Monday, June 28

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June 28, Monday - Left Limon and went to Denver. Cooked lunch at Echo Lake. Went to Central City and spent the night at Estes Park.

June 29, Tuesday - Went to Grand Lake by way of Trail Ridge Road. Took a cruise ride in the afternoon and rested the rest of the day. Called Marvin.

June 30, Wednesday - A beautiful day! From Grand Lake to Berthoud Pass, to Loveland Pass to Hoosier Pass to Manitou. Bud and I went up the Manitou Incline.

Our vacations tended to be whirlwind affairs - Limon to Echo Lake to Central City Estes Park is about 220 miles. You could generally drive into a mountain town somewhere and without benefit of reservations, find a nice place to stay.

We cooked lunch out among the pines on a Coleman propane camp stove. Even to my jaded 15 year old palate, it tasted like cordon bleu. The stove, because of the high altitudes, required a larger gas orifice to work properly. My aunt Patty latched onto that and we heard orifice jokes all the time we were in Colorado. It's a goofy family, to be sure. It took a few years for me to understand the understated humor of orifices.

Trail Ridge Road is a scenic wonder, but Grand Lake is not all that much to write home about, except for the stories about the fur-bearing trout that live there. So mom called home. Remember, this is 1965. Long Distance calling is a thing, and a few minutes on the phone between Colorado and Kansas City would probably have cost six or seven bucks or more. Say hello, keep it brief, and hang up.

All the passes, Loveland, Pass, Berthoud Pass, Hoosier Pass, and on to Manitou Springs. The standard procedure went something like this: Pick a route on the map, decide when and where to eat lunch, and take off driving. Arrive at a waypoint, get out, point at the sign, have your picture taken, lather, rinse, repeat. Sadly, those images have been lost to the ravages of time, dozens of moves, crabby relatives, and our dramatic downsize.

Here's one from a number of years earlier, taken on a big family caravan vacation. This is at Snowy Range Pass, Wyoming:

Please note the nine year-old photographer on the left holding his trusty Ansco Pioneer 620. I already knew what I wanted to do with my life.

Anyway, the Manitou Incline was, to me a wonder of engineering. It was a railway that ran up the side of a mountain in Manitou. You sat in a reclining seat, facing Colorado Springs. As the car started up the steep incline, you were no longer reclining. You were sitting upright and wondering what would happen if one of those drive cables snapped. You'd be doing Mach 1 by the time you got to the bottom, I think. My aunt Patty got a case of the yips thinking about it, and I used my natural talents as a jokester and smartass to keep her mind occupied with laughter. By the time we got to the top, the whole damn car was laughing, and when we got back to the bottom of the incline, the some guy told my mom he and his wife had so much fun listening to us that he paid for our dinner. Historical perspective: he never should have encouraged me. I still think I'm pretty funny.

The Incline Railway was closed after a rock slide in the 1990s, but the roadbed, minus the rails remains. Now, crazy people hike up the damn thing. Straight up. What a world.

Friday, June 25

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June 25, Friday - Washed this morning and went to store this afternoon. Johnson wasn't too happy that I wouldn't be back until the 12th. Stayed home last night - no fishing. Talked to Marie.

June 26, Saturday - Marv and I ironed and I packed Bud's and my suitcase. Went to Doctor Allen in afternoon. Delivered bait and sat on back porch with neighbors till 10.

June 27, Sunday - My birthday. Started trip. Doesn't seem that I should be 50. Breakfast in Junction City, lunch in. Supper and stayed all night in Limon. Bud is traveling better this trip.

Damn, I can't believe mom was (only) 50 at the time. Age perspective is entirely relative, and skewed when approached from a position of ignorant youth. Happy Birthday, mom.

For the record, if mom were still with us, she'd be 105 on the 27th.

Westward hoo boy! Getting from Kansas City to Colorado in 1965 wasn't the straight, flat, superslab adventure it is today. Interstate 70 (the first Interstate highway in the country, thanks to President Eisenhower, semi-native son and local hero) was still being constructed, and much of the trip west was on U.S. 40, a two-lane highway with a 60 mph speed limit, and a town every six or ten miles. We saw them all. "The Victory Highway." It took forever to get anywhere once you got past the smooth, fast, Kansas Turnpike at Topeka.

Our trips Way Out West* usually went something like this: Assemble the members of the traveling caravan at Tom and Pansy's house at 1501 Garfield in Kansas City, Kansas. The target time for this was around 4:30 a.m. This gave the participants, which could number anywhere from six to fifteen people, a chance to have a cup of grandma's hot, brown liquid that she claimed was coffee, have a pre-travel prayer and bible-verse reading, usually led by my dad, and head out the door to the waiting cars. It was a Baptist Le Mans start.

