Memoirs-A Family in Luck

A Family In Luck

Even in those postwar 1940’s and ‘50s years posthumously stamped with the imprimatur of “the good old days” and the “true period of American family values” our family was not a storybook family. Well into late adulthood we, the get of the strange pairing that became our parents, railed at the Scot's harshness of our mother while holding the gentle amiableness of our father in utter contempt.

Like most ungrateful children, and all children are ungrateful, our every failure and disappointment was laid at their feet.

But then none of my friends had a story book family either and even within the tensions and failures of our own family I knew that we were luckier than a lot of other people.

Our neighborhood, in those years, was a quiet one with every third house being inhabited by a single woman or women. The three Ostertag sisters never married. Beaulah Rittermeyer never married. Mrs. Faucett was a widow, as was Mrs. Mathews, Mrs. Rientschler, Mrs. KirkPatrick, Mrs. O’Dell, Mrs. Crabtree and poor Mrs. Gallup whose husband, driven mad, it was said, by the death of their infant son, lived out his life at the St. Joe Asylum for the Insane. Shieldsy, a family friend, and Poppy lived quietly with Poppy’s damaged lungs..he was gassed in France during WWI… and visits from their daughter and occasionally one of their sons.

It was not a particularly bad neighborhood nor was it a particularly good one. Just a conglomeration of people whose generation, scarred and manipulated by two world wars, an influenza pandemic, (a 1918 global disaster in which 28% of the U.S. population suffered, and 500,000 to 675,000 died), a depression, a land killing drought, and in some instances, the struggle to figure out the ground rules in a new country or how to live after losing everything, lived their lives.

Three of my peers ..in the neighborhood… were victims of habitual incest, two of my closest friends lived on dirt floors, one of whose mother was severely mentally challenged, childhood entertainment at the home of another friend consisted of hiding behind the sofa and watching her mother entertain her men friends and the one friend I had whose family came closest to belonging to a storybook family..because they were catholic and attended church en masse.. lived, as did her mother and siblings, in real fear of her Irish father who liked to use his fists on them.

Three of my friends were raised in what was then referred to as basement houses, one of which had no partitions and one bed for a family of ten. These were simply basements upon which a house had never been built.

The boy that I was later to marry grew up, with his five brothers, in a basement. Stacked at night on pole beds to keep dry when it rained because the basement leaked so badly. They could tell you about wading through inches of water, carrying their shoes, to reach the door and starting for school without breakfast and with lunch (which was called dinner back then) just a fantasy someone else dreamed up.

But the biggest difference in the lives of my family and that of my peers was in the matter of entertainment.

We went places. We did things.

Wound together like a snarled ball of scratchy wool yarn harassed by an ill-tempered cat..we went places and did things.

Every summer we made our pilgrimage to Swope Park, home of The Kansas City Zoo and the infamous Swope Lookout. Often caravanning …the washtub with the watermelon, a jug of tea and a couple dozen bottles of Coca Cola and Nehi pop (orange for me, grape for my brother, Merle and Crème Soda for sister, Marion, with tea and Coke for the older people) in someone's trunk and the packed food boxes in another, we always made one stop on the highway at Leimkuhler’s Gas Station and Ice-house to buy a 25 pound block of ice to be chipped over the watermelon and pop and covered snugly with a gunny sack.

We went to the show at the Armour regularly, partly for the movie and more importantly for the newsreels. We went to Nelson’s, the neighborhood tavern/dance hall. We were regulars at the skating rink.

In the summer we would not have missed going to Winnwood Lake each weekend with it’s free show, outside dance floor and the multicolored juke-box that blared boogie woogie until mid-night, not to mention the on-grounds carnival. Occasionally we swam in the man-made lake but only when one of my sisters had a swimsuit to show off.

In the autumn and through the winter we were regulars at The Brush Creek Follies, a country music show that appeared regularly at the Shriners Temple Auditorium in Kansas City. We saw the young Minnie Pearl and Tex Ritter and Red Foley, Tiny Tim (who wasn’t tiny at all) and Herb Kratoska and Tex Owens and his daughter Laura Lee whom I was named after. Many of these entertainers became friends of the family and were guests in our home.

My parents knew personally members of the The Texas Rangers, a western harmony group franchised to KMBC Radio in Kansas City during that time. Among other things they did a noon-time music and news thing that we never missed. One of my earliest memories is being held high in Mother’s arms so I could listen to the little plastic radio on the shelf on the kitchen wall while the Texas Rangers sang Pony Boy (my favorite song) and dedicated it to me, little Nanie Stock.

There was a lot of spur-of-the-moment stuff. Someone would have an idea and off we would go! Like the time they installed the searchlight at the waterworks in North Town!

One night all of a sudden, off to the South West, a huge shaft of light, inspired by the great search lights over London during the War, swept the night sky. It was awesome..nothing short of miraculous. We all jumped in the car and off we went to see the actual item. There it stood. A huge beam of light seemingly coming right out of the ground there in front of the Water Works building! Piercing the sky farther than even the mind could see! Standing there in that family, dressed in varying degrees of shabby, we were one in our awe, connected like no other family.

