Sunday, August 1

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August 1, Sunday - Picnic tonight at Bob's. First Sunday back at work. Worked in deli. Got along pretty well.

August 2, Monday - Had to hunt a place to get my hair fixed. Mary Kern finally did it. Bud bought his car. Sold my last bond to buy it. Am I burned up!

August 3, Tuesday - Short on help as usual. Hot today. Didn't call home today on lunch hour - they were surprised to see me tonight.

Last things first. Mom always called home on her lunch hour. She did this to make sure we didn't need anything from the store, sometimes to let us know she had stops to make on her way home - just general stuff. That she didn't call home is a big deal.

So this:

The car in question, the reason that mom's hair is on fire, is a 1956 Chevy two-door post. I bought it from my pal Mike up the street. To be more accurate, my dad bought it from Mike, because I was too young to own a vehicle, much less drive one..

It was in pretty fair shape, and just had a fresh coat of Chevrolet Midnight Blue applied. Under the hood was the workhorse 235 c.i. Chevy Stovebolt inline six cylinder backed by the dependable two-speed Powerglide automatic transmission. The lifters were noisy, and like many Stovebolts, it had an accessory top oiler added in an attempt to muffle the clacking a bit. This drove my dad crazy, and would eventually lead him to trade in my car while I was at school. I come from a long line of worrying, crazy, people with bad decision-making skills.

1956 Chevy

The thing is this: I paid $300 for the car. On top of some seed money from dad a few years back, I had saved almost $700 from various projects, piecework in dad's bait factory, mowing lawns, shoveling snow, you name it. This was always the "car money." Mom was on board with this. It was more than enough cash to buy the car, and pay for the tags. Dad went ahead and put it on his insurance - I was too young to drive it anyway.

From here on out, my income went to small cosmetic fixes - chrome wheels, seat covers for the ratty bench seats, a glaspak muffler, and few sparkly trinkets here and there from Arrow Speed Shop on Independence Avenue. Yes, I had fuzzy dice. By the time a new school year rolled around in 1966, I'd have been able to swing the cash for aV8 engine swap and I'd be ready to take my position in the hierarchy of teenage death-wish motorheads at Northeast High School. A '56 Chevy would move me to the top of the lower-middle tiers in no time. Quite an achievement for a sophomore.

Cars were not ubiquitous at urban high schools back then. There was no student parking lot. It wasn't necessary. Of the pack I ran with, I was the only one with a car until late my senior year. Other guys were able to borrow their parents' car, but it wasn't the same.

Somehow, my dad had pulled a fast one, but I can't figure out what he did with the money. $300, in today's buying power would equal well over $2,400! What the hell? That mom had to cash her last bond for this is a tragedy. No wonder she was pissed.

Speculation: I can imagine a scenario where somebody in the neighborhood would put the touch on dad. He was as soft as they come, and a bit of an innocent. Our neighborhood was full of sob stories, and dad, the househusband, was always around to hear them. Yeah, I can see that happening. Car problems, medical bills, lost jobs, all would have activated dad's sucker gene.

Mom had always assumed that someday, if they worked hard, they could find a place of their own, stop paying rent, and join the Great American Illusion. The mean home prices nationwide in 1965 were around $20,000, and mom's last few bonds would have made a decent down-payment. I remember driving with her looking at bungalows around Northeast. She particularly like a couple of places on Denver and Quincy streets, just north of Budd Park. The disappearance of the last bond was her dream in flames. I can barely write thinking about this.

I honestly don't know the whole story here. I will never know, but it was obviously a pivot point in my folks' lives. I'm surprised mom didn't kill him in his sleep.

Monday, July 19

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July 19, Wednesday - Rained hard in the morning. Got hair cut and fixed. went home and stayed all day. Rain.

July 20, Tuesday- Bud called about 11:00 and said Marv was so dizzy he couldn't stand. Finally had to go home and take him to the doctor. Didn't go back to work. Johnson wasn't too pleased.

It's always something at our house. Dad lost his bearings and mom had to leave work and haul dad out to the Country Club Plaza to see Dr. Miller.

Her boss, Kenny Johnson, was not happy, but didn't have much to say about it.

