William

By William H. Zuspan

How would you feel if the first man you remembered living in the house with your mother wasnt your father after all? What if the second father figure drove you and your brother to an orphanage, dropping you off at the age of four? And after a few years as a Catholic, you were taken out of the orphanage and put in a Christian scientist school? What if you had to change your last name then? Would you have been happy?

What if you went from there to another private school with a different religion and then to a public school at age thirteen? Would you have had many friends?

What if you suddenly met your real father, who you had been told was dead, and was given your real last name? What kind of person would you be? Would you have understood why your brother left home when he turned eighteen?

And if you got a scholarship and went to college, leaving you mother to live alone, would you then be happy? Would the rest of your life then be stable and fulfilling?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Apr 28, 2017
• ISBN: 9781524588502

William H. Zuspan

William H. Zuspan graduated with a bachelor's degree in psychology from Kalamazoo College in Kalamazoo, Michigan. He had been in the advertising industry for forty years and is now enjoying his retirement years in Tallahassee, Florida with his wife, Lenore.

Book preview

Copyright © 2017 by William H. Zuspan.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2017902986

ISBN:   Hardcover   978-1-5245-8728-4

   Softcover   978-1-5245-8727-7

   eBook   978-1-5245-8850-2

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: 03/24/2017

Xlibris

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

756069

For Michael and Rebecca

CONTENTS

Preface

WILMA

Beginnings, Rural Missouri

Chicago

Howard

A New Start

Starting Over Again

WILLIAM

From Quincy To The Orphanage

The Orphanage

Hi-Low-Ini-Meani-Ka-Ka-Boom-Cha-Cha-Pi-Wa-Wa!

Wyler Military School

Back Dies

Morgan Park High School

Kalamazoo College

The Army, Marriage And Disaster

New York City

Atlanta

PREFACE

I have written this book primarily for my children, to give them a better understanding of me.

The first part deals with my mother who had a great deal of influence over me, at least for the first third of my life. It is written in the third person of necessity, for what I have learned over the years could not have been written any other way. Her background, before I was born, was unique and is important in explaining why I developed the way I did.

The bulk of the book, however, is my first person best effort to elucidate my path from infancy to adulthood. It was begun years ago when I first tried to understand myself. It goes through the many religions, schools, and relationships I encountered.

Hopefully, the story will enlighten and entertain.

WILMA

BEGINNINGS, RURAL MISSOURI

She was born in 1907. As a toddler, she lived happily on a small remote farm 2 ½ miles east of Steffenville, an unincorporated community, in Lewis County, Missouri. The county, about 15,500 in population, was named after Meriwether Lewis when he was a Missouri Territory Captain, before his later fame as the co-leader of the Lewis & Clark Expedition. It was situated in the northeast corner of Missouri. Her father, Will Crosby Harris, was an only child. Her mother, Geneva Myrtle Allen, had four siblings – two brothers and two sisters. The frame house where Wilma was born was small, with wood stove heat, kerosene lamps, and an outhouse. She was one of two daughters but her sister, Madge, born in 1896, was eleven years older. So, like an only child, Wilma was often by herself. Still, she had many pets to keep her company. A white duck she named Quackers followed her around everywhere and a pig she rode like a pony, she called Curly. There was a swayback gray mare, a rabbit in a six-foot square pen that she talked to, and lots of fuzzy wuzzy baby chickens underfoot. One Thanksgiving morning she couldn’t find her duck, and kept asking about Quackers all day, even at dinner, not realizing she and her family were eating it. She was never told.

When she was six, Myrtle (she didn’t like the name Geneva) and Will, moved to La Belle, MO, population about 700, so Wilma could go with a neighbor boy, who drove a horse and buggy, to school. Her father found work at the Ross Poultry House, a chicken hatchery. La Belle was about 20 miles up state highway 6 from Steffenville. Wilma did not like Labelle or her sister, Madge, who bossed her. But Madge married when Wilma was nine and left. Wilma rejoiced but she remained shy and afraid to speak up in class and, as a result, was a poor student. Home from school, with few children close enough for her to play with, she cut out paper dolls from the Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward catalogues.