It seems to me that this was our real story..…we ran and flew and crashed and rose to run again....like a kite with long tails, everyone clutching..no one allowed to let go. It's true, you don't choose your family. It is the luck of the draw.

But in many ways that mattered we were a family in luck!

The Day Bud Killed the Goose

On the Sundays of my childhood the table was always stretched to the limit with extra plates and extra people, neighbors, stray relatives, kids kicked out by their more discerning parents, friends and often the unsuspecting prey of one of my older siblings.

On these occasions the menu was expanded to surpass the ordinary weekly suppers of meatloaf, beans and ham, tuna and noodles, goulash etc. This added Sunday touch usually meant a trip to the back yard for somebody, hatchet in hand, to do in a chicken or two or even on rare occasions a duck. They were quickly scalded, plucked had a little cold water run over them and popped into the skillet if young enough and if not, sentenced to serve considerable time in the oven. This kind of menu, with Mom’s biscuits and gravy and anything scrounged from our ill-cared-for garden, could be stretched a long way and always was.

Not a member of our family reached adulthood without acquiring the skill to look at a platter of chicken, mathematically determine the number of pieces divided by the members of the board, so to speak, and know without asking how many pieces or what piece would be their lot. The old saying ”I get the neck of the chicken..” did not come out of thin air. Merle and I generally got the wings.

The day Bud, the newest and, on this occasion most unfortunate, member of our coterie of friends, was charged with killing the goose, I was very uneasy. In the first place I was sorry to kill the goose, even if we had worked our way through all the chickens for the year. He was not a bad old goose and liked to follow me and my brother around. I would miss him.

And then Bud was a novice at goose killing. That worried me a little. To me, even with his sleeves rolled up, Bud looked awfully dressed up for goose killing. He was not and never became, a country boy. He came courting in the dress of the day, that is a white dress shirt, neat grey slack pants and shiny brown oxford’s. I sure hoped he wouldn’t get goose blood on his good shoes.

But what I should have been worrying about was my brother, Merle. Merle was what you might call accident prone.

The goose was easy to catch. Like everything else in the backyard in hopes of handouts better than their regular fair of dried up grass hoppers, half cracked walnuts and June bug grubs, he followed anyone who made the mistake of going out there. He never seemed to catch on to the Sunday dinner thing.

With Merle in the lead and the goose under his arm we angled down the path, through the weeds, to the spot where the chickens were generally killed. There past the cinder pile and under the walnut tree was a big rock.

The general run of things was that someone would hold the victims legs while someone else stretched the neck out over the rock and someone else swung and whacked. Miraculously on rare occasions, if pressed for time, Mother was able to single handedly do the deed and be scalding and plucking in half the time. But for the rest of us it took three people. It was not a pretty sight and I don’t think any of the victims liked it.

I know Bud didn’t. I don’t think Bud had ever killed anything in his life and I’m sure he never did again. His mistake was he was just not forceful enough! His first whack missed completely causing Merle’s hand to slip on the goose’s squirming neck. Just as he was taking a second swing Merle let go to get a better grip, just in time to get his thumb in the way.

Missed the goose again..got the thumb. Blood spurted..not goose blood..all over the shiny shoes. I forgot I wasn’t supposed to cuss and said “Damn, Bud.”

I glanced up to see if he was mad about the blood thing or the cussing thing and he didn’t look mad but his face was whiter than the goose. I think he would have passed out if he hadn’t been afraid of falling on top of the goose and Merle’s bloody thumb.

Merle sucked on his thumb and hollered, “Hit him again” and Bud did and the goose was dead, or at least trying to be. He was harder to catch dead than he had been alive..flopping around in the tall grass.

Merle finally got hold of him and we hung him up to bleed out before taking him in to Mom. Merle stayed with the goose but I felt like Bud needed someone worse than the goose did at that point. Anyway, he let me hold his hand all the way to the house.

He continued to date my sister and turned out to be a great brother-in-law. We loved him dearly. After all, you can't hold one little accident against a person.

Ski Season

I hear it’s skiing weather again and I am all for it! True, here in the glacier scraped flatlands of North Missouri skiers are a rather insignificant part of the sporting population..unlike deer slayers, turkey hunters, rodent trappers, cat-fish snaggers and such..but I have fond memories of the skiing world.

Yes, I have skied. At one point in my life, in those insanity driven days of somewhat youthful motherhood, thinking it would serve to prepare them for “life beyond”, I often bombarded my suffering children and grandchildren with experiences over which I had no control. (Other than the ordinary day to day stuff over which I also had no control.)

The Great Ski Trip was on the list and I remember it well……we were living in Henry County back then and…

**************

The planning stage of this trip had gone well, I thought. Kathy, at Clinton’s “Going Places” travel agency had done a great job for us. Also there was a lot of communication beforehand. I remember a conversation with my oldest son, Les, calling from his home in Kansas City.