The largest of these groups was the Great Yellowstone Vacation of 1959. There were twelve or fourteen of the Patton Clan in a caravan of five cars.We didn't take our car, a 1947 Chevy Stylemaster of questionable roadworthiness. Instead, we got to drive grandad's fairly new 1958 Chevy sedan. There was a catch, though. It had to be the lead car, and my grandma had to ride shotgun. Meanwhile, grandpa Tom rode with some of the others. I thought this was odd for many years, but now I understand. Grandpa loved riding with my uncle Bob in his big, lime-green, 1958 Pontiac Bonneville. Wider than a locomotive, and made of pure Detroit chrome, it laid down the miles like a flying carpet from One Thousand and One Nights. Blink, and you're in Denver.

Grandma absolutely loved to travel. Grandma had also never learned to drive. This meant that, as we traveled, grandma's eyes were on the horizon, thinking about where we should be headed, not about how tired the driver may be, or how many miles had lapsed since anyone got a break of any kind. About the time the driver would be looking for a place to pull the wagons in a circle for the night, grandma would have a look at a road map, and say, "Let's drive on to (insert name of distant town here)." As the days passed, and this routine repeated itself several times, my dad lobbied for a different arrangement, and somewhere near Independence Rock, Wyoming, grandma became the subject of a secret morning coin toss. Whoever lost got Pansy and became the de facto lead car. Another Patton Family legend in the making.

Grandma's love of traveling became part of Patton Family Legend at her 1971 funeral. She died in August of that year, and friends and family gathered at the Nichols Funeral Home in Kansas City, Kansas to have a few laughs and say goodbye. This is how we did things. Funerals were not moribund group-crying events. They were celebrations and a whole lot of fun, really. My date said she had never laughed so hard at a funeral. Yeah, I had a date for Grandma's funeral. After the services, the cortége lined up and headed north for Leavenworth County and our Family Reserve. (Hi, Lyle.) My dad was in the lead car with the funeral director, giving driving instructions. He was wholly unqualified for this job.

 To prove this, he instructed the limo driver to take a left turn off of HIghway 92 in the middle of Downtown Leavenworth. The driver did as instructed and soon, the snaking line of vehicles was jammed into a couple of side streets. One was a dead end.

One by one, the cars, limos, and hearse started turning around on the narrow back street. I was in my Mustang a few cars back. An older woman who was pulling weeds in her front yard stopped what she was doing to watch the processional mayhem. She motioned to one of the limo drivers. He rolled down his window. 

She yelled, "You can't go this way. It's a dead end." 

That was the end of any kind of decorum for the rest of the day. As the family car passed me headed back the other way, I could see my mom and my uncle Bob laughing their asses off. My date looked at me in wonder. 

When we finally made it out to our oak-shaded cemetery near Easton, Kansas, and the casket moved to the gravesite, the minister started the service: 

"Pansy Patton always loved to travel. Especially in Leavenworth County." 

That was it. There were so many people howling with laughter that it took several minutes to get things calmed down enough to finish the funeral. We laughed about it for years. It was that kind of family.

Dudes, Wyoming, 1959
Uncle Walt, Uncle Bob, great-Uncle John, dad,
Grandpa Tom and The Black-Hatted Barefoot Bud - Five Feet tall at age eight.

Anyway, back to 1965. Mom and I were riding this trip with my aunt Patty and my cousin Susan. This was the tightest pod of the Pattons, and we often vacationed together. We laughed a lot. My cousin Susan was two years older than I was, and we had been best buds for as long as I could remember, longer actually. Susan was the big sister I never had.

Himself, my cousin Susan, and Aunt Patty at the top of Pikes Peak

We lost Susan a few years ago, and though we had drifted apart as adults, I still miss the great times and the laughter we shared. She was an amazing cook, and passed that gene on to her daughter.

We drove out in my aunt Patty's red 1962 Chevrolet Impala SS convertible, and a couple of hours after after the ungodly middle-of-the-night start, we rolled into Junction City, Kansas for breakfast. We had a regular downtown cafe stop there, and though I can't remember where, I do remember what - pancakes, always pancakes. Butter, syrup, cold frothy milk. I usually woke up again around Hays.

1962 Chevy - Image:http://allamericanclassiccars.blogspot.com/

The topic of conversation around our meals was always what we were going to do for the next meal, though this time around we had either packed sandwich stuff and ate at a city park somewhere along the way - Hays, Russell, or Wakeeny - or mom skipped a groove and didn't finish the sentence. An overnight stay at Limon included a ceremonial "We made it this far." dinner and a trip to the local municipal pool to wear out the road-hyper kids, then off to bed for another early start the next day.

