crisis, and disappointment. Scrambled eggs are bearable but lumpy, yellow but indecisive, easy but unskilled. I liked eggs over easy because Mom taught me how to dip the corner of a toast triangle into the liquid yoke. The memory of that series of days around March 4, 1951 is lost except for a few comments written in the soft-covered brown Your New Baby booklet which was given to Mom. When she went to the Kenosha, Wisconsin hospital to have my sister Marcia Lee, I spent the first night at Selina and George Thom’s house which was across the empty lot from us. They both worked at Nash Motors. Selina was Mom’s best friend in Kenosha. Then I spent the rest of the week at the Nohling’s house until Mom came home. New mothers were hospitalized for a week in those days. Gladys Nohling got rather sharp with me to eat what was put in front of me. Well, OK, then.

Gladys and Leroy were friends of my parents from the First Methodist Church in Kenosha, Gladys singing in the church choir with Dad. Leroy was a huge balding man who owned a small machine shop, which among other things made potato chip slicer blades for a local potato chip factory. They had two fine children much older than I. Their son was playing with me when their family was over at our house visiting one evening. I was a lot smaller than David was, and as I rolled off his back I hit the carpet, and it hurt. The next day Mom took me to the hospital for an x-ray, and sure enough I had a broken collar bone. I was taped up and sent home. I still have a small lump on the break, which does not bother me. Mom says the Nohlings were mortified, but it was just an accident. One day I was playing in my sandbox and somehow sand got poured down my back, all of which stuck to the tape. Even though the bandage looked and felt like sandpaper it didn’t bother me, but Mom hit the roof and took me back to get me re-taped.

I was born on a snowy Christmas Eve on December 24, 1947, in the Kenosha hospital. I suspect that I didn’t cry. Burp or pass gas, maybe, but not cry, and I undoubtedly wanted to take a nap after I looked around a bit. (If I am alive when you read this, gifts are always appropriate). Dad told how he was in the expectant fathers’ waiting room when the doctor came out and chatted with him for a while before surprising Dad with the information that for unto us a child was born, who was named William Lewis Horton. The William was sort of after my uncle Billy Leon Horton and Lewis for my Dad. The doctor, Leslie Kent, who charged my parents $98.50 for my delivery, wrote in my baby book, The days which make us happy make us wise. It sounds wise. He sang in Dad’s men’s glee club. Our nurse was Rose Bushonville.

I weighed seven pounds three ounces at 5:57 PM (1757 hours). I haven’t stopped adding to that. Mom received lots of gifts and kept a list of them with the givers names in my baby book. The hospital had just started using up-to-date technology in the nursery. The local paper took a photo of the babies lying in their new, clear, plastic bins, and I was one of them. The hospital bill for that week was $48.15.

Image%2001.JPG

Me at 1 year, right before my mustache came in.

After I got home Mom recorded about every thing I did. She wrote that my first words were tickle-tickle, Mamma, and fried chicken. There are additional data:

1.   Baptism on March 21, 1948, at Kenosha First Methodist Church, which was Palm Sunday. Reverend WC Calvert (a funny name for a Methodist preacher) performed the ceremony. I received a white carnation and Edith Nohling (Leroy’s sister) gave me a doll for a baptism gift. I still have it, but it is crumbling.

2.   If I had been a girl, my name would have been Carol Ann. People did not know ahead of time what the sex of an unborn baby was.

3.   At one year I weighed 22 pounds (do you see the pattern?) and had six teeth and could walk.

4.   I sucked my right index finger for a few years.

5.   I did not like pureed spinach, but then, who does?

6.   I behaved well for my first haircut. That probably had to do with some believable threats made before hand.

7.   I got my tetanus, whooping cough, and diphtheria shots at nine months.

8.   They made me take cod liver oil!

9.   I drank from a cup at ten months. There weren’t any sippy cups back then.

10.   Humpty Dumpty was the first nursery rhyme I could say.

11.   Mom was 26 and Dad was 29 when I was born. Just a couple of kids having kids. I was much younger.

At some time in my very young years Mom took me to watch the circus unloading from a train to be set up in Kenosha. If I am remembering this correctly it was on the evening of August 24, 1952. Getting to see a circus train unload was almost as exciting as getting to go to the circus, and it was free. If this memory is correct, it was the Barnum and Bailey Circus. I remember how noisy it seemed with all the animal noises, including the tigers, and the general commotion and shouting and bustle, and the smell of diesel and animals and unknown smells. I would have been about four and a half that evening.

