Sunday, December 31, 2017

Introduction to Dorothy

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Mom's Diary - Click to enlarge


1965 – Sunday night meant Ed Sullivan and Walt Disney, the Beatles were still tops on the Top 40 charts, things were heating up in Vietnam, and a week’s worth of groceries might set you back a whopping twenty bucks. 

My mom, like her mom, kept a small diary, three days to a page, where she noted the mundane and the extraordinary, feelings and reactions to the world around her.
When I discovered this small, spiral-bound book, my mom had been gone more than thirty years, and my teenage years seemed as forgotten as yesterday’s grocery list.

She and my dad, a former meatcutter, had been married nearly twenty-one years, and I was their only child. Dad had been married once before, and had two children by that marriage, a boy, Bill; and a girl, Sonjalee, better known as Sonnie. Mom was also married before, but had no children. Details of either divorce were never mentioned. In fact, I only found out about mom's first marriage while I was doing genealogy research in courthouse records ten years after her death.



My mom was a head cashier for the Kroger Company, once a major player in the Kansas City metro, and most of my family worked in grocery retail or as meatcutters and meatwrappers. I had my own seven-year run with Kroger, starting the year after this diary was finished. Many of the mundane details in this book revolve around her work at Kroger. This is ordinary life in blue collars.

Marv and Dorothy - my mom and dad in 1970
Dad (Marv) suffered a couple of massive heart attacks in August of 1962, and retired from the meat departments. He could no longer tolerate the cold of the lockers and butcher shop. Instead, he fell back on his work as a manufacturer of fish bait – dough baits for carp and catfish, that he had marketed under the trademarked brand name of “Sniffy Baits” for more than fifteen years. You just can't make this shit up. It has all the bizarre trappings of a Wes Anderson film. Dad became a househusband, and cooked and cleaned like he had done it all his life. His cooking, and my sedentary ways helped me stay eternally pudgy until I really hit my stride in 1972.
Bait shipment waiting for truck line pickup - front porch.
While it sounds pretty comical, it was often the source of my own mortification, especially after dad named a couple of products after me, and in spite of my pleading, decided to sponsor one of my Saturday morning bowling teams. Dad took the bait business very seriously, and over the years, created some of the best products of its kind anywhere. His baits never spoiled, never hardened, had a huge following allover the midwest. He made a serious contribution to the family with fish bait. In spite of dad's dedication, or maybe because of it, fish bait and fishing will become strong points of contention between my parents as 1965 unfolds.
I was fourteen, and  finishing my eighth grade year at Northeast Junior High School, part of the Kansas City, Missouri Public School system. I was pretty typical, I suppose, and at that point I loved school, and was fully engaged in math, science, drama, and especially music – band and orchestra. I was very shy, and tended to avoid tense social situations like Teen Town, the Friday night sock hop at the school gym. It was a teenage hormonal pressure cooker and more than I knew how to handle. I was four years into my painful, pointless, and pitiful crush on cute little Patty Saunders - I met her at my Saturday bowling league when I was nine. I was shy, bookish, chunky, and my social skills were sadly lacking.

Northeast Junior High School
There is really nothing remotely extraordinary about any of this, which, I believe, gives it some of its power and emotion. For instance, Mom always had Mondays off, so that's when she got her hair fixed, ran errands, and tried to get ready to start all over again. Not earth-shattering, but it helped define her world.

In this little red volume, I discovered things about my mom and my dad that I never knew or even suspected, and found out how I fit into their lives and how that helped make me who I am today. Spoiler alert: I had absolutely no clue as to what was going on.

There are posts when I have absolutely nothing to add to mom's words. There just isn't anything that I can say to make it any more enlightening. Sometimes, it's just what it seems to be, and requires little or no explanation.

Three days per page, 1965


Some of the players:

Marv is my dad. He and I share the same Kansas farm name, Orville, but he always went by Marv - I'm a junior, and went by "Marvin" all through school. To this day, I know if someone has risen from from my ghostly past when the voice on the other end of the phone says, "Is this Marvin Simpson?"

My dad - "Marv"

My mom refers to her family a lot - her mom, Pansy, and her siblings, Paul, Jean, Patty, Bob, and Bill. We spent a lot of time - most Sundays when mom wasn't working, at the Patton house in Kansas City, Kansas. Mom didn't do much without her family.

Mom's family
Dad's kids - Bill Simpson, my half-brother, and his wife Pat and daughter Cindy, my niece; and my half-sister Sonjalee, (Sonnie) her husband Harmond and their two boys Brian and Mark - my nephews.
The Kroger crew - too many to list but mom butts heads with a manager trainee named Doug, and refers to a number of the people she works with.

Mom at work at Kroger, 1965
Much of this will make more sense when it publishes in date order. Starting tomorrow at 9:00 EST, and every three days for the entire year. You're welcome to follow along, subscribe to the blog feed, comment, and ask questions. After more than fifty years, there are certainly no secrets.

I'll post reminders on Twitter as they post. Welcome to my mom's world in 1965.

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