"Bud is traveling better." is mom-code for Bud isn't having his violent episodes of car-sickness this trip. Nice. Oy, I could tell you stories.

* Do you have any idea how difficult it was to work in a Laurel and Hardy reference in a blog post about a road trip in 1965? Be amazed. I could connect even more dots and add Tilda Swinton to the narrative, but it's getting late. Besides, if you know, you know.

Tuesday, June 22

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June 22, Tuesday - Ironed late last night and early this morning. went to funeral home - Marie's mother-in-law. Took Linda fishing.

June 23, Wednesday - Went to Union Hall and picked up check. went downtown and then to Doctor Hesser's office. Go back to work July 12. He bawled me out. Appointment September 27. Went fishing.

June 24, Thursday - Got my hair fixed. Carol is back in hospital. Went to Mom's this afternoon. Bob and Mary were working on the front room. Went fishing.

This page represents the reality of  blogging someone's journal. Often, there is nothing of real interest - life goes on, errands get run, doctors are consulted, the sun rises and sets.

That's okay. There are more exciting days to come.

Saturday, June 19

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June 19, Saturday - Took Bud to Susan's for swimming. Marv and Sandy went fishing. Such a quiet day. Baked a cake, waxed the floors, and took a bath.

June 20, Sunday - Father's Day. Mom's birthday. Nice day. went to church and then took Marv to dinner at Waid's. Good meal. Went over to Mom's in evening. Frank and Jean were there. Jean's hearing is much improved. Thank goodness.

June 21, Monday - Marv and I washed. Then I paid rent and went to store. Stayed home in evening. Not much doing. Went downtown and bought two new dresses. Bud went to drive-in and got in at 1:30 a.m.

My cousin Susan was my closest relative on the Patton side of the family. She lived near the Wyandotte-Johnson County line in Kansas City, Kansas. We had always been pals, and when the family gathered at Pansy's, we always found ways to entertain ourselves.

Susan belonged to the Sun and Surf Swim Club out on County Line Road. Although I was recovering from the Mother of All Sunburns, I jumped at the chance to go hang out with Susan and her pals. Susan was two years older than I was, and was thus far more sophisticated and way more clever than I was. Her friends were smart, confident, and popular. They teased me mercilessly. It was like landing on Venus.

Most of my time this trip was spent preening and trying figure out how to wear my hair. I had given up the little dabs of Brylcreem and the polished Princeton haircut I had been wearing for years in favor of a more Beach Boys inspired fluffy mop, with just the right amount of front coverage. Not Beatles-style by any means, but certainly not my previous L7 square look, either. I'm sure I looked a fool, but I was so unaware of my place in the universe, it really didn't matter. I added a light spritz of peroxide to the front to add a bit of highlights. Jesus, really?

It must have been a special day indeed to break out of the Crane's Cafeteria rut and head over to Waid's for dinner for Father's Day. We always made a fuss over such days.

My aunt Jean's hearing has improved. Good thing. We were starting to yell at her so she could hear us. Family gatherings had started to sound like Sundays in Little Italy, except we didn't have anyone named Anthony to yell at, and there was no Caruso to be heard.

Monday is wash day, and mom went to Cirese's and paid the rent, ran downtown and just generally puttered. I get my puttering gene from mom. Man, I really hate puttering.

Mom and dad rented their house on 11th Street from Joe and Mary Cirese. My uncle Lawrence worked for them as a handyman and maintenance worker. When we moved into the house in 1955, the rent was set at $60 per month. That equals the buying power of about $575 in today's dollars. When the Cirese's son died in a horrific car crash in 1960, mom and dad sent flowers to the funeral home and visited before the funeral mass. Mary Cirese took my mom aside and told her that as long as she lived, she would never pay a dollar more in rent than she did on that day. My mom moved out of our house in 1978 to live in an assisted living complex. Her last rent payment was for $60. Mary Cirese was a saint. She died in 1999 at the age of 97.

I went to the drive-in, although mom doesn't say who I went with. There are only two possibilities - I might have gone with Ron and Mike, or I might have gone with dad's fishing buddy Sandy. I preferred Ron and Company because of the movie choices. Ron would have been more likely to go see Beach Party movies, and Sandy and her friends were more chick-flick and drama prone. There were, however, additional benefits to hanging out with Sandy.