She adored her father who years later she described as perfect. Will doted on his youngest daughter. He understood her loneliness and need for attention. He was a simple man who ate peas balancing them on a knife and cautioned anyone who would listen that the way to eat fish was to woller it around in your mouth to catch the bones first before swallowing. He sometimes smoked a pipe made from a corncob and was known to occasionally stop by the only bar in town for a drink. Her mother, a teetotaler, strongly disapproved, but Wilma thought it was the only way her father could get respite from her Mother’s constant criticism. Myrtle taught her daughter to memorize all the books of the Bible both old and new testaments, a feat that she learned by age eight and never forgot. Wilma could not understand her mother, who had the prettiest alto singing voice she ever heard, but could sound so harsh when she spoke to her father. She was seldom comfortable around her mother, who never seemed to pay much attention to her, unlike her father. Yet, Wilma was fond of her mother’s older sisters, Aunt Minnie and Aunt Nette, and loved to visit with them on their farms in nearby Kirksville.

As a Labelle schoolgirl, she was always the shortest, never reaching five feet, but nonetheless played on the girls’ basketball team, a sport popularized by the Bloomer Girls, a semiprofessional team of the era. Her team won the Lewis County championship in 1925, the year she graduated from high school. Years later she would describe her prowess at passing the ball to her team mates between the legs of the opposing team members, and the trick the coach taught the team about sucking on lemon slices to keep from getting winded. She also took fiddle lessons, but was not exceptional. B sharp, never B flat, always B natural, an adage taught by the school’s music teacher, stuck in her mind all her life.

The nearest city, Quincy, Illinois, population 40,000, was just 40 miles to the east, across the Mississippi river. Its newspaper, the Quincy Herald Whig, described a varied and exciting life compared to the monotonous routine in Labelle. Now a high school graduate, Wilma enrolled in Gem City Business College in Quincy to learn shorthand and how to be a secretary. Her father gave her $500 for tuition and room and board at the Quincy Y.W.C.A., where she had to be in her room and have the lights out by 9 p.m. While $500 was a lot of money in 1925, she needed to work at lunchtime behind the cafeteria steam counter in the Gem City building to earn enough money for an occasional new dress. After finishing the six-month secretarial course, the college got her a job at the Moorman Manufacturing Company.

Her sister, Madge, had married when she was 20. She had a son, Clifford, but her husband died in a car crash after only 3 years of marriage. Clifford, just 10 years older than Wilma was like an older brother and she liked him. Madge remarried quickly two years later, this time to the Postmaster of Lewistown, Mo. population about 500. Wilma wanted no part of Labelle or Lewistown and thought her sister’s new social position, as the Postmaster’s wife, was supercilious. Wilma stayed in Quincy and with the job at Moorman’s for three years. Then, her girlfriends told her they were going to Chicago. She joined them landing a secretarial job with Chicago’s Rock Island Railroad. It was 1928. She was 21 years old when she began living in the big city.

In Chicago, far away from home, and still shy, she struggled. Chicago was the first time she had been completely on her own. She hadn’t been really free in Quincy. Her father had been close and she depended on him to cheer her up when she was sad. But he encouraged her to go. She thought she could make it but had just about decided to return to Quincy when, at the urging of her girlfriends, she learned to dance, especially the new Charleston. She was timid at first, not wanting to talk, but there was something about the dance that made her let go. It gave her the feeling of freedom that she felt when she was back at home. She didn’t have to say much, just dance, and young men liked to dance with her. Soon she was boy crazy. She began to like Chicago and to feel she would find a man like her father.

In less than a year she met and fell in love with Carl Zehnle. Carl was bright and ambitious and soon had a job with the fledgling Galvin Manufacturing Company, founded in 1928, and later to become the hugely successful Motorola Corporation. She married him in March, 1929.

CHICAGO

Wilma was first attracted to Carl because, while she didn’t meet him there, he was from Quincy. It made her feel protected that he was not a Chicagoan, but from a place not far from home that she knew well. Chicago was an exciting, but scary place, especially for a young woman. The city had boomed, doubling its population from about 1½ million in 1900 to nearly 3½ million in 1928. It was the second largest city in the United States. Only New York City was bigger. Jazz clubs, with their new, exhilarating music, dotted the flat Chicago landscape. Louis Armstrong, a recent transplant from New Orleans, was