I had a special blanket when I was born that I liked, but Mom gave it away in a fit of ridding out when we moved to Milwaukee. I know she regretted that as time passed.

I would bring Mom dandelions by the fistful, some with stems, and some without, and she would stick them in a glass of water. I thought they were beautiful flowers, and I still think that, as long as they are not in my yard.

I remember the house at 4047-30th Avenue as being huge—huge driveway, huge yard, huge cherry tree, and other huges. It was advertised for $7,950 in the paper, and I have that clipping in one of Mom’s old scrapbooks. In 2012 dollars that was the equivalent to $81,000 to $234,000. Dad once said that his hand shook when he signed the check. There was a coal bin with an outside chute in the basement. Dad kept some raw, rough-cut lumber down there. He had given me some WWII souvenirs Uncle Bill had sent home-a canteen and German glasses, which I hid down there, and when we moved to Milwaukee I forgot them. I still have the German helmet he had sent, and it is worth a couple hundred dollars now. When I was a kid I would wear it when playing Army and have kids throw rocks at it.

There was a gargantuan stoker hot air furnace down in the basement which used less than six tons of coal a year which Dad had to wrestle with on every cold Wisconsin morning (which was all of them). He had to make sure it was stoked correctly. I can imagine this being like the scene in the movie Christmas Story with the strange furnace sounds and Daren McGavin’s indistinct grumbling. If you haven’t seen that movie, you are missing a true classic. I rarely heard Dad curse.

Dad set up a woodworking area there to enjoy his favorite hobby. He loved working with wood. The noise from his power tools terrified me and I couldn’t get out of the basement fast enough whenever he was working on a project. He wasn’t much of a teacher and I wasn’t much of a student, so consequently I did not pick up the tremendous amount of knowhow he had—a loss I have regretted for many years.

On the main floor of this huge house was a kitchen, dining room, living room, and closed—in back porch. The dining room was just for company, had a huge sideboard which Mom called a buffet, and a table and chairs. I think Mom kept linens in the sideboard. There was a dial phone which was on a party line that connected to a human operator. Mom still remembers the long and short ring for our house.

The living room had a couch which we called a davenport, built in book cases, and at least one armchair. I especially remember the chair with its thick stuffed arms. As I watched Hopalong Cassidy and other cowboy shows on TV I would straddle one arm and gallop through the west, my index finger for a pistol barrel, shooting at anything that moved. Mom thought my shooting noises were spitting—sometimes she didn’t have a lot of imagination. K-ch, k-ch.

On our first used TV, which I vaguely remember being delivered, we received at most three channels if the weather was good. In those days the new medium in Kenosha didn’t have much to watch for kids. Often the screen was snowy or didn’t come in at all. I remember watching Howdy Doody, and Two Ton Baker the Music Maker. I loved Kukla, Fran, and Ollie, and a show that was hosted by Andy Divine called Andy’s Gang, which carried short movies and silly skits. Andy had a puppet Froggy who was magic and could get Andy to do silly things. Andy would say, Twang your magic Twanger, Froggy! It was edited to look like it was in a theater full of happy kids. These all were great shows, and about the only shows for kids. I missed out on Romper Room and Captain Kangaroo. I don’t remember the shows Mom and Dad watched except for Sid Caesar and Ed Sullivan. My parents always had the first and last word about what TV shows were viewed.

Mom used the living room oak floor to lay out fabric to pin, and then cut it into pieces to be sewn into clothing. I don’t remember anything she made, but she sewed on an old electric sewing machine for years. Once I decided to touch the razor blade which she used to trim the fabric. She told me not to, but I knew if I touched it, oh so carefully, I’d be OK. I cut my finger. I broke a vase of Mom’s in the living room. She cried. I still feel bad about that. It was sixty years ago. I fell down the huge stairs to the second floor once. I think the railing pulled out of the wall, and down I rolled for an eternity, head over heels. Nothing broke, but I do remember how much it hurt, and how upset Mom was. There was a door on the driveway side of the house that went into the kitchen. The milkman used to set the milk by the door and yell, Milkman! in a sing-songy voice, and Mom hated that, in a pet peeve sort of way. The milkman had a milk wagon pulled by a horse that knew the route and knew when to stop without being guided or controlled.

