Born in a Meadow: Memories of World Travels, Jazz, Sports, Business, and Laughs

By Robert Higgins

Born in a Meadow is a book of memories of a boy determined to prove to himself that being handicapped was not an excuse for giving up on high aspirations.

During his life, he had three careers; music, stock brokerage, and international business, and he excelled in all three.

He traveled in thirty countries, had friends

• Language: English
• Publisher: Robert Higgins
• Release date: Nov 21, 2023
• ISBN: 9798986694627

Book preview

Born in a Meadow

I grew up thinking I was born in a picturesque little village in Idaho where it snowed a lot. The picture I remember was of my dad and mom standing waist deep in snow in front of our house, with long icicles hanging down from the eaves.

Many years later, I learned it wasn’t a picturesque little village at all, but a fairly drab lumber camp. My dad worked for the Boise Payette Lumber Company, operating the crane that lifted logs onto railway flat cars for shipment to the lumber mill. There were living quarters for the single men and houses for the married men and their families. There was a two-room schoolhouse, where my mother and another teacher taught grades one through eight. Everything belonged to the Company. The name of the place was Cabarton, named after Mr. C. A. Barton, a company official.

All I knew about Cabarton was what others had told me, since my family moved to California when I was only two years old. An opportunity to see the place where I was born came in November 1964, after I was married and the father of two little girls, Robyn and Jody. My grandfather, Henry Bigelow, was approaching his 100th birthday, and my mother’s family members were planning to be in Nampa, Idaho, to celebrate the occasion. My brother Horace and I, with our wives, our mother, and the girls, packed up in my station wagon and set out from Southern California on the 900-mile trip. On the way, we encountered a snowstorm in Northern California, much to the delight of the girls, who managed to do some sledding near the hotel where we stayed one night.

The highlight of the trip was driving with my cousin, Bert Higgins, up Highway 55, about 80 miles north to Cabarton. The scenery was magnificent. There was snow on the ground, but the sky was clear, and the sun was shining. There were views of the Payette River and of the railroad where my dad had loaded logs onto flat cars. I lost track of time and had no idea how close we were to Cabarton.

Cabarton, Idaho—1920

We were driving through a peaceful, snow-covered meadow, with no buildings in sight, when Bert suddenly stepped on the brakes and stopped the car. He swung open the door and trotted over to a fence that ran parallel to the road. He climbed over and waded several strides through the snow, where he came to a stop. He turned around to face us; then he stepped a few steps to one side as though he were aligning himself with something across the road. When he was satisfied with his position, he shouted to us, I am standing on your front porch!

When the company decided to move out, they loaded all the houses, barns, equipment, and even the schoolhouse onto flat cars and headed for a new place to chop down trees. Nothing was left behind but a beautiful, quiet, snow-covered meadow.

Traveled the world

From London to Edo

Before I learned

I was born in a meadow.

Horace and I were born at home in Cabarton, he in 1922 and I in 1925. Our older brother, John, was born in the same house in Cascade, a small town about six miles to the north, in 1919. Our mother said she lived in the same house in five different locations, including once while it was being transported on a flat car.

The doctor who delivered me was young and inexperienced when he came to our house on the night of April 20, 1925. In her book, my mother describes the events of that night as follows:

The house was quiet. The doctor had gone. The next-door neighbor had returned to her home. The newborn baby was in a crib beside my bed. I was tucked in for the night.

My husband came into the room. I have to talk to you, he said.

U-m-m, I replied.

There’s something wrong with the little fellow. The doctor said he might not live through the night. He said not to tell you, but I thought I should.

I knew there was something wrong. He had to be patted before he cried, and then it was not a vigorous squall.

I am glad you did, I replied. I’d rather know it.

The doctor was shook up. There’s something wrong with the baby’s right leg. It’s useless. That’s why it took so long. It’s the first handicapped baby he ever delivered. He felt worse than I did. My husband paused.

What time is it? I asked.

Not yet 11 o’clock, he replied.

Then he was born on April 20, 1925. That’s a month early. Bring him to me, and put him on my arm, I said.