“Well, Hi, Son. What’s up?”

“Nothing much. I just called to see what you were wearing to ski.”

“Oh, something warm I guess. You know how I hate to be cold. Something warm and lots of it.”

“Well, why don’t you let me pick you up something up here in Kansas City? How about ski bibs? (snowpants for big people)

“Well, I kind of thought I might wear my snowsuit. You know. The one I got the winter we kept the hogs.”

A long silence here. I think he was trying to remember what my snowsuit looked like.

“Mom, I don’t think they are wearing too many snowsuits on the slopes. Why don’t you let me pick you up some bibs? What color is your jacket?”

“I don’t know. Just a minute.” I had to lay the phone down to get to the side of the house where the window by the basketball hoop was.

“John, what color is that coat you said I could borrow?”

He said it was brown.

“It’s brown,” I tell Les, “Brown with tan arms. I remember now.”

Another silence. This conversation was beginning to drag.

“Mom, I don’t think they’re wearing too much brown anymore.”

By now I was getting bored and changed the subject. I hate conversations that don’t seem to be going anywhere.

Later, I had to admit, the kid was right. We didn’t see too many people in shiny-blue snowsuits. Mostly they wore matching mauve, pink, blue, yellow or gray ski suits with little square bottle warmers velcroed to their backsides.

My son turned out matched up like an advertisement for Johnny Walker, with gray ski bibs and matching jacket, gray and mauve-rimmed goggles and mauve and gray eiderdown gloves. The kid had turned into a yuppy!

At ski school my youngest son, John, and three of my nine grandchildren, Sean, 13, Stephanie, eight..(or maybe nine), Chris, nine..(or maybe eight,) and I struggled with “pies”, (that’s keeping the front of the skis in a pigeon-toed position), stopping, (anyway you can,) and “getting up off the ground.”

According to ski types there is an acceptable way and a disgusting way to get up. I tried to master the first, which involves tucking your knees under you and raising yourself with your arms. During this process I noticed that a disproportionate amount of body weight had recently and mysteriously settled below my waistline.

I opted for the disgusting way and you don’t want to hear about it.

We survived ski school and by afternoon were on Schoolmarm Trail a gentle trail designed for grandmothers in blue snowsuits and small children.

I only fell four times! I was ecstatic! What did it matter that I took the slope in the pie position? I could ski!

We stood in line to buy lunch and another to get a table to eat at. The only time we had a table to ourselves the whole weekend was when Chris threw up during a rest period the first day. I guess it was the altitude.

The next day, still beaming over my accomplishment on Schoolmarm Trail, I scrambled up the shuttle-bus steps in my overstuffed snow suit expecting another day of success on skis.

But it was not to be. This mountain was different. This mountain was not kind. My “pies” did not hold. My skis kept crossing, sending me somersaulting downwards and crossways.! If they didn’t cross I built up too much speed and bounced from snow bank to snow bank!

I was miserable.

At this point my son, the Yuppy, turned into a cross between the Nordic Ski Patrol and Ghengis Kahn.

“Use your downhill ski! Turn! Turn! Don’t lay in the trail! Get up! Use your downhill ski! Turn! Turn! Don’t lay in the trail!”

Like Erma Bombeck, I tried to remember those days before he was born and why I had wanted a child. There must have been a reason but I couldn’t think of any.

I fell seventeen times before I stopped counting. It was getting very tiresome. I was getting very angry. My son was beginning to exhibit signs of embarrassment I hadn’t seen since he was a teenager.

I tried to look at things from his point of view.

Yes, it must be embarrassing to look down at your fat little mother, in her out-dated snowsuit, groveling in the snow. Yes, I could understand that. Thinking of his problems helped me put the whole thing in perspective.

Calmly removing my skis I announced that I would walk to the next spot on which I felt competent to ski. “When pigs fly,” I muttered into the zipper tab of my snow suit.

By the look on my sons face you would have thought I had suggested trussing up my grandchildren and using them for snowshoes!

“Nobody walks on the mountain,” he says.

“I walk on mountains,” say I.

“Nobody walks on the mountain,” he says.

“You said that, Boy. You’re wrong. I walk on mountains,” I said.

“It’s against the rules,” he says. “Nobody walks on the mountain.”

“You know what they can do with that rule?” I say.

He looked at me and started to say something but didn’t. I think he was remembering the time I threw the chair at him for torturing his sister.

I walked down the mountain.

…But I DID SKI! For one day..I DID SKI!

Washers, Dryers and Bubbles Galore

(The model in this photo and her location are unidentified for fear some one may come and steal her laundry off the line.)

Dishwashers are nice and I would like to have one even though, although I hate to cook, I do not hate to do dishes in the sink the old fashioned way.

