Thursday, May 13

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May 13, Thursday - Felt miserable today - treatment 10. Asked Mary how many more - she said quite a few. I knew that. Nice weather 80°. Rain tonight.

May 14, Friday - Treatment 11. Went to store and then to take treatment. Windy. Bud went to ball game with Steve Fairhurst.

May 15, Saturday - Gladys and Lawrence came up and spent day. Lawrence and Bud mowed lawn. Bought mower from Lawrence for $20

More radiation treatments. She's not very far into the process, but I remember her feeling a little crazy in the routine, and the helplessness she felt.

Steve Fairhurst was one of my neighborhood stalwarts - the smart one. Steve had a brilliant mind, and a knack for details. In later years we joked that if we had the computing power available in 2000 when we were kids, we'd just now be getting out of jail.

Baseball was a big deal for us. This was a tragedy because we lived in Kansas City. The A's never had a winning season in Kansas City, even though toward the end, they had the nucleus of the Oakland A's' winning teams of the '70s.

From our corner of 11th and Spruce, we walked the one block to the bus stop at 12 and Jackson, took a bus to Brooklyn Avenue, and transferred south to the stadium at 22nd Street. General admission tickets were cheap, and because so few people went to the games, a GA ticket was as good as a box seat once the game started. For this night game against the Minnesota Twins, the total paid admission was just a tick over 6,000 diehard fans.

The Twins, an American League expansion team in 1961 were the former hapless Washington Senators. The A's held the Twins scoreless as the home team marched three batters across the plate - one in the fourth, and three more in the seventh:

Kansas City Municipal Stadium - probably pre-Charlie Finley

As we sat in the big, green, extremely fan-friendly behemoth that was Municipal Stadium, it looked as if Kansas City might pull one off. Nope. The Twins chalked up three runs in the eight, and two in the ninth to win 5-3. The A's record after that game was a dismal 5 and 21.

The incredible groundskeeper George Toma with Harvey, the Athletics' ball delivery rabbit

Gladys is dad's sister, Lawrence is her husband. Lawrence could fix just about anything. He brought down a power mower with a 2-cycle Clinton engine that he had rebuilt. 2-cycles, for the uninitiated, use a mix of gasoline and oil instead of straight gas. It looked a lot like this:

It was probably a Wizard, from Western Auto.

There was no recoil starter - the rope you used to start it was separate. You wound it around the starter spool on top, and gave it a good yank - it usually started. You kept the rope, with its T-handle, tied off to the mower handle, where you were certain to lose it at the worst possible time. If you were me, you invariably ran over the damned rope, shooting it and the handle across the street. To shut it off, you had to ground the spark plug until the engine died. I carried a screwdriver for this purpose. This mower was half the size you would have probably wanted for a yard our size, but poor folks have poor ways, etc.

After I got the hang of the mower, I had dad take me to the hardware store to buy a screw-eye and at least fifty feet of rope. I drilled a hole in the back of the mower deck and bolted in the screw-eye. I could now attach the rope and lower the running mower to cut the steep terraces that Northeast was famous for. A regular yard fetched $3 to $6, but a terraced yard brought almost $10. I made a lot of money that summer, burned up the Clinton motor and went out and bought another mower, and still had a ton of cash left over for my nefarious teenage plans to take over the world.

Terraced yards in Northeast - fun to mow
Google Maps Street View of houses across the street from ours.