It’s funny but I don’t remember the kitchen. Mom did her canning there. There were six foot cupboards that went clear to the ceiling, and were about ten inches wide. My folks paid $25.00 for a used stove. When she canned grape jelly, steam was every where, and it was hot. The bubbling blue broth of jelly smelled absolutely delicious. She poured the jelly into small glass jars and then poured melted paraffin on top of the jelly to keep out the air. If she wanted, she put a lid on it after it cooled. When she opened a new jar, I got to lick the jelly off the paraffin, and maybe get to chew the wax like we would wax lips. She usually saved the paraffin for later reuse. She also canned apples, pears, corn, peas, green beans, strawberries, beets, squash, and applesauce.

I don’t remember much about the house’s second story. I had a room-maybe Marcia did, too, and my parents had their bedroom up there. I was afraid to go up there in the dark. There was a screened in sleeping porch, and Mom and Dad slept out there on hot nights. There wasn’t any air conditioning then. Before I was born, on hot summer nights they would take blankets and pillows down to the Lake Michigan beach and sleep there, as did many other people.

The bathroom was upstairs with a big tub. Most houses didn’t have showers in those days. Mom kept a chart on the wall that I could color in every day for brushing my teeth. Marcia had seen me turn the lock on on the door, and one day when she was a toddler, locked herself in the bathroom and couldn’t get it unlocked. Now this was the only bathroom in the house, and Dad had to take the door off the hinges to get her out, and I think she really needed to apologize to everyone for that.

We had an unattached one-car garage which must have been designed for a Model T sized car. The garage and house were sided with what looked like asphalt shingles—not an uncommon thing in those days. If I ever was in that garage that had a one piece door I don’t remember it.

Our back yard was huge. A sandbox sat under the Concord grape arbor. The arbor itself was above an old capped well with a concrete cover. We did have city water. Dad had driven down to Lake Michigan and filled up a couple of boxes with sand for it. He once said that putting sand in the car trunk proved to not be a great idea. There was also a huge cherry tree with wonderful branches for climbing, and the cherries were delicious. Even the green ones. The sweetest, most succulent and highly desirable fruit were the ones that the birds had pecked out a bite because they were especially sweet. Along the back cinder alley was a large patch of rhubarb, and Mom would give me a bowl of sugar and I would dip a stalk of raw rhubarb in it and eat it like candy. When I think about that now it makes my jaws hurt. Can you say, Tart? Some people say they used salt instead, which makes my jaws hurt and my eyes water.

I’ll bet that the cinders in the alley came from the neighborhood furnaces and were dumped out there for decades. This is an early example of reusing. Cars and local kids used the alley. The neighborhood was kind of on the north edge of Kenosha and hadn’t been developed or farmed, as near as I can determine.

Across the alley was a huge field of wildflowers, grasses, and weeds. I suspect it was pretty much as it had been before settlement. Across the field was a dirt road which ran next to railroad tracks that my parents tell me were for an electric interurban line that ran to Chicago. I was afraid to cross the tracks. On the other side was a municipal golf course, and it was forbidden to even think of walking on it. My friends told me that if a train engineer saw us near the tracks that he would radio the police, we would be arrested, and spend the rest of our lives in jail. We hid in the weeds whenever a train went by. Weren’t we sly!

Dad set fire to the huge weed field one day. It was windy, but he decided he needed to burn some boxes in our burn spot where we burned garbage and paper. People used to burn their trash in the back yard. The wind took some of the large sparks and set the field on fire. My friend Michael and I were on the other side of the field and decided to cut across it to get home. In front of the fire. Pretty stupid, huh? All’s well that ends well. The fire department came and put out the fire.

The dirt road was pretty far from the house and had a huge hill that was an incredible thrill to ride down on my tricycle. I snuck over there once with Michael for some daring rides. Mom couldn’t find me; her way of calling me home was to stand at the back door and yell, Billy! This was the usual communication system in those days, and my responsibility was to yell, Coming! Since I was not able to hear her then I didn’t reply, and she became frantic. She finally figured out where I was and came and got me with her stick, and thumped my rear end all the way home. I felt she had over reacted, and I didn’t do it again. Mom pretty much let me run anywhere without worrying. Parents weren’t so over protective then, and didn’t hover over their kids too much. I am sure that I’d hear dozens of arguments about how it isn’t safe now as it used to be. They would be wrong.