Usually, it was Sandy, one of her girlfriends and me. We sat three across the front seat, gnawing on drive-in corn dogs and pizza, and slurping huge Cokes, and more or less tried to track with the movie. Sometimes we parked ourselves on a blanket on the hood of her car.

It took an entirely new turn the first time Sandy invited two friends. Sandy and her original friend sat up front, and I shared the back seat with a younger girl, who we'll call Friend Number Two. (Kevin help me, I can't remember her name.) She was maybe five feet tall, slightly built, freckled, had short-cropped hair, and was a bit high-strung, as I remember. The second it got dark enough for the movie to start, she peeled off her shirt and settled in, now topless, to snuggle up against me and watch the movie. I sensed that I was the unwitting and red-faced butt of a giggly girl-joke, but I really didn't care. It's difficult to explain how unprepared I was for all of this.

For a shy fourteen-year-old, the proximity of compact and unfettered teenage breasts in the back seat of an old Dodge was like a birthday, Christmas and the Fourth of July all rolled into one. My blushing, stammering overreaction to her sudden partial nudity made her laugh. She encouraged me to make the best of the situation. This routine happened maybe a three or four times that summer.

I kinda wish I could remember her name. Nah.

Wednesday, June 16

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June 16, Wednesday - Did washing and had my hair fixed. Beginning to feel better. Went fishing with Marv until dark at Joe's. Real cool. (Marked through: Played Bud a game of golf. He won!)

June 17, Thursday - Marv did ironing. We took Mike fishing. Marv took a ten pound carp. Mike took it home. We had to go up there and clean it.

June 18, Friday - No fishing today! Went to the store - got my vacation check. I can go back to work as soon as doctor releases me or take two weeks more. Think I'll go to work.

Life goes on. Fishing goes on. "Joe's" refers to 40 Hiway Club Lake. They had a miniature golf course that fronted the highway, and it was a pretty good place to get away from the constant fishing.

I know I've mentioned it before, but it might have been the year before - memory fades - that I invited Patty Saunders to go fishing at Joe's with me. That seemed perfectly normal to me, and looking back, it was a loaves-and-fishes-level miracle that she agreed to go along. Maybe I was a wholly charming, if perpetually chubby schlub that was simply irresistible to cute petite blonde teenage girls. Nah.

Mike was my buddy up the street, and it seems that while he was proud to drag dad's lunker carp home, he was less enthusiastic about gutting, skinning, and prepping the scaly monster.

Mom seems pretty excited that fishing takes a holiday on Friday. She's waiting now for clearance from her doctor to go back to work, and she can't wait. Mom has been spinning in circles since her surgery. She has always worked for a living, and all the spare time is making her crazy. Plus, when she's at work, life is a lot more predictable. Mom likes a well-organized life. So do I.

Sunday, June 13

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June 13, Sunday - More rain. Feel droopy.Went to church. Brought Mom over to our house for a while. Rained like crazy. Bud didn't feel well from his sunburn so we went to bed early.

June 14, Monday - Cleaned the whole house and baked a cake. Cool. Bud still doesn't feel too well. Blisters all over his shoulders. Today was my last treatment. Thank goodness.

June 15, Tuesday - Have to see both doctors next week. Hesser on Wednesday - Allen on Saturday. Was going to town this morning, but felt too badly. Went fishing with Marv and Bud this afternoon. 

 The sunburn aftermath continues. I had huge blisters all over my shoulders. Had to sleep on my stomach. I have never experienced another burn like this since, thank you. I'm surprised I've never had an issue with melanomas. (Knock wood)

Not much else going on - mom is taking her last Cobalt treatment, and hanging out with dad and me at the lake. The only cake mom ever made was Angel Food.

More fishing at 40 Hiway Club Lake. My tolerance for carp fishing isn't great. If you're not a carp angler, the process for fishing for the overgrown koi doesn't involve boats, waders, fly rods, or anything that looks like the standard wade-in-the-water style of fishing. If you want to catch carp, you sit. And sit.

Common Carp

My dad's rig was something like this - an open-spool level-wind bait-casting reel on an eight-foot fiberglas rod. (Spinning reels were for posers and children.) The reel was spooled with 28-pound test braided nylon line. At the fish end was a split nylon leader with two treble hooks, one six to eight inches higher than the other. Directly above that was a lead sinker. When dad was ready to go after the scaly monsters, he baited both hooks with one of his patented (fact) dough baits, reared back and cast this whole mess out into the lake. A good cast was somewhere between forty and sixty feet from the shore. Dad would then set his rods into rod-holders that he and my uncle Lawrence had designed and welded together. Then he waited. Seriously. For what seemed like days.