Even if I can’t actually remember being present when fire was first used by man I am old enough to still fervently appreciate hot water at the sink with bubbly grease-resistant soap in a bottle. Like washers and dryers, they are wonders not to be taken lightly.

Until I was nine years old the water in the house came only to the kitchen sink and was piped from a cistern at the back of the house. The 20^th century had advanced slowly at our house, as at our neighbors’, but at one point the small hand pump at the sink had been replaced with an honest to goodness modern faucet. It was yet another six or eight years before the bathroom arrived and with it hot water. That was followed later by a shower in the tub and after that there was no stopping us.

Before all this scientific progress, doing laundry was a day long-process done in the basement where the wringer -washer and two tubs of rinse water were set up.

The basement was a wet and dreary place lighted by a bare 60 watt bulb suspended from the ceiling with a pull string to switch it on and off. A family of toads lived year round in the northwest corner and spider webs were so thick overhead I used to think they held the house up. The redeeming features of the basement were the water spigot above the washing machine and the drain in the southeast corner.

In the early years the water was heated in a great oblong pot that covered completely the double-burnered electric plate on the wooden bench in the corner. I remember Mom emptying the steaming water into the washer. How she even lifted it is a wonder. Later, the hot water heater made the job a lot easier.

The first step was to sort everything by color into piles; whites, colored, bedding, denim/work clothes etc.. equal to load capacity. We had a large family so there were generally 10-12 loads.

Then powdered soap and bleach was put in the wash water. The first rinse tub was left plain but “bluing” was put in the second rinse tub. Bluing was just that..a blueish dye that made white things really white.

The first load into the washer was generally bed linen then dishcloths, washcloths, white shirts, underwear and everything that needed a strong bleaching. The washer was turned on and the load was left to wash for about 20 minutes.

During this first wash a large pan of starch was set to cook on the stove. Almost all of the colored things: shirts, blouses, work clothes etc. were starched so there had to be quite a lot of it made up. The powdered starch came in a box, had to be mixed and cooked to a thick paste separately.

At our house a pot of beans, having spent the night soaking in the double boiler on the kitchen stove, was set to cook while the wash was going on. With cornbread, that made a ready supper after a grueling day running up and down the basement stairs lugging baskets of wet laundry.

Each load had to be run through the wringer from washer to first tub to second tub and again to starch. The things to be starched were dipped in a dishpan piece by piece after the last rinse and run through the wringer again.

After each load was finished it was taken to the side-yard. Small white things, dish cloths, washcloths etc. were spread on clean grass to bleach further in the sun. Everything else was hung. The clothesline was a set of four heavily wired lines stretched from poles about 30 feet apart. The weight of the wet laundry made the lines sag almost to the ground so 2x2 poles or just very long, trimmed branches from the woods were used at intervals to prop the lines up.

When the clothes were dry they were brought in and the things to be ironed, which was pretty much everything except the towels and wash cloths and underwear, were spread in a pile, sprinkled with water, either with your hand or with a pop bottle with a sprinkler attachment stuck into it, rolled up tightly and put into a laundry basket. Like most people’s laundry baskets, ours were used wooden bushel fruit baskets. After sitting in the basket for a couple of hours or sometimes all night they were uniformly but slightly moist and just right for ironing.

Our ironings were generally at least two baskets of tightly rolled and packed shirts, blouses, slacks, skirts, dresses, tablecloths, hankerchiefs, work clothes and blue jeans.

This was a lot of work.

Doing dishes was also a job to be remembered. Before we had climbed that last rung of the social ladder to hot water in the house and got our very own hot water heater, dish water had to be heated on the kitchen stove. This was done in a very large, heavy teakettle designed for tasks like this that far exceeded simple tea making.

Our kettle contained four steel balls, about the size of large marbles, that rattled around inside the kettle and served to keep the lime build up off the inside of the kettle.

The kettle was very heavy and for a long while, after the task of dishwashing fell to me, someone bigger had to lift the kettle and pour the steaming water into the dishpan in the sink. Even for an adult two hands with potholders were used to carry and pour the kettle of scalding water.

The modern version of dishwashing soap at the time was an all purpose powdered detergent, (we used Oxydol) that was also used as laundry soap. The fantasy of dishwater that actually had bubbles and did not immediately produce an itchy slime on your arms was just that, a fantasy.

But even more important than the actual washing of the dishes was the “scalding” In our house this was a never-to-be-neglected or carelessly done process. Mother was a great believer in the axiom Dirty Dishes Kill People. Unscalded dishes spread diseases like the plague, typhoid, cholera, tuberculosis, dysentery etc. It must be true because we ALWAYS scalded and not one of us caught the plague, typhoid, cholera, TB or any serious dysentery! We often got scalded ourselves but we never caught the plague, typhoid, cholera, etc..etc..

The scalding was done by propping the dishes up in a second dishpan, pouring the water from the kettle, then stacking to drain on a tea towel on the counter top. Dish drainers came much later. They are a wonderful invention. Every inch of every item had to be scalded. If you got lazy and missed an inch that could have been the very inch wherein lurked the germ that could have wiped out the whole family! No one wanted that responsibility.