Mom had a sure fire way to get Marcia and me—mainly me—to behave. It was referred to as the stick. It was a stick and also could be called the board of education. In fact, I think that she called it the Board sometimes. Marcia and I were never in doubt about an action being very wrong when it was applied to our seat of learning. It wasn’t used much, it wasn’t mentioned often, but it was always in the back of our little minds. Marcia hid it in the vacuum cleaner hose once but I got blamed. It is too bad that our country has rejected this marvelous teaching tool. Educators like to expound about how people learn, but cannot bring themselves to credit the worth of corporal punishment. Command Sergeant Major Larry once mentioned to me that two significant learning tools were fear and pain. They can be quickly and economically used to make important points.

I am not supporting brutality, or beating people. There is a difference between a spanking and brutality.

Part of the field was used to dump piles of dirt which I imagine were from the post war construction boom that followed WWII. I called these gray piles of clay mountains and played in them a lot. One week dump trucks came and unloaded enormous piles of black, sticky, stinky, oily sand, there not being any EPA or pollution control in that era. I was told it was from the foundries and was part of the process of molding iron parts for the automobile industry, Nash and Rambler having plants in Kenosha.

I had a wonderful day climbing around and digging in these piles, looking for fascinatingly shaped pieces of iron. Mom was aghast when I got home covered from head to toe with greasy filthy sand and oil. I remember getting a bath and receiving directions to not climb in that intriguing sand ever again. Bummer. I was a cooperative little angel, so the next day I only poked around the edges of these piles searching for the metal treasures, resulting in another bath, another more precise and detailed warning.

I helped some folks find dandelion greens along the alley one spring day. I couldn’t even conceive greens as being food—I still can’t. Today we take for granted getting any variety of fresh fruit and vegetables at any grocery store any time of the year, but people couldn’t really do that until the 1980’s when shipping such things became more common. In late winter and early spring, average people craved decent fresh vegetables.

It was in Kenosha that my parents taught me about smuggling. I have a memory, clouded in mist, of sitting in the back seat of the car while my parents slipped behind the Wisconsin-Illinois border to buy illegal goods. They didn’t explain it too well to me, probably because they were smart and knew not to let kids in on too many details of criminal activities. What they did has probably passed the statutes of limitation behind the cheese curtain. While the border patrol was busy elsewhere, they went to an Illinois grocery store and bought a large quantity of yellow oleo margarine and slipped it into Kenosha, strictly for personal use, I assure the reader. In dairy world Wisconsin there was only hatred for fake butter, and the state law mandated that the only oleo one could buy was uncolored. This made the product look like a brick of lard, and not very appetizing. Dairy producers were quick to protect their products through legislation, so that REAL butter only would look yummy, and artificial margarine, which my parents called oleo, wouldn’t look as good. Butter was more expensive. I think my folks smuggled crates of margarine north, and were never caught.

Next to our Kenosha house was a huge empty lot whose owner told Dad that he could use it for a vegetable garden. Dad had it tilled, and he planted lots of different kinds of vegetables and flowers. Dad was from the farm, and working with the soil came pretty natural to him. I loved the kohlrabi and Dad would pull one up, peel it with his pocket knife, and I would eat it like an apple, right there in the garden.

Dad also told the story many times of how he spent days planting his rows of vegetables, and I would usually hang around. When he got home from a day at Penney’s one evening, I told him I had helped him by hoeing weeds out of the garden. It seems I had weeded a whole row of sprouting squash plants for him. I know I should feel bad about that, but the fact is I do not like squash—it tastes like metallic slush to me, so maybe I wasn’t so dumb after all.

On the other side of our garden was the Thom’s house. They were George and Selina Thom. My parents expected me to be respectful of my elders, and to call them Mr. and Mrs. Thom. Apparently that was just too much for me and I called them George and Tom. They were so charmed by this that that is what they wanted me to call them. Occasionally when I was outside playing, I would drop by to visit them, and they always welcomed me. They were very nice to me and we were very close. She was Mom’s best Kenosha friend, and they gave each other permanents. They both worked and retired from Nash Motor Company, and moved up to the Upper Peninsula when they retired. Who in the world moves to northern Michigan when they retire?