Note: To this day, I have periodic bouts with vertigo caused by my inner ear, and have to take part of the day to readjust my otoliths. I've always wondered if this is related.

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.

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

Monday, May 31

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May 31, Monday - very quiet day. Marv and Bud worked on bait shop. I ironed a little and that's about all I did do. Marv is so patient with me. I can't stand myself, but he takes everything so well that I'm ashamed of myself.




















Mom continues to do battle with her self-image. Understandable.

You might remember that May 30 was the original date for Memorial Day before it became a three-day weekend with an observed date, the last Monday in May


The old folks called it Decoration Day, and that name had been passed down since the late 1860s, a date to remember the deaths in the American Civil War.

Memorial Day in 1965 wasn't a big deal for most people. They decorated the graves of their loved ones, and paid special attention to the remembrance of fallen soldiers. Retail stores didn't have massive blowout sales, and we city kids knew that summer was right around the corner. 

For me, the big deal was that the Indianapolis 500 Mile Race was held on May 30.

The 1965 500 had a good freshman class, including Mario Andretti, Al Unser, Sr., and Gordon Johncock. A.J. Foyt, was back behind the wheel after a horrific stock car crash at the Motor Trend 500 at Riverside, California.

Rear engine cars were making inroads against the older front-engine Offenhauser roadsters, and Jim Clark of Scotland won the 500 in a rear-engine Ford Lotus. The front-engined cars were definitely living on borrowed time, as were cars fueled by gasoline. The incredible second-lap crash at the 1964 500 made a number of teams turn to methanol or methanol blends, but their performance wasn't good enough to keep up with the high-octane gasoline cars. Eventually, all Indy cars would change to methanol, thus leveling the playing field, and promoting safer racing at Indy.

Jim Clark's Lotus Ford

Meanwhile, in Kansas City, Bud and his dad worked on the bait shop, and mom did ironing.

Friday, May 28

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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:

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. I took a date. We laughed our asses off. More Wes Anderson material.

Tuesday, May 25

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May 25, Tuesday - Did washing, then to ______ for bra. I'm a pair again. Delivered bait and then stayed home for the evening. Talked to Marie and Patty

May 26, Wednesday - Sore from new bra. Also tired. Big storm in the middle of the night. Marv did ironing before I got up. He's so good to me. He's begun to relax a little since I've been home.

May 27, Thursday - Have been a mess today. Depressed and full of self-pity. I hate myself and everyone else. Cool today - high in the 60s.

Mom was fitted for a prosthetic bra in place of her missing left breast. The one she chose was inflatable, and had a hose that she could use to inflate by mouth, and a release valve to adjust the size if needed. She was embarrassed by it, and thought the idea absurd. She adjusted her thinking as time went by, but it added a chapter to the family humor collection later this summer.

Mom was mistaken about one detail - my dad never, ever relaxed. Ever.

The struggle with her emotions continues.

Sunday May 16

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May 16, Sunday - Planned to go to church, but felt so bum I slept in. Went fishing with Marv in the afternoon.

May 17, Monday - Ran around all morning. Got roaster-broiler with TV Stamps. Marv and I did washing. Spent quiet evening. Rained Monday night.

May 18, Tuesday - Not much cooking today. Marv had car worked on and came home and ironed. He went fishing in the evening.

Mom fades in and out for quite a while after her mastectomy, as can be expected. Fishing. Always with the fishing.

Trading stamps. S&H Green Stamps were the gold standard, but Kroger handed out Top Value stamps. "TV." You received a certain number of stamps depending on how much you spent at the participating stores. You pasted the stamps into books, in this case, 50 to a page, and when you had amassed the required number of books, you headed off to a redemption center to exchange them for stuff. Mom picked out a countertop broiler for her collection of red and yellow stamps. 

Trading stamps had all but disappeared by the time I started working for Kroger in 1966, but they had just begun cutting their prices instead of offering premiums. (Their promotion was called "4,197 Deep-Cut Discount Prices"). They had big numbers splashed all over everything in the store.
 