Bait-casting reel

The idea was to watch for signs of the carp messing with the bait - a wiggle of the line, a soft tug and the hook, a ripple in the water. Then with a flick of the rod, you set the hook and held on. A good-size carp can work you over for a half-hour or more, and the big ones never give up until they're nearly dead. I caught a 27-pound carp when I was twelve. It took 90 minutes to bring him in. You worked them closer to the shore a few inches at a time, finally coaxing them into a huge landing net.

Carp glamour shot

The only thing left to do was take a picture of the damned thing, usually on a rope or a clip stringer. My family history is told with hundreds of pictures of carp hanging on ropes near relatives.

Carp on the doorknob, Bud at the window, 1951

My granddad William H. Simpson, Fort Scott, Kansas, 1947, with fish

I know of people who ate carp, but we didn't. They are an oily species, and I'm told that they're chock full of Omega-3 fatty acids. Residents in poorer neighborhoods in Kansas City could often be seen fishing in Swope Park or Troost Lake, usually for carp, sometimes catfish. The lunkers weren't sport to them, they were sustenance.

We generally gave them away to people with less-finicky eaters at home. Years later, one of my interns at the studio, a student at the Kansas City Art Institute, told me of her winter in Prague.

As it happens, in the Czech Republic, a traditional Christmas dinner is carp that has been cooked in milk. The story was confirmed by one of my employees at Glacier National Park last year. I'm told that Prague rivals Paris for sheer beauty, but I think I'll visit in summer.

My strategy for amusing myself on fishing trips was a big can of Turtle Wax and some rags. While dad sat on the bank and tried to outsmart the clever bottom-feeders, I waxed the Big Blue Cadillac. That sucker really shined up nice. 

My personal Wes Anderson movie continues. Our narratives have much in common.

Thursday, June 10

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June 10, Thursday - Bud didn't have to go to school today. Hot. Not much doing. Spent the evening on the back porch. Thelma was up. Mom went to Denver last night - will be back Sunday.

June 11, Friday - School is out. Hot today - 85°. Bud went swimming. Marv and I had to bring Lambs' car home. Jean goes to Memphis Sunday to have her ear operated on.

June 12, Saturday - Nice quiet Saturday. Sold some bait in morning. Rain all afternoon and evening. Mom called from Salina - will be home about 12.

Kansas City Public Schools year ended in June in those days, and reconvened after Labor Day. My birthday, in the first week of September, was often the last day of summer vacation.

Back on the back porch with the neighbors. Thelma is my friend Leonard's mom. While it was hot and humid, dad never wrestled the window air conditioner into place until the first day that it hit 95°. Installing the huge, energy-gulping window unit was an ordeal on many levels. This was before the days of window units that one person could easily manage. This thing was a behemoth. Dad, of course, being dad, had a system. He kept the air conditioner on top of mom's hope chest, and in the corner of their bedroom. When it came time to install it, he put the chest on a pair of carpet pieces, slid the chest into the living room, and through a series of short lifts and feats of superhuman dad-strength, slid the monster into the window. It was always a joy to feel the cool air fill the house, and to feel the humidity drain away. The neighbors may not have agreed, though. When we switched on the massive Frigidaire, all the lights in the neighborhood dimmed.

I went swimming with my step-cousin (!) Marsha at the Raytown Swim Club. There's that "club" handle again, shorthand for "whites only", though I wasn't aware of all this for quite a few more years. Marsha was my newest cousin, having arrived only the year before when my uncle Bob married her mom, my new Aunt Mary. There was a lot of weird sexual tension between me and my new cousin, but after a few nervous slap-and-tickle sessions, we worked through it.

Our day at the pool was spent entirely in the water, splashing and goofing around. All day. Hours and hours in the sun. Years before the invention of sunscreen. When I got there, I was early summer fish-belly blue/white. When I left, I was bright rose-red, and getting redder by the minute. It was the single worst sunburn I've ever had. I'm just so grateful that I had a full head of hair back then, otherwise, my brain would have cooked in my skull. It was just horrific.

By the next day, my shoulders and back were covered in blisters. I asked for morphine, but all I got was a lecture and a small fan. It didn't help. I couldn't move. When my back peeled, it came off in huge, crinkly sheets. I molted like a cockroach. This is not Kafka. I was not transformed.

From the What Goes Around Department: The Raytown Swim Club became Super Splash U.S.A sometime in the 1990s. I did two location shoots for them not long afterward, enlisting a group of ten or twelve parent-approved and model-released kids to do what kids do in pools in the summer.