I remember two Kenosha kid friends. My best friend was red headed Michael who lived down the block and attended two years of kindergarten with me. His family was even poorer than ours, although at the time there was no class or race or gender distinctions—I was only a little kid after all. Michael had a couple of older brothers who seemed scary to me. They roamed the streets and liked to play with gasoline. Their father was named Chet, a black haired man who terrified me. I don’t know why, but it was instinctive. Whenever he was around I took off. No one knows this, but when I need to get hold of my emotions or hysteria, I think the word Chet a couple of times to settle myself down. Weird, really. I have done this for sixty years. I lost track of Michael when I left Kenosha, when I was in first grade. I found his name, my age, on the internet, in Racine, Wisconsin, but I guess I don’t have any reason to contact him.

My other friend was David, whose mother was strange. He had to take naps every afternoon because many people hoped that napping would prevent their children from getting polio, which was terrifying the nation at the time. Mom didn’t think much of that theory.

One of the best places to play near our house was a huge dump a couple of blocks north of our house. It was a good old fashioned kind of dump with piles of fascinating smelly debris, and it was huge. We would wander around through it and play in the creek that flowed through it. Once Michael’s brothers caught crawdads in the dump creek, peeled the tails, got boards from the dump, a section of screen, and cooked the crabs over a fire. They always had matches. We ate them with our unwashed bare hands, and I remember them as being delicious.

The oldest scar on my body is under the lashes of my left eyebrow. It is very unnoticeable. I don’t think anyone even knows it is there, except maybe Mom. When I was a pre-school kid in Kenosha I was watching our neighbor using an intriguing contraption, cleaning out his basement sewer pipe, standing outside between the houses. He told me to back away because the ribbon of steel router was sharp. I must have not listened, got too close, and somehow got cut. He about had a stroke, since blood was streaming over my face from the area of my eye. Mom says he was really upset. I don’t remember going to the doctor. Mom probably used pressure to stop the bleeding. Lucky, wasn’t I?

For luck, though, you can’t top the time I fell out of a moving car. I wasn’t much past being a toddler when we were on one of our frequent visits to the farm. I don’t remember it very well, and Mom has always been reluctant to talk about it. As near as I can piece together vague, fragmentary memories and bits of stories, Mom borrowed Granddad’s car to visit a friend in St. Joseph, Missouri. The car didn’t have a good door latch. As she was driving slowly down the street with me in the front seat, the door came open and I tumbled out. She stopped, and fortunately we were in front of a doctor’s office. I got looked over and pronounced alive and unhurt. There were no seat belts or car seats then, and you put the kid in front to keep an eye on him. I have another vague feeling that I fell out of a car back in Nodaway County when Granddad was driving, but no one else remembers that, so maybe it didn’t happen.

I remember going to my huge elementary school’s gym for some of the world’s first polio shots. I was in first grade. Kids cried but I didn’t. The medical shooter didn’t have time for bedside manners. It was, Come here. Wipe. Jab. Wipe. Go over there. We did, they got done with thousands of inoculations, and life went on, and polio just about ceased in our country. That’s not a bad thing. I think I had to take a followup cube of sugar later on, and preferred that to hypodermics. In 2012 some religious fanatics/morons murdered several medical people in Afghanistan who were trying to inoculate children for polio. They said the nurses were injecting children with microchips so that the CIA could track them. I live in a better place.

I went to kindergarten two years in Kenosha. In those days Kenosha had a two year kindergarten program, one for four year olds and one for five year olds. Each had a separate curriculum and a different purpose. The first year was at a very old Wilson Elementary School. I don’t remember much about it except it was for a half day, which all US kindergartens were then. We got to wear invisible cloaks as we walked down to the bathroom. I had to ride a city bus there and back home with Michael. I didn’t get off the bus on the first day. The driver brought me back to my drop off corner when he figured out who I was and what I was doing on his bus. Mom was frantic when I didn’t show up. All’s well that ends well. I learned how to do it after that.

My second year was at a brand new building about one hundred miles from our house, so it was close enough for me to walk to school. It was part of the frantic school building program that accompanied the baby boom. I am a boomer, although I never felt like one. There was no grass on the lawn, and it was a huge building. There was a huge street to cross on the way (30th Street) about the size of an interstate highway, and thankfully there was a crossing guard there. In the winter snow was piled up over my head.