Top Value Stamps Book

Later, when I was a store manager for Ed Gieseler's Volume TV in Kansas City - "Volume Makes The Difference" - one of our vendors handed out Green Stamps as a sales promotion. I got a Sunbeam hand mixer and a nice Southwestern-themed blanket, both of which I still have, and a Kitchenaid coffee mill, which has long since ground to a stop.

Sales promotions and spiffs make life interesting. When I managed the camera store for Hallmark, the distributor of Olympus cameras had a sales contest. I won two Olympus OM-1 cameras, two lenses, and a motor drive. Somewhere, there are two OM-1 bodies with my name engraved on their baseplates.

Cars needed to be worked on back in those days. Ignitions were distributor-controlled, and contact points wore out, spark plugs were expendable, and a car's running gear needed lubrication and the brakes required occasional  adjustment. We can talk about tires some other time.
Cadillacs should have come with a live-in mechanic, for what they cost to repair.

Monday, May 10

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May 10, Monday - Took Bud to library and found book for speech. Got money and paid bills like crazy. Took Bud to the R______. Went home and Bud worked on speech. Sinuses ok. Marie has diabetes. (Bill started to work on mom's bathroom today.)

May 13, Tuesday - Helped Marv do washing, then took treatment 8. Bud stayed home and finished working on speech. "Colossus of Rhodes". Marv went fishing and Bud went bowling. Had lovely evening - did just as I pleased. I like it.

May 14, Wednesday - Feel low today. Marv ironed and I swept through the house. Took treatment 9. Bud stuck key in John's car and it became wedged. Crisis!

I don't know where mom took me, but I obviously found my way back home.

Bill is mom's brother - he and Uncle Bob spent some time working on the Patton house at 1501 Garfield in Kansas City, Kansas. The house no longer exists. I'm told it burned to the ground in 2005. When I was born we lived at 1932 North 14th, next door to my great-grandmother, and just around the corner from the Patton house. Mom's family was tight, and a cluster like this would have suited mom just fine. All the same, we moved a couple of times before we wound up on 11th Street. When I was very small, we lived on 10th Street, right next door to Whittier Elementary School, and somehow we relocated to Fort Scott, Kansas, where my dad was from, for a couple of years. The idea of mom being that far from her family seems unlikely, and whatever the reason for that stop, I'm sure dad heard about it.

Mom and her brother John at The Patton House, KCK
I'll be switched if I know who that little kid is.

Grandma and Grandpa Patton with Uncle Bob at The Patton House

You'll see a lot of references to doing the wash. We did all our laundry with a Maytag wringer washer something like this one:

The process was labor-intensive.

• You filled the washer with hot water, added detergent - Tide - and then the dirty clothes. You then switched on the agitator.

• After an appropriate amount of time, you stopped the agitator, activated the wringer, and fed the clothes from the washer to a tub filled with water for the first rinse.

• Time to drain the washer. Some had pumps for this - ours was gravity-powered. Right into the floor drain.

• After you drained the washer, you refilled it with cold water for the second rinse. You then put the clothes back through the wringer and into the washer. 

•  Turn on the agitator again. After the clothes have been properly rinsed, they go back through the wringer into a now-empty rinse tub, ready to be dried.

The drying process was solar and wind powered, by way of a couple hundred feet of clothesline in the back yard. A bag of clothespins was hanging on the line, and your fourteen-year-old son  dutifully, more often than not, helped you pin your clothes on the line.

You get the idea. After this ordeal, there was ironing to be done. No miracle fabrics - cotton, thank you, and cotton needs to be ironed. I learned how to iron when I was ten years old, and still prefer to do my own, although I really don't mind a few wrinkles these days.

"John" was one of the neighborhood guys that always had one too many cars, and dad never thought twice about letting them park them in our huge yard. This one was a 1950 Ford Coupe, shot up in primer gray. John had to wait for his next paycheck to license it, so it sat next to the old box truck that inhabited our side yard. (More on that vehicle later.)

1950 Ford Coupe - Not John's

As I was fascinated by all things automotive, I took a look inside, sat behind the wheel, and in a fit of temporary insanity, showed Tommy Jackson how one of my assortment of padlock keys would likely start the Ford. What could possibly go wrong?