Raytown Swim Club, now Super Splash USA

My aunt Jean, mom's sister, had issues with her hearing, and years later, after my mom died, she had issues with me. When mom was facing her end-of-life issues from her third go with cancer, she moved from her efficiency apartment in Temple Heights Manor, a Baptist-sponsored high-rise assisted-living facility, and into Jean's house for a while. When it became clear that mom wasn't going to get the care she needed at Jean's, she moved to a nursing home in Raytown. After mom died, I went to Jean's to get what was left of mom's stuff, and was informed that she had decided to keep a number of items instead of letting me go through mom's things - pictures, letters, etc - as well as some furniture and other effects. I may well have said some unkind things. I'm not sure, as I was blind with rage. I found out later that several members of mom's family gave Jean a dressing-down over all this. I wanted nothing to do with her.

My aunt Jean described herself as the "mean one", and after nearly thirty years had passed, she and I buried the hatchet, and we found common ground as she joined me in my search for my ancestors on her side of the family. May she rest in peace.

The Lambs are Sandi's parents. They always had car issues. Cars are the bane of poor people, more so in a spread out town like Kansas City. It's the Los Angeles of the Plains. For no more people than it has, it takes up massive amounts of real estate. House lots and yards there are huge, with ample spacing.

Monday, June 7

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June 7, Monday - Feel much better. Went with Marv to pick up ingredients. Nice day. Went to take treatment. Plan to go to Colorado the last week in June with Patty. Hope it helps my mental outlook. Marv and I had a terrible row, so I went down and did washing and then Bud and I went for a ride.

June 8, Tuesday - Not much doing today. Spent most of the day sleeping.

June 9, Wednesday - Got permanent. Feel better. Raining hard. Bud went bowling and we bought two new chairs for the porch and then used them all evening.

Another day in the city. My folks battled it out - I'm guessing it had to do with Sandy and/or the bait business - probably both. I only heard my folks fight one time in my life, and I confronted them about it. They never fought in my presence again, but I know they had a few verbal Donnybrooks.

When mom and I went for a ride, it meant I was going to get to drive the Cadillac. I can't believe we all lived through this. I had so much experience behind the wheel when I finally got to take Driver's Ed in high school that the teacher would tell me where to go, usually on the freeway, and having just finished his lunch, would nap in the passenger seat until we got there, I woke him up, and we changed drivers. One day, I changed directions after he dozed off and much to the delight of three other Northeast High School students drove to the rustic confines of the old Kansas City Timing Association Drag Strip down on Front Street. We made two strong quarter-mile passes before he woke up as we pulled up to the starting line for a third go. It was the first time I ever heard a teacher say "Fuck!" I got ten detentions and a good talking to from the principal, Mr. McKenna before he commuted my sentence. He was getting up in years, and mistakenly thought I was a football player and thus, entirely blameless in all things. The other students told the story for years.

The back porch. What might be referred to as a deck these days, though not as attractively appointed. It faced Chuck Capo's junk yard, the Twelfth Street bus turnaround and the Jackson Hoe Bar. Beyond were the train tracks of the Santa fe Railroad, and the constant stream of freight and passenger trains going from Chicago to Los Angeles and back. People told me it was noisy. I didn't notice. When I moved to rural Colorado in 1972, I couldn't sleep because the train tracks were at least a mile from my bedroom window, and it was way too quiet.

Our back porch was the default portal to the house. You drove into our yard from the 11th Street side, onto a huge gravel apron and right up to the porch. The front porch, a real concrete porch, had two doors - one to what was originally the living room facing the street, and one to the parlor, or dining room. Odd layout.

What passed for our living room was staked out of the original parlor, and my folks used the living room as their bedroom. When I was very small, we all shared that bedroom, and dad used the only real bedroom as an office. It later became my room, and my bed faced the alley that fronted Jackson Court. The neighborhood teen Visigoths' favorite sport was waiting until I went to bed at night, and as I lay there reading or listening to the hapless Kansas City A's on the radio, they would creep up around the window, and stand just far enough out that my reading light wouldn't shine on them. On some agreed-upon signal, they'd all yell at once and scatter. Fuckers. I still don't like  open shades when I can't see out.

The back porch was the gathering place for the neighborhood. Good chairs were a necessity.

Chairs - they weren't "vintage" back then.

Dad held court with the kids, and mom caught up with the Ladies of Jackson Court™. Dad sent up clouds of pipe smoke - he had given up cigarettes a few years earlier when his ticker betrayed him, and as a pipe-smoker kept Sir Walter Raleigh in business. The aroma was as though he was inhaling a pile of cherry-flavored Three Musketeers bars bars wrapped in vinyl seat covers. Old vinyl seat covers. Really old.

