The Autobiography of Jerome Kearney

By Jerome Kearney

A semi-auto biographic account of a baby boomer's life from birth to the present time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Feb 22, 2021
• ISBN: 9781664159983

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Copyright © 2021 by Jerome Kearney.

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.

The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

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

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 02/22/2021

Xlibris

844-714-8691

www.Xlibris.com

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Contents

The Undulating Sour Cream Ball

The Sensitivity Meeting

One Night at the Saloon

The Inspection

The Boom Box

The Guest House

The Rubber

The Orangutan

Eighth-Grade English Class

Eighth Grade English Class

The Woman in the Fake Cake

The Book Report

Getting Laid in a Combat Zone

Pull Over

Marijuana

The Coyote

The Vietnam War

Rat Lab

The Radio Station Survey

I was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1947. The weather that day was unusually warm. I was the firstborn child of my parents, Brennan and Doris Kearney, who had married in 1941 at a wedding at Mount Olivet Lutheran Church in Minneapolis. My father had already joined the army shortly after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in Hawaii in 1941. My father then went to Officer Candidate School at Fort Benning Georgia. He was trained to be in the ski troop and to be an intelligence officer. He participated in the third wave of the Normandy invasion in 1944. He was wounded by shrapnel from a German artillery shell in northwestern France during the invasion. He recovered in England and returned to combat in northwestern France for the duration of the war. Near the end of the war, my father, who already spoke fluent French, actually took a French language course at the Sorbonne in Paris.

After my father went overseas, my mother worked in a bomber factory in Omaha, Nebraska, as a quality control inspector. My mother’s twin sister also worked at the bomber factory in some other capacity.

Both my mother and father had graduated from the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. My mother had majored in fashion design in college, and my father had majored in journalism and advertising.

After the war, my father returned to Minneapolis and began to work in the garment and advertising businesses. My mother wanted to have three children like her twin sister Desire’, and soon became pregnant. I was my parents’ first child and my parents named me Jerome. I was a normal, healthy baby. In those days, the norm was for a couple to have three kids.

Although I have a Scot-Irish name, I am in fact mostly Scandinavian: 57 % Norwegian, 25 % Swedish, 10 % Finish, and 8 % Scot-Irish. My father’s father was Scot-Irish, and my great grandfather on my father’s side was Scot-Irish.

Two years later my parents had a second child they named Ronald, and two years after that, they had a third child, they named Leonard. In the early 1950s, our family lived in a two-bedroom, one-bathroom postwar bungalow that we referred to as the little brown house. The backyard was large and the front was medium-sized. My father took great pains to develop the landscaping in the front and back yards.

During the first winter, I can remember in 1950 when I was three years old, my father used to take me sledding in the hilly areas of Minneapolis. One day he told a middle-aged neighbor named Whitney, who lived two doors away, hooked his Irish setter named Clancy up to my sled and pulled me down the street. That was big fun for a little three-year-old kid.

During the day my father worked in downtown Minneapolis in the advertising business. He tended to take on clients who operated men’s clothing stores because he had prior experience in the men’s ware business. In those days my parents didn’t have their own car so my father took the bus to and from work. I always remembered how happy I was to see him when he returned from work. He would always hug us.

So my mother was a homemaker despite her education. She seemed to be happy with that role. Her twin sister Desiré, who lived in Owatonna, Minnesota, came to Minneapolis quite often because her second child Thomas had polio and had to get treatments. My mother would often sit in the living room with her twin sister and did fashion sketches. She also read upscale women’s magazines, Vogue and and Harper’s Bazaar.

Her twin sister and her son Thomas would ride with us as we went to a near grocery store called Langer’s Grocery. In those days, grocery stores were just medium-sized but had a butcher department for fresh meats.

In the late weekday afternoons after my father was home from work, I would sit on the living room couch with him while my mother made dinner in the kitchen. He would read the newspaper and drink a couple of martinis and eat peanuts or mixed nuts. We would also listen to the radio. The shows on the radio included the Great Gildersleeve and Ammos and Andy.

When dinner was ready, I would sit with my parents at the dining room table with a booster seat on my chair and eat the same food my parents did. My parents always had candles and a floral centerpiece on the dining room table. My younger brother had been fed baby food prior to us eating dinner, and he was already tucked away in our bedroom. My mother was an excellent cook and made interesting foods for dinner which I automatically enjoyed. After dinner, my father would carry me into the bedroom and put me in my crib. My mother always gave me a good night hug and kiss and referred to me as her honeybunch.

Eventually my father bought a used 1946 Ford woody station wagon. That car seemed to run okay but sometimes there were issues with getting it started. Prior to that time my mother had not had a driver’s license or driven a car. One day I went with my folks to an area with little or no traffic, and my father taught my mother how to drive. In those days all the cars were stick shift. From that point on, my mother would often borrow her mother’s old Buick four-door sedan to run errands.