The key slid into the lock and then promptly stuck. Tight. I couldn't so much as jiggle it. I felt the blood drain out of my face. Dad was going to be furious, and John, with his boxcar haircut and his Chesterfield cigarettes rolled into his T-shirt sleeve, would probably just kill me outright and leave my lifeless body next to the railroad tracks behind the Jackson Hole bar.

Tommy, always the hero, hightailed it for home, and I went inside and eventually told dad what had happened. In typical Marv fashion, he said nothing, but walked outside to assess the situation, came back inside and dug out the Yellow Pages to look up "Locksmiths", and made the call. The Yellow Pages, in case you're younger than forty, was a phone book of business numbers. The pages were yellow. Neat, huh?

A couple of hours later, the locksmith showed up, took out the Ford's ignition switch, removed the offending key, and gave dad the bill. $10.00 worth of expert lock-smithery. In today's money, that's about $82.

I could sense dad seething in the kitchen as he said goodbye to the locksmith and closed the back door. It was deathly quiet. And then dad walked into my room, handed me a folded piece of paper, and walked out. I open it and read this short verse:

"No more keys in locks, my lad,
for ten bucks it cost your dad."

Honest to Jesus, I think I really would have preferred a good beating, but that just wasn't my dad's style.

Tuesday, May 4

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May 4, Tuesday - Went to deliver bait. Marsha came over to spend the day. Stopped by to see Mary. Took treatment. Bob and Flo came by on way home. Had a nice visit. (Mary was operated on. Everything OK. What a wonderful relief.)

May 5, Wednesday - Sonnie's birthday. So tired today. Took treatment.

May 6, Thursday - Took treatment early

Bait deliveries were another constant part of our lives. The were dozens of bait and tackle shops all over town that stocked dad's products, and he always delivered orders personally unless the shop was more than a hundred miles away. Even then, he was as likely to load up the Cadillac and hit the road with the trunk full of cases of bait. I remember trips to Trading Post, Parsons, Pittsburg, Coffeyville, and Fort Scott, all in Kansas, and at least one run each to Jefferson City and Rich Hill.

Marsha was my newest cousin, uncle Bob's step-daughter. We were pretty good buddies for quite a while. We gingerly tiptoed around our sexual tensions. I went swimming with Marsha later in this summer of '65 and got the Big Kahuna Cheeseburger of all sunburns.

You can't tell the players without a program - Sonnie is my half-sister, Bob and Mary are married, Marsha is Mary's daughter by a previous marriage, and Flo is Mary's mom. 

Saturday, May 1

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May 1, Saturday - Took first cobalt treatment. Real easy. Cleaned house in a.m. while Marv washed. TV no good. Went to bed early.

May 2, Sunday - Went to church alone. Marv went fishing. Bud and I had nice afternoon. Mom came over and stayed all night

May 3, Monday - Went to St. Luke's early. Patty's surgery was benign. Such a relief. Took another treatment. Was so tired, I was sick.

I don't know how to compare cancer-recovery therapies in 1965 versus today, but mom's treatments seemed to take everything out of her. It doesn't sound like she did radiation and chemo at the same time, but I'm not sure.

Mom never complained, never gave anyone the impression that life had been in any way unfair to her. She did what she did every day - she put her head down and charged forward. It wasn't always easy.

Dad usually fished at area pay lakes - lakes that were stocked with carp and catfish, and charged admittance for a day's fishing. Unless it was a genuine lunker, Dad rarely kept the fish he caught, but then again, he rarely paid to fish there. He gave the owners samples of his bait to try or give away, and they let him fish for free. One was Shur-Katch Lake near the banks of the Little Blue River near the Heart Drive-In. Another lake was near Smithville, Missouri, but it was a fair slog to get there before the freeways went in. Dad's favorite was 40 Hiway Club Lake, near 40 Hiway and Lee's Summit Road. The "Club" in the name was an indicator that black people need not come down the driveway.

Jess and Mary Moretina ran the lake, which had a grill and snack bar along with a miniature golf course. Mary made a killer cheeseburger, and you could grab a Vess soda from the chest cooler. This made it tolerable for me to go along. Bank fishing for carp is a slow, long-term activity - bait casted into the deeps for the bottom-feeders, with long waits in between any kind of activity. Dad usually had four or more level-wind bait-casting rigs lined up along the bank, each with 28-pound test line. He scoffed at spinning reels as being the tools of the amateur fisherman.