If you don't know any pipe-smokers, they are the contemplative thinkers of the world. Decisions have to wait until the pipe is stoked, set alight, the match shaken and disposed of, and few thoughtful puffs have been negotiated, the pipe studied, relit, tamped, and puffed again. You do not hurry pipe smokers. Don't even try. The more you hurry them, the slower they get. If they smoke a pipe and also wear a hat, abandon hope, all is lost.

I tried pipe smoking a couple of times, mostly as an affectation of anti-establishment hip style, but I didn't have the patience for the damn things. Cigarettes were cheap* and easy to come by, packed the required nicotine punch, and had the cool factor that a pipe just didn't have. Cigarettes gave me credibility with my denim and Acme boots costume swagger. I started smoking when I was sixteen, and only managed to quit twenty-one years later. An horrific bicycle crash left me stuck to the couch for a few days. The ashtray was mounded so high with butts that no more would fit, so that was that.

What goes around, I suppose - I like a pipe now and again, but Sir Walter Raleigh and his fruit-salad tobacco-packing ilk need not apply. I prefer an artisanal herbal kick these days.

*I started smoking cigarettes in 1967. They cost about thirty cents per pack, the equivalent of about $2.50 today. 

Friday, June 4

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June 4, Friday - Thinking about leaving Marv. We are incompatible to the last degree and he insists on fishing twice a week with Sandi. So! (See how unbalanced I am.)

June 5, Saturday - Bad storm last night, about 1:30. Treatment today - may be my last. Dr. Allen told me to take my nerve pills, but I doubt that they will help. If I hear about Sandi much more, I'll scream.

June 6, Sunday - To church - sure hope it helps. I'm so discouraged. We took Bud to shoot pool - shot my first game, too. Quiet evening - paid bills. (Marked through: Hate to break up my home, but it's coming.) 

Imagine reading this for the first time some forty years after your mom's passing. I knew there was tension because of dad's fishing buddy, Sandi, but I didn't know the extent of the pain.

Our house sat next to a row of identical houses on a "street" called Jackson Court. If you wanted to drive to a house on the court, you had to drive down a narrow alley outside my bedroom window, or a back alley on the other side of the houses. Only a couple of hundred feet from 11th Street to the end of the court, the six houses were at a right angle to ours. Houses two, four, and six were occupied by their owners, while the remainder were rentals.

Jackson Court

Jackson Court

House four saw a parade of renters - my buddy Sharon and her extended family when I was six or seven, a big, rangy guy named Bob a few years later. He had a dump truck and a '37 Ford. I thought the Ford was pretty cool, until I realized that it wasn't a hot rod or a retro statement. It was what he could afford.

During this time period, another family, whose name escapes me, moved in. Sandi was the oldest child in the house, the wife's daughter by a previous misunderstanding and just graduated from high school, maybe one or two years out. She and dad struck up an immediate friendship centered around fishing and fish bait. Dad had given her some of his products, and she was so impressed, she wanted to work for dad. He rejected that idea, because it would have cut into my piecework income from the company, but he encouraged her to go fishing with him. Dad, with a regular fishing friend, would have poured on the mentor charm, and Sandi was receptive to the mentorship.

Dad and I share a natural ability to flirt, even if follow-through is a bit iffy in places. We were and are both generally clueless about such things, and always surprised when someone takes us up on our offers.

I could be wrong, but I don't think dad had any real romantic interest in Sandi, but mom, in her current state of mutilation, as she see it, and the state of mind that accompanies it, sees Sandi as her nemesis. Even mom, by her comments, indicates that she thinks she's overreacting.

Piecework. Dad's fish bait was shipped in 8 ounce squat paper containers, with the bait enclosed in plastic bags. My job was doing all this packaging. Dad mixed his dough bait in a huge vintage Hobart commercial planetary mixer. Imagine your Kitchenaid countertop mixer, but six feet tall, and you'll have a good idea of the mixer's bulk. He then muscled the huge steel mixing bowl out of the mixer and turned the dough out onto a large work table. He divided the dough with a cutter, then hand-packed the dough into a container of known capacity, turning out cup-sized lumps of dough. He stacked those onto another board that could be shifted to my workstation around the corner. I took each lump of dough, inserted it into a plastic bag and set it off for finishing. After the entire batch - some four dozen packages were bagged and my bait-covered hands cleaned, I went back and twisted the bags and inverted them into paper cartons and put lids on. I tallied my day's progress on a small slate near the door.  Dad would come back later and attach the appropriate labels to the top of the containers, box the bait two dozen to a carton and get them ready for shipping or delivery. For my part in this process, I was paid five cents per unit. $.05 x 48 = $2.40 In today's money, that's about $19.00 in buying power. A good Saturday manufacturing run might produce ten batches. I was rich. Some summer months I made upwards of $250. I squirreled away the money so I would be able to buy a car.