I don’t know which is the bigger luxury: my automatic washer and dryer..or my bottle of Dawn Liquid Dish Soap with its lovely ungreasy sink full of bubbles.

The Catalogue People

I was born in the dining room before the upstairs was finished on a swelteringly hot day and I was very fat.

Being my mother’s seventh child there really was no need for a doctor as she had done it six times before but he was called anyway and his contribution to the event was to tell Dad, “Well, Mike, maybe this will be the lucky one as she is “seven come eleven.”

You have to know a little bit about the game of Craps, to understand his thinking on this. Craps is a dice game played by gamblers and Dad was famous for his love of the game. In the game of Craps sevens and elevens are game changers and I was the seventh child born in the seventh month on the eleventh day. (July 11)

Shieldsy, our neighbor and Mom’s friend, assisted at my birth and tried hard to keep me cool and happy but the cooler I got the unhappier I became. As soon as Shieldsy left to fix supper for Poppy Shields and her own family Mom got me out of the basket and wrapped me up tight. She said as soon as I started to sweat she never hard another peep out of me.

I guess that’s why winters always seemed so darned cold to me. That big old house only had two zones, frigid and sweltering. Even with the huge basement furnace (as big as a modern day bathroom) that ate up the sooty coal that cost Mom $15 a ton load, the chill in winter never left and a draft always blew around our ankles and knees.

And often, on winter nights..the waiting nights..between Thanksgiving and Christmas..and then through a long January..it was just me, Mom’s sewing scissors and the last year’s Sears and Roebuck Catalogue.

Sitting at the dining room table with my legs tucked up under me and my sweater pulled down over my fingers to keep warm, I spent long, miraculous hours with the Catalogue People.

The Catalogue People were incredibly clever. They spoke, sang, played and danced with each other in an endless variety of dress, carefully selected and cut from the Men’s, Women’s and Children’s Section and played with the most marvelous toys from the Toy Section.

They pushed the baby, chosen form the Infants Section, in the most adorable baby carriage of the season. (after cutting a slit in the buggy top the baby could be slipped right in.)

The children, selected from the underwear page of the Children’s Section, wore every wonderful item of dress that I had ever desired or imagined. With their charming clothing held in place with small tabs cut at the shoulder and waist, they slept in the most exquisite nighties, swam in the most cunning swim garb and played in the brightest, most casual play clothes. For winter only the furriest, most elegant coat and hat would do.

The mother, chosen for her gentle expression and whether her arms stuck out far enough to bend the tabs in at the waist, wore incredible combinations of glamour and servitude from the Women’s Section. She always carried beautiful “Genuine Morocan Leather” purses and wore perky hats with feathers.

The father, a stalwart fellow, wore handsome hats and always faced to the right. I haven’t a clue as to why this requirement was so important but it was and I adhered to it.

The View From the 12th Floor

The View From the 12th. Floor

The view from the 12^th floor office window of my recent new best friend, the bone and joint doctor by the name of Ligenfelter, in the Pavilion Section of the sprawling North Kansas City Hospital, stretched below and away to the south and east and west like an artful diorama of industry.

The scene before me, the distant Kansas City skyline, a broad and winding river, acres of flat-topped warehouses edged in by miles of busy streets and more acres of railroad tracks and their slowly moving cargos lent a lazy somnolence to the scene that tended to lull the senses.

But as I looked out across that river-bottom land, seeking out things and buildings and places familiar in my memories, it came to me that I was looking at the history of my family. What we were and what we had become had its inception in this small strip of flat land bounded by great rivers and their bridges, tall Loess bluffs and fields of fertile loam and yellow clay. It lay before me as an opened book lies upon a nightstand, waiting to be read.

To the east, just left of Harrah’s, the new (relatively speaking) gambling boat, the swift current of the Missouri pushed and rippled in orderly rows of roiling motion on to the east and a little bit north at this point, only to turn east and south again to continue it’s rolling, pushing advance to the even mightier Mississippi at the northern edge of St Louis, clear over on the Eastern edge of the state.

But in 1844 it was here and upon this river, up from the Mississippi, in its turn up from the Port of New Orleans, and on to St. Joseph, that Margaret Mary and Joseph Whiskerchen, our Great-Great Grandparents, and their children, newly from Rheinborg, Germany, brought everything they owned to find and farm a new home. Our Great Grandmother Mary Margaret Whiskerchen, the first of this family to be born in this country, married John Lewis and raised 14 children, one of whom was our grandmother, Eliza Lewis Stock.

And to the west the traffic of Burlington Street, that is actually Oak Street to the north and Oak Street to the south and becomes 71 Highway even further south, can be seen in patches between tall buildings and a few tall trees. This is a very old thoroughfare and although unpaved in 1908, it did go clear to the river where the ferry shuttled back and forth.