I had to take speech in that new building. I wonder why. I couldn’t pronounce the th in mother or thermometer. I had never had to say thermometer, and I called Mom Mom.They made me stay after school two days a week. That meant I had to miss the bookmobile, and the crossing guard was gone when I finally got to the corner. I have a feeling that I really didn’t need the service, but that the specialist needed to fill up a quota. I am still miffed about missing the bookmobile.

Mom played with us, talked to us, read to us, disciplined us, and made our clothes, and didn’t kill us. One of Mom’s favorite stories about my kindergarten years was that one morning right after breakfast I announced that I had forgotten to mention it for a couple of weeks, but I needed a puppet that morning for school. Mom got out a sock and sewed some buttons on it and sent me off with what she felt was a not good enough sock puppet, but I thought it was great. What a Mom! Recently I learned from my daughter Jennifer of a young mother who told Jennifer that she home-preschooled her child. Mom was way ahead of her time. We used to just call them mothers.

I remember listening to the radio while Mom was working in the kitchen because she often had it on. In those days there was only AM, and the music was pop, and from movies, and from musicals which were at the top of the charts. My parents didn’t care for rock and roll, but weren’t against it. I do remember liking the songs The Railroad Comes Through the Middle of the House and Sixteen Tons. Who wouldn’t like songs with those titles? One radio personality was Mary Merrifield."

One day we drove to get some big boxes which were Dad’s new electric planer and table saw. I sat in the back seat (car seats and seat belts didn’t exist). When Dad turned a corner the planer shifted and leaned over me and pinned me down. I didn’t want to bother anyone so I didn’t say anything. Dad was surprised when he opened his car door at home and found me buried. This probably explains the pronounced flatness of my right side.

The first time I tasted pizza, which we then called pizza pie, was in Kenosha. When I was about five Aunty Mar and Uncle Byron came up from Missouri and the adults went out. The next day there were some slices of left-over pizza on the kitchen table, and Mom said I could taste it. I didn’t care for it. In those days you had to go to a restaurant for pizza, and since Italian food wasn’t part of my parent’s heritage or experience, and they didn’t have much discretionary money for luxuries, they didn’t eat out very often. I didn’t have another taste of pizza until we lived in Lincoln, Illinois, around high school age. Then I loved it and have loved it ever since.

Other foods I fell in love with included candied crabapples, parched corn, and pickled watermelon rind, tastes which I acquired in Milwaukee. Hint: Christmas ideas.

I wore an assortment of 1950’s kid clothes. I had trouble putting on my socks—the heel frequently ended up on the top of my foot. I imagine I was an easy, nondescript, compliant, intelligent, sensitive, pleasing and teachable kid, and I wish I had had a roomful of me’s the last few years that I taught—I would never have retired. I think I was absent a lot in both kindergartens and first grade. I clearly remember that I had a lot of earaches and sore throats in those years. The only treatment mom knew was for me to lie with my hurting ear pressed against a hot water bottle for unending boring hour after unending boring hour. For sore throats Mom would feed me a spoonful of honey or a spoon of grape jelly. You try to swallow that some time. Regular folks didn’t go to the doctor for earaches back then, and there probably wasn’t anything they could have done.

Those problems pretty much ended in first grade when I had my tonsils removed. The doctor decided to deal with my tonsils head on. The promise was that I would get all the ice cream that I could eat! What a deal! When taken to the hospital I had my first experience with a rectal thermometer. Not only could I not pronounce it correctly, I was humiliated. I was about six years old, and there were about a dozen other kids in my boring, scary, white, humiliating room waiting for their tonsils to be removed and they could get into ice cream heaven. One by one they disappeared and were never seen again. It is a good thing I had never seen the TV shows Bones and Criminal Minds yet. When I got to the operating room all I could see were masked strangers and the ceiling. A cheerful masked nurse put a crappy, stringy mask with chloroform over my face, and the next thing I remember was my throat hurting like one of the words I couldn’t say. Oh, I was given ice cream all right, but my throat hurt so much that I couldn’t swallow air. I had been hoodwinked. At least I began having fewer earaches, although I have always had a tendency towards sore throats when I get a cold. I am a sissy when it comes to earaches.

Back in the 1940’s and 1950’s my parents often left me to play unattended. Since Marcia and I didn’t have a lot of toys, playing seemed to be structured