Mom says, "We took Bud . . ." It was just me and her.

I took mom to a pool hall in the blue-collar Armourdale district of Kansas City, Kansas where we futzed around with a few games of 8-ball. I knew of the joint because of my half-step-cousin Danny*, who had taken me there several times on the q-t. My mom, obviously twisting in her pain over her marriage with my dad, played pool and drank a beer. Let me say that again. My mom drank beer. The house bought it for her. They knew she didn't belong there, much less with a beer in her hand. They called her mom. We laughed all the way home. She made me promise not to mention the whole excursion in Sunday School. I reminded her how highly unlikely it was that I'd be anywhere near Sunday School.

"I'll pray for you."

That's my mom.



*Too complicated to explain

Tuesday, June 1

Click to enlarge

June 1, Tuesday - Rained real hard this morning. Went to Dr. and Kroger this afternoon. I know so many nice people from there. Talked to Mickey. Stormed and we went to Wurtz's basement.

June 2, Wednesday - Not much doing today. Sultry - Marv bought tackle.

June 3, Thursday - Opened the bait shop today. There'll be no going any place now.

Part of the magic of living in the Flyover is the weather. Four seasons in one week is not out of the question, and after the first of April, the sky will open up and punish you with huge storms - torrential rains, hailstones the size of oranges, and tornadoes.

The inhabitants of these lands have created tornado sirens. When activated by local authorities, these sirens wail to warn everyone that their lives are in danger. The people, thus warned, instead of taking shelter, go outside and with their necks craned like turkeys in the rain, stare at the lowering sky. Many of these same people, when they see an actual tornado heading their way, will head underground and take shelter, if only at the last possible moment. Other people, like my dad, who grew up in Fort Scott, Kansas; feel the approaching storm, and the second the sky turns that sickly shade of green, dive underground like a prairie dog being chased by a coyote. When we lived in Fort Scott in the early '50s, a small tornado neatly removed the back wall of our house on Washington Street. The storm came and went while my mom was trying, unsuccessfully, to squeeze her backside under her big iron bed. We had no basement.

Basements are a necessity in tornado alley, and many people wouldn't begin to consider living in a house without a basement. Since our basement was a small and highly aromatic fish bait factory, it was not unusual, given enough warning, to seek shelter in the basements of friends and relatives with "normal" basements. This time around we went to the Wurtzes, my aunt Gladys and her husband Lawrence, who lived in a basement apartment at Eighth Street and Chestnut Avenue.

With less warning, we made do at home. On May 20, 1957, all manner of hell broke loose in the plains. Thirty-five confirmed tornadoes took aim at parts of Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Missouri. Concordia, Kansas was hit by a large tornado accompanied by hail that measured seven inches in diameter. A regulation softball is half that size - 3.8". 

At that time, mom was working at a small Kroger store at 27th and Brown in the Quindaro district of Kansas City, Kansas. Her 3-transfer bus trip took an hour and then some, so when she was ready to leave work at 5:00, her dad, concerned about the weather, came and picked her up and took her back to his house and basement shelter.

Meanwhile, dad and I headed down to the bait factory basement. From the cellar door on the south side of the house, we saw dozens, I repeat, dozens of spinning funnel clouds whirl across the dark green sky. The Everly Brothers, Elvis, and Pat Boone played on WHB Radio in between sparse and cryptic weather-related break-ins. Mom called home when she got to her dad's house, and that was the last we heard from her until she showed up at our front door around 9:00 p.m. The phone lines were jammed, and many were down.

Around dusk, An EF5 tornado - top wind speeds over 200 mph - first touched down near Williamsburg, Kansas and tracked for 71 miles until it finally lifted near Raytown, Missouri. It devastated the sleepy bedroom community of Hickman Mills and destroyed the small suburb of Ruskin Heights, Missouri. Forty-four people lost their lives that night and more than 500 were injured.

Weather warning were hit-and-miss back then. Two years before Ruskin Heights, in 1955, a tornado wiped out the small Kansas town of Udall, Killing eighty at one swipe.

Anyway, back in 1965, mom senses that the bait shop is part retail establishment, part anchor, and 100 percent not at all what she had in mind. (The influence of her mother is evident in all this. Pansy didn't think much of dad's bait business.) The lid is about to blow off of the pressure cooker. Stick around.