In that year it was a ferry that brought my mother’s mother, a pregnant-but-unwed, college educated, Missouri farm girl to the South bank of the Missouri where she was provided a carriage to take her up the hill to The Willows, a sanctuary for girls like her, and a well known baby mill, at 20^th and Main. By raising my eyes just a little and there to the center of the Kansas City skyline and a little beyond I knew that that was where my mother was born.

Adopted by a North Missouri farm family, she told me of riding her pony on the loess bluff on this north side of the river overlooking what is now 210 hwy and of sitting her pony and looking out across at the limestone bluffs of Cliff Drive on the opposite side and down upon the hayfields that stretched from the foot of the bluff upon which she sat into what became Armour Road.

In 1912 the Armour-Swift-Burlington (ASB) Bridge at the end of Burlington Street was finally finished. By 1927 the bridge had suffered a fire at one section and needed other repairs and Dad was one of the fortunate who was employed, on that project.

Almost directly down and in front of my high window stands the tall square towers of what is left of the old mills where for over a hundred years cereal grains were ground, stored and shipped. Perhaps they still are. Dad worked at Corn Products, just east of the mills, and always came home wrapped in the North Town scent of warm ground grain.

And I know that the street that I look down upon goes to the west to the corner of Swift and Armour and the old Crown Drug Store where after school my sister served malts and grilled hamburgers and cold Coca Cola’s. And there on Armour was the hardware store where my brother worked after school and Saturdays and the huge, stark National Belles Hess building, the garment factory where my other sister, after her marriage, worked until she was too far pregnant to climb the stairs or stand the heat. And on that street my cousin’s filling station was the only chance to fill up until you got “over the river” or back north several miles.

And the Armour Theater, where my very first date and I, (we were 12 years old and he had walked five miles to escort me to the bus stop into Northtown,) shivered and screamed through the bleakness of The Hunchback of Notre Dame in black and white.

And 12 floors below me, in the single-floor three-wing infancy of this very hospital, my youngest daughter was born.

That small, sterile room so empty of all but myself just a few minutes ago had somehow become full to bursting, thanks to the view from the 12^th floor office window of my recent new best friend, the bone and joint doctor.

All My Relatives

All My Relatives Are Crazy So How Did I Escape?

It was a close call, let me tell you, but being the youngest of the family gave me tremendous advantages. No matter what trouble I was in they had already been there.

If I came down with a disease they had already had it. Winning a prize, getting a concussion, losing my virginity… all had been done by some member of the family and was therefore, of no consequence. If this sounds discouraging it was not. It was a constant declaration of the fact that I too would likely survive. I learned most of what I know from their experiences.

One of my brothers, discouraged I guess by the chaos of our full-to-bursting house, “swore and be damned” (that was a common utterance in our family) that he would never have a houseful of kids and he had eight!

Even though they all grew up to be very nice people and reasonably sane I took the lesson to heart and learned never to say “never”!

Another brother, experimenting one day with the new shotgun, blew a hole in the boys’ dresser. I learned that day that guns, in a small space, could be very loud and that I did not like them! This lesson was a freebie also as I was not the one that had to meet with Mother regarding the hole in the dresser.

And my older sister! She actually married a man that refused to eat pickles out of a jar someone else had stuck there fingers in! What kind of husband material is that?

What if you were in a hurry for a pickle? What if you were on a picnic and forgot the fork? What if you just needed the jar and had to get the last two pickles out and every time you stabbed them they scooted over to the other side of the jar like little green twin torpedoes and you were getting mad and.. well you see what I mean. She probably spent a lot of time guarding the pickle jar just to make sure no one stuck their fingers in it.

So I stored that away in my mind and determined that I would never marry a man who objected to fingers in the pickle jar.

The people in my circle of friends, one of whom told me once that having supper at my house always made her sweat, found the members of my family downright awe inspiring. And so do I.

I would never have made it without them.

Memoirs

I have decided to write my memoirs! (Unfortunately for my readers who are also music lovers this may necessitate the postponement of my 2023-2025 violin recitals.)

I want my memoirs to be up to snuff and of a very high quality so the most stringent standards must apply. The criteria for my memoirs are as follows.

1: They must be short and easy to read. Most of my friends have short attention spans.

2: The book should have no sharp edges. Most of my friends read in bed and tend to nod off early and have tender skin.

3: It must contain enough lies to make it really exciting because most of my friends’ lives aren’t any more interesting than mine and why would I want to bore them to death?

With those criteria in mind I have chosen the following true-life experiences to expound upon in my memoirs.

The time I wet my pants on the Greyhound Bus.

The time I shaved the hair off my forearms.

The time I spent the night under a bush in Chelmsford, England.

The time I left my four-year-old daughter at a rest stop.

The time I didn’t meet Willie Nelson (Yes, I’m still whining about that.)

The time I dropped the baby. (I’m not saying which one.)

