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May 28, Friday - A new angle in treatment today. Cool again today. Took mom to Dr. Curran and back home. Bought plywood for bait shop. (Went to union hall for money. Paid me $240!! We're rich.)
May 29, Saturday - Lawrence and Gladys came up and spent the day. Lawrence and Marv built bait shop. Bud mowed the yard. Gladys and I ran errands. Everybody was tired at end of day.
May 30, Sunday - Went to Bethel Cemetery for memorial services. Very nice. I hope I am buried up there.
Mom's check from the Retail Clerks' Union is the equivalent to $1857 in 2018 dollars.
The Bait Shop. This is difficult to explain, but bear with me. Our house was situated on the northwest corner of a property owned by Saint Mary Cirese. The best I can figure is that it was large enough for at least five or six houses, but whether those houses ever existed, I don't know. I seem to remember the remains of house foundations in the property, but that may be a manufactured memory. The corner looks like this in satellite view:
Our house is at the upper left, next to Jackson Court, and everything else in this rectangle was our yard. The bottom quarter was usually planted in corn, tomatoes, green beans, pumpkins, and watermelons. Everything else I mowed with a 20 inch push mower.
At any rate, we wound up with a large early '40s Chevrolet box truck on the property. It didn't run, and we used the back part as storage - lawnmowers, garden tools, tillers, etc. It landed on the lot around 1958 - I remember climbing on the truck with the neighborhood kids. We used it as playground equipment, and found the top of the truck a suitable place to keep an eye on the entire neighborhood. It was the high ground for our games and a constant worry for my dad.
Something like this, if you will, except in a faded red:
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| 1941 Chevy Cab-Over-Engine (COE) Truck |
My dad was looking for a way to eliminate the middleman from his bait distribution network, and the only way to do that was to launch a retail venture. He didn't have the means to buy or lease a storefront, and the area pay lakes already were selling bait on their own, so dad hit upon the idea of building a bait shop on our lot.
He and my uncle Lawrence came up with the idea of using the old truck as one wall of the shop, and attaching the rest to the side. Dad and Lawrence were blind optimists, and could always make something from nothing - depression-era thinking at its Midwestern best. They built a framed wall parallel to the side of the truck, hung rafters from the area near the roof of the truck, and enclosed the front of the truck in a kind of ship's prow made from corrugated metal, painted white. Inside, he put his bait and tackle on display in an old glass-front display case he bought from Jerry Fredman's drug store up the street. Dad ran a power line from the house to run a small refrigerator to keep fresh worms, and - this is the bit that sent my mom over the roof - a night service bell. Dad figured that any fisherman worth his sinkers would want to be up before the sun, and so would we. Dad stocked most small tackle items - fishing line, hooks, leaders, sinkers, nets - along with a complete line of his carp and catfish baits.
The shop had several iterations - 11th and Spruce Baits, Sniffy Baits, dad's trademark brand; and much to my teenage mortification, Bud's Baits. Dear God. Dad painted big signs shouting our glory to the passing traffic, and later in the spring of '65 launched the store. Stay tuned for more on this delightful story.
Bethel Cemetery is our family reserve in rural Leavenworth County, Kansas. Mom was born in Jarbalo, just down the road, and the family, when it came to Kansas, thought Leavenworth County would be their last stop. That wasn't quite right, but even as her family moved to Topeka, and eventually Kansas City, Bethel Cemetery was the one constant, the gathering place in times of grief, sorrow, and remembrance. Had some laughs there, too.
We buried mom there in March of 1979. She died during the Great New Year's Blizzard of December 31 to January 2, but the cemetery was frozen solid, and her grave couldn't be excavated until March. It's always something with these people. Her mom's funeral procession got lost on the way to the cemetery, and had forty cars piled up and trying to turn around on a narrow Leavenworth side street. Barrel of freaking monkeys, I tell you. Best funeral ever. We laughed our asses off.