The Ford woody station wagon proved to be too problematic, so my father traded it for a Jeep station wagon. That vehicle ran well, but my mother complained about the ride being too stiff. My folks finally traded that vehicle off for a Mercury coupe. That car was very comfortable and ran well. My brother and I would ride in the back seat.

In 1951 my father bought a used TV from his father. The wooden set was large, but the screen was relatively small. In those days, TVs were only black and white. We often had to futz with the controls because the picture was acting up. We watched the Milton Berle Show, Cid Ceasar, and the Howdy Doody Show. One day my father said that the Howdy Doody Show was coming to Minneapolis, and we would be able to see them in downtown Minneapolis and Dayton’s department store. Sure enough, all of the characters on the Howdy Doody Show were there. That was a great bit of entertainment for a little kid like me.

In the spring of 1951, my parents drove my brother and me down to Owatonna, Minnesota, to stay with our aunt and uncle because my mother was about to deliver her third child. In early May 1951, my mother and father arrived at my aunt and uncle’s house in Owatonna with the new baby boy they named Leonard.

In the daytime when my father was away at work and I was four years old, I would play with my best friend David who lived across the street. Sometimes David and I would walk a few blocks north of our immediate neighborhood where there was another neighborhood that featured a large pile of black dirt that made a small hill that we called a mountain. After a couple of hours, we would go back home.

At night in the summer of 1951, I remember my mother, father, and I would sit on the front steps and enjoy the warm summer evening. The skies would be clear, and we could see the stars and the moon. My father pointed out the Big Dipper and the Little Dipper to me. There were fireflies at night as well and occasional bats.

One night while we were sitting on the front porch, I noticed calliope music and bright lights in the near distance across some farm fields. There would also be the occasional dinging of a bell. I asked my folks what was causing the music and the bell dinging. My father said it was the carnival and that he would take me over to see it.

He put me on his shoulders and carried me through a large pasture to the carnival. I went on some of the rides including the Ferris wheel which was frightening to me. We saw what was making the occasional dinging sound. A strong man would step to the base of a tall structure and pound the baseboard with a sledgehammer. If he pounded hard enough, a metal puck would rise up a tube in the tall structure and hit a bell. I asked my father if he was going to do it, and he declined. We got some popcorn to eat, and we then went back home.

During those early years, my mother and I would occasionally take the train to Owatonna, Minnesota, a pleasant medium-sized city sixty-five miles south of Minneapolis, where my mother’s twin sister, husband, and three sons lived in a nice large two-story house my uncle had designed on a large lot. My uncle was a mechanical engineer for a company in Owatonna, and he made a pretty good salary. I loved riding on the train especially the dining car and the observation car.

By that time my youngest brother Leonard had been born. Now my parents had three boys just like my mother’s twin sister Desiré. She seemed happy about that and had a photographer come to our house one day and take a photo of us three boys. I still have that picture after all these years.

Next door to us there was a family that had two children, a boy my age named Jerry and his older sister Jeanie who was nine years old. In the middle of the day, I would go to the edge of our lot and Jerry would come out to the edge of his family’s lot. I would try to be friendly with Jerry, but he would always end up hitting me. He would not hurt me badly, but it was just the unfriendliness of it that bothered me.

One weekend day when my father was home from work I went into our house and told my father about Jerry always hitting me. He said, Well, just hit him back.

The next time I went to the edge of our lot and Jerry hit me, I smacked him back good and hard. Jerry went blubbering into his house. A short time later I was out front on the edge of our lot playing with my toy truck in the dirt. There was a rake nearby that my father had been using to rake the front of our yard.

Jerry’s older sister Jeanie came out and started ragging on me about hitting Jerry. To me she seemed threatening, and I picked up the rake and hit her on the head with it. Jeanie’s head began to bleed, and she screamed and ran into her house. I went into our house and told my father I had hit Jeanie in the head with a rake.

My father said, We’d better go next door and see about Jeanie. As we approached the front of the house, Jeanie’s father was carrying her out to his car. She had a bloody towel wrapped around her head. Amazingly my father said nothing about the incident to me.

One winter my father and I were sitting in our kitchen at a counter in front of a window. There was snow on the ground outside. My father and I were eating sandwiches. My father was drinking a glass of white wine. Just then the garbage truck pulled up to the edge of our lot and one of the garbage men lifted the full garbage can and dumped it into the garbage bin of the big truck, spilling quite a bit of the garbage. My mother saw this and immediately yelled out the back door, Pick up that garbage, you goddamn son of bitch! and ran toward the garbage truck. The startled garbage man immediately picked up the spilled garbage. That was the first time I realized my mother was quite capable of using swear words.

My father used to take me to see a movie