The time I told that really cute guy I was only 35.

As you can see, it’s going to be very hard sorting out which of the momentous occasions in my life were the absolutely most momentous. But I’m working on it.

Through the Glass Ceiling but Vaguely

My own first brush with the "Glass Ceiling" was as a ten-year-old baseball player!!

I have often thought that if the world had really, really wanted to get the best of me, I should never have been allowed to hit that first base-ball! It is difficult to make anyone understand the feeling of utter power that came to a skinny ten-year-old girl with the painful vibration up that old wood bat and watching that ball get tinier and tinier. I loved it!

Thanks to a baseball-loving brother-in-law, I could catch anything, no matter how hard it was hit or how much it stung. I could and did hit a lot of balls clear into the tree line on the playground at Munger Elementary School. Being small and wiry, I could run faster than any of the boys.

But then one day Ms. McPike, the fifth grade teacher and Ms. Bruns, the fourth grade teacher, both short, homely women and extremely kind, they in their rumpled suits and comfortable school teacher shoes, clomped across the grassy ball diamond we had laid out to tell me that I couldn't play ball anymore. It had something to do with me acquiring a top similar to Jane Russell, a very breasty movie star famous in those 1950's days.

Their reasoning was pretty confusing and it really didn't make much sense to me. I don't think it did to them either.

After all, Ms. McPike was the one who taught us all the really hard games like "Red Rover Red Rover" and "Prisoners Dare". Moving among us, over the clumps of unmown fescue, cheering us on and demanding that we run faster and try harder, she was the one who spun me quickly one day, redirected my skinny ten-year-old body to an empty path towards the goal line...and whispered to me, "Go..go..., Janie..go hard".

And I burst from her grasp full of the power the day gave me..and it didn't matter at all that I was clobbered and stomped and eventually, although graciously momentarily, smothered by the bodies..all bigger and heavier..of my schoolmates.

And it didn't matter at all because I thought for sure next time I would win...because Ms. McPike was whispering..."Go...go...Janie...go hard"

P.S. Nobody ever did mistake me for Jane Russell.

Confessions of a Compulsive Reader

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Confessions of a Compulsive Reader

I used to smoke. I used to smoke a LOT!! But when my first grandchild was on the way I decided to quit. But what to do with all that free time..

Fortunately I have always been a reader.

I am probably the only person extant, female or male, who has actually read the complete works of Horatio Algier.

The young hero of Horatio Algier’s novels, (always a hero in those days..never a heroine) through his own effort and determination, with only the barest of surprising and unexpected good fortune near the end of any one of these highly motivational books, was not only able to sustain a home (I think he picked coal or something) for his wimpy mother and an assortment of sickly brothers and sisters, but invariably wound up getting an “education” and building a small business empire. Through it all he also maintained an impeccable character and would have put Abraham Lincoln to shame for honesty!

With all this Horatio Algier stuff under my belt I could see no reason why the world should expect any less from me, now that I was no longer a degenerate smoker. Fortunately I had read a lot of other stuff too.

I remember the very day I learned to read. Perhaps they teach reading differently now but the old way seemed to work for me.

Ms. Marie’s group of first graders sat in front of the big felt phonics board in the front of the room. Little cards marched across the rows of felt pockets. Ms. Marie would point to a card with a long stick that she also used to whack the Duncan boys every now and then. Then she would make a noise..then all the little people would make a noise that was intended to be like the noise Ms. Marie made.

The day the world opened I had been allowed to sit at the back of the room by myself and look at any of the books on the two shelves. I didn’t have a clue as to why I was sent back to the bookcase by myself but I went because she told me to. I had a little book open on my lap.

In one wonderful instant of understanding I saw the relationship of the letters in the book and the sounds Ms. Marie was making. I could read. Since that time I considered the ability to read as vital as a sixth sense and would have grieved its loss as deeply. I read everything. Within two weeks I had read all the little books.

Far too soon school was out for the summer. So I read all the words in the newspaper I could decipher.

I also read one of my sisters’ True Story and True Romance magazines and my other sister’s Wee Wisdom Magazine and my brother’s comic books. I read as much as I could of Mom’s McCall’s and American magazines and sneaked the copy of Life that showed all the pictures of a baby growing in the womb that was kept hidden in the bottom drawer of the phonograph cabinet. I read the funny papers every Sunday. I read billboards and advertisements in windows. I read the writing on the bleach bottle.

I couldn’t wait for school to start because I knew Ms. Spots’ second grade room had another two shelves with books I had never seen. By the middle of September I had read almost all the little second grade books.. And then a terrible thing happened. Ms. Spots called in Ms. Marie and they huddled over the little green card box in which Ms. Spots kept her book check-out records and they found out that I had read almost a hundred books! No more books for me. I don’t know what they thought..I guess they thought my brain would sizzle or something.

This was a lucky break, however, as it left me nothing to read but all the school and library books brought home by my older brothers and sisters. Their stuff was lots better than Ms. Spots’.