John took him out of his crib and placed him beside me. I pushed away his blanket and put his body next to my own near my chest. If he must pass away, he needn’t be lonely. He could hear my heartbeat and the other rumblings he had always heard. John seemed to be happier. He kissed me and went back to his camp cot in the living room.

Born on April 20. Perhaps died April 21. In the morning we might have a statistic. How handicapped was he? Was he all right mentally? How much of a burden would he be to himself? I was not able to answer.

Going into the Presence may be easier if you are faced with a grave situation. I achieved laying this problem down in a short time. I touched the bottom level, as some say. I prayed through, as others say. I was at peace. I went to sleep.

I awoke at daylight. I looked down at my baby at my side. He was breathing. God had done His will. I was satisfied. John was happy. We’ll take good care of him, he said. We named him Robert. Everything was right.

Mom and Dad in front of our house with John—1920

For fifteen years, we celebrated my birthday on the 20th of April, including 1930, when it fell on Easter Sunday. When I was fifteen years old, we needed a birth certificate for some reason, and I wrote to the authorities in Boise, requesting one. When it arrived, we were surprised to learn that it said I was born on April 21st. Considering that my father carried a gold Hamilton watch in his watch pocket, my mother knew that I was born before 11:00 o’clock on April 20th. Her theory is that the young doctor, shaken by his first difficult delivery, arrived home late and went to bed without doing his paperwork. The following morning, he must have guessed I was born at 1:00 a.m. on April 21st, which is the time that appears on the certificate. I much preferred the 20th, but I have gone along with the authorities, nevertheless.

My mother wrote about an incident that happened in 1927, when I was two years old. My father was returning home from work one afternoon, walking up the snow-covered path to our house. On the way, he found me coming to meet him, creeping in the snow, with my hands in his rubber shoe covers. He picked me up and carried me to the house with tears in his eyes and said to my mother, Let’s get out of this country. The harsh weather of Idaho was no place to raise a disabled child. So, in the winter of 1927, our family moved from Idaho to Southern California. Later my mother said I had changed their lives.

Early Life

We lived several weeks in Los Angeles, where my dad took a course at an automotive school. Then we went on to Pomona, where my paternal grandparents lived. My dad got a job as a Master Machinist at the Pomona Valley Machine Works.

Shortly after we settled in Pomona, my dad took me to the Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles, where I was outfitted with a peg leg. Strapped on at my waist, it was made of wood and had a leather pad, where I placed my knee, while my deformed lower leg dangled behind. I learned to walk. I no longer had to crawl or hop from one room to another.

Later I would discover that I could run, although not very fast. I never asked my mother if she knew why I had been born with deformities. I didn’t want her to feel guilty.

The first memories of my life occurred when we were living on West Third Street in Pomona. Donnie and DeeDee Christiansen lived next door and were a little older than I. They played with matches and burned down two garages and a makeshift clubhouse. They were angry because the big boys wouldn’t let them enter the little cardboard shack they had built in the narrow space between the Christiansens’ garage and ours. Donnie and DeeDee, of course, had intended to burn down only the clubhouse.

Bobby—age 11

Margie Helms lived across the street. Their garbage pail was always full of empty blue bottles of her mother’s headache medicine.

I cut my foot on a piece of glass in the vacant lot across the alley behind our house. I still have the scar.

A photographer took pictures of each of my brothers and me sitting on his Shetland pony by the side of our house.

I climbed into the back of the iceman’s truck to get a chip of ice to suck on and cried when he drove away with me still in the truck.

I went to a movie with my brothers and, when we got home, my uncle Charles asked me if the movie was a talkie.

When I was five years old, my mother sent me to kindergarten. After the first day, I complained to her that the children did nothing but drink milk and take naps. She said I didn’t have to go back to school until the following year. My mother was a university graduate and teacher. She introduced me to books. I enjoyed going to the public library with her and looking through the shelves of children’s books. She must have read to me a lot. I knew the nursery rhymes and children’s stories, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses.