One of the remarkable and pleasurable benefits of attaining my dotage is that I now can reread ALL of that good old stuff I read sooo many years ago without being troubled by remembering that I read it before!

Is that good or what??

Winnwood

Winnwood

…We walk the snakey mound left from the

Old in”urban track

On summer nights.

The humid stillness

Broken by wrap-around winds..stirring

Dust devils

In the mounded leaves

tossed carelessly aside by our little march.

…to Winnwood..

The carnival of our universe

The roar of skaters pounds against the shouts

Of night swimmers..

And the clank of miniature cars

rounding their small track.

Under the stars dancers dance..

striped with jukebox rainbows

Until show time..free showtime.

Tom Mix and Hop Along Cassidy

teach us their violent morality

and all those families

on quilts and blankets spread

upon the dusty grass...

babies asleep in Coaster wagons

or on their mothers’ arms..

Fruit jars of cold tea and jelly sandwiches

The smell of popcorn and warm lake water

lapping at the boardwalk

Was heady stuff..

At Winnwood…

In 1943

A Ride in the Country

In the 1940s entertainment had to be simple and cheap and for our family, going for A Ride in the Country fell into this category.

Unlike some other applications, in this instance “cheap” and “easy” did not mean the same thing at all. Although the cost was limited to the price of some carefully rationed gasoline and maybe an extra quart of oil, very little about our family rides in the country ever proved to be easy.

To begin with everyone had to “get cleaned up”. This meant we had to wash faces and hands, put on shoes and make sure everyone had on underwear. If I take a minute I can feel again the child that was me and the excitement of that preparation and the urgency in the fear of being left behind.

The logistics alone would stop most people in today’s world. When I was very small Dad would drive, and when I was older it was my oldest brother. Mom and one of my older sisters sat next to him in front. Most often it was Kathryn because her legs were shorter and it was easier for her to get out of the way when it came time to shift. (It was a floor shift thing you know.) One or another of the children who got stuck boarding with us while their parents did who knew what..who knew where would be on Mom’s lap.

So that left the back seat for my other older sister, her baby girl, my two other brothers, my third sister and myself. I was too small to deserve a whole seat space and too large to stand between someone’s knees or sit on a lap so I generally rode stretched out on the shelf at the rear window. I remember it being very hot but I liked the privacy. Believe it or not, more often than not, someone would bring along a friend. Yes, we actually had friends who looked forward to our family doings as much as we did. I don’t remember where they sat.

The car I remember most was a box-like little Chevvie sedan. I saw one again at a car show a few years ago and I could not believe how small it was!

The road to the highway was a mile-long series of hills that caused us all to clutch each other going down and to hold our breath, lean forward and exert a communal mental energy urging the little car to make it to the top, on the way up. Everyone relaxed a little when we made it to the highway but only until whoever was driving started cussing and waggling the steering wheel around. That meant we had a flat.

No Drive in the Country was ever completed without at least one, and sometimes two or three, flat tires. Tires and their tubes were the bane of any ride in the country. The flat-repair process was rather complicated and ate up a lot of time. Everyone had to get out so the back seat could be raised up so the jack and patching stuff could be reached. The car was jacked up. The driver, whose job this generally was because everyone else was either too little to be much use or had wandered off looking for a bush or some wild plums or just to not have to hear the loud shouting and cussing, did a lot of shouting and cussing. When the flat was fixed everyone got back in and we went on until the next flat occurred.

There were other entertaining reasons to go for a drive …

We always tried to catch explosions, house fires and floods. This kind of news was easily obtained by phone through insistent rings on the party line. Even if it wasn’t our ring..(we all had a code..say two longs and a short..or a short and three longs etc..) an unusual amount of phone activity meant something was happening and everyone was bound to listen.

House fires generally occurred at night and because of the urgency of the thing the “getting cleaned up” part was minimal. No one could see if your face or hands were dirty and no one worried about whether you had on underwear. Floods had to wait for the weekend and sometimes were disappointingly receded and we had to be content with looking at dirt marks on the sides of buildings where the water had been. The only thing that exploded with any regularity was the feed mill in NKC.

The day we went to Sears to get the new console phonograph was memorable. It was hard to find room for it but my brother managed. The very first fish I ever caught..a beautiful Gar for those who fish.. stiff with rigor mortis..rode home on the floorboards at Daddy's feet.

The hot August day my very first niece came home from the hospital was, of course, a family event. We all got cleaned up, piled in the car and went to escort the new parents from the hospital…track them to their tiny upstairs apartment and watched while a very nervous young father tried to stuff her baby arms into a soft shirt.

A few years later I recall Daddy taking a smaller crew, diminished by time and the departures of adulthood, to see a straw stuck into an oak tree by a tornado at Excelsior Springs. Evidently, by the time we got there, someone had pulled out the straw because we never could find a tree with a straw sticking out of it.

They just don’t make entertainment like they used to.