The next year, we moved to a bigger house next door to my Uncle Clarence. I entered first grade at Kaufmann Elementary School. Sitting on my left in the last row was a boy named Masao Tomita, whose family had just arrived from Japan. Masao spoke no English. I was given the assignment to be his host and help him to become acclimated to his new environment. I taught him to wave either one or two fingers in the air if he needed to go to the restroom. We became friends. I knew his mother but never met his father. Years later, just before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Masao’s family moved back to Japan. I have since wondered whether their move was coincidental or planned. Was Masao’s father a Japanese spy? Did Masao become a kamikaze pilot and sink our ships? Did he survive World War II?

When I was in grammar school, classes were divided into half-years, so that one teacher might be teaching low second grade in one room and another teaching high second at the same time in another room, making it possible for a student to be promoted a half-year. This happened to me in the first grade and again in the third grade; these promotions resulted in my being a year younger than my classmates. I don’t know precisely why I was promoted, but I suspect it had something to do with my restlessness. The easiest way for a teacher to cure the problem was to pass me on to someone else.

I began selling Liberty magazines at five cents a copy on Wednesdays and Thursdays after school. I was making my own money. In my own little way, I became financially independent. The country was in the middle of the Great Depression, but I always had coins jingling in my pocket. I built my business up until I was selling more than 100 copies a week. At a profit of one-and-one-half cents a copy, I was taking home more than $1.50 a week, plus an occasional tip. In addition, I got brownies and greenies, which I could trade for merchandise. Five greenies equaled one brownie. The first thing I bought with them was a box camera made of cardboard, with a lens in front and a roll of film at the back. Looking for a subject for my first pictures, I walked down the street to the Gray Granite Company, where my Uncle Clarence worked, and took pictures of the gravestones on display in front of the building.

Prohibition was still in effect. My dad, like many others, occasionally made a supply of home brew, which was illegal at the time. I remember him closing the kitchen curtains and mixing the ingredients to make his own beer. The benefit to my brothers and me was that he also made root beer for us. It was powerful. When we opened the bottles, the bottlecaps and foam nearly hit the ceiling. Maybe he used too much yeast.

When I was six or seven years old, my family drove to Escondido to visit my Aunt Lila and Uncle Roy. They lived on a hill surrounded by their avocado grove. A narrow dirt road led up the hill from the street to the house.

One day I climbed into Uncle Roy’s car to play like I always did in my dad’s car at home. I was jiggling the steering wheel back and forth and having a great time. I wiggled the gear stick and shifted into neutral. The car began to move. My dad, who had been sitting on the porch, saw me and came running. He jumped on the running board and steered the car down the hill. This may have been the first of many dumb things I’ve done in my life. Some of them are mentioned in this book. Others, I have left among my list of things to forget.

On March 10, 1933, a month before my eighth birthday, we were having dinner when the house began to shake. It was the Long Beach earthquake. Many buildings were destroyed, and more than 100 people died. Luckily, Pomona, 30 miles away, was not seriously affected. But it was scary while it lasted.

The Great Depression

On October 29, 1929, Black Tuesday, the stock market crashed, and the longest depression of the 20th century began. Unemployment reached 24 percent. It would be 10 years before there was any meaningful recovery.

Add to this the Dust Bowl in the panhandles of Oklahoma and Texas, and parts of Kansas. Heavy dust storms blew off tons of topsoil, making it impossible to grow crops. Banks foreclosed on farmers. Thousands of families packed up what little belongings they had and migrated to California in hopes of finding farm work. These people were referred to as Okies whether or not they came from Oklahoma. The era is masterfully chronicled in John Steinbeck’s book The Grapes of Wrath.

At home in Pomona, people helped each other, drivers trusted hitchhikers, front doors of houses were left unlocked, and parked cars had open windows. Survival was the common denominator. My dad, fortunately, was never unemployed, but the money he earned barely supported a family of five. Our dinner frequently included a pound of round steak, pounded. The pounding the butcher gave it not only tenderized the meat but also made it look bigger when cut into