If a luckless carp sucked in the bait, it was like hooking onto a bull elephant with an outboard motor. Carp are extraordinary fighters, and it might take a half-hour or more to tire and land one once it was hooked.

40 Hiway Club Lake as it looks today

This often proved to be more boredom than even an only child can handle, and if I didn't bring the supplies along that allowed me to wax and detail the Cadillac, I could often be found at the snack bar or playing miniature golf.

I once gathered up all my nerve and asked young Patty Saunders, whom I had met bowling five or six years earlier, to go with us to the lake on a Saturday afternoon. We fished, played miniature golf, and ate cheeseburgers. She drank Grape NeHi. I drank Vess Red Cream Soda. I don't remember if this was before or after I asked her to go see "Pajama Game" with me. My adoration of Patty overpowered my brutal shyness, at least temporarily. Musicals solved everything.

For the record, tomorrow, May 2, is Patty's birthday. To this day, she reminds me that she's older than I am and that I should show her the respect she deserves. I do so willingly.

Wednesday, April 28

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28 April, Wednesday - Went with Marv to pick up ingredients. Spent the rest of the day at home. Mary goes into the hospital Monday - operated on Tuesday

29 April, Thursday - Went to store and then to see Gladys. She felt pretty bad. Came home and relaxed. Felt pretty good.

30 April, Friday - Didn't sleep well. Got up and had a fight with Marv over Bud. Got hair fixed. Went to see May Fair Lady with Mom, Patty, Walt and Bud. Real good.

Dad's supply trips were epic adventures into the world of fish bait ingredients. Dad regularly picked up 100 pound bags of wheat shorts and flour from Robin Hood in North Kansas City, huge whey blocks originally designed for poultry farms, 55 gallon drums of cheese trimmings for catfish bait, 55 gallon drums of blackstrap molasses, (Yep, the trunk of the Cadillac could easily hold a full 55-gallon barrel, and my old man was strong enough to wrestle it out by himself.) and my favorite trip, every loaf of two-day old Taystee bread that dad could squeeze into a '55 Cadillac sedan. The back seat was jammed to the roof, and usually the trunk and as much of the passenger side of the front seat as dad could muster and still have room for me to ride along.* Dad had cultivated a friendship with someone at Taystee, and they just gave dad all the bread he could cart away, sometimes twice a week. They couldn't sell it, and the bread was destined for the dumpster, so what the heck. Dad found he could use bread as a replacement for wheat shorts and flour for some of his bait. The bonus factor was that the bread that was "Baked While You Sleep" was already infused with industrial strength preservatives, which meant dad didn't have to buy big bags of mold-killing sodium propionate to add to bait. Dad, like me, could be frugal to a fault. 

Tastee has Wheaty Flavor

If you're inclined as this point to compare your Uncle Ferd's homemade corn-flake dough bait to dad's stuff, you can pretty much stop now. Dad spent years in R&D finding the combination of flavorings and ingredients that made his bait unique. The running family joke was that the minute you walked in the back door, dad would thrust something under your nose, and say, "Here! Smell this." This madness was his method, and over the years he isolated flavors from other foods - cumin, curry, fenugreek, hops, whey, celery, and many others that he eventually incorporated into bait or other flavorings. He built a small distilling device for extracting essences of flavors that didn't exist on the market. Yes, we had a still.

Dad's baits didn't spoil, didn't get hard in the container, and never failed to catch fish. Four years after dad died, I went shopping for a gift for an angler friend of mine. I found a couple of cans of his Big Thunder Carp Bait at a bait and tackle shop in Independence, Missouri. It was still good. It was soft and pliable, and still had that distinctively sweet molasses aroma. Dad definitely knew his business. Your Uncle Ferd doesn't know shit about fish bait.

What could make mom and dad fight over me? Hard saying, but I never saw any of it. I only saw mom and dad fight one time, and that was about fish bait. Truth is, I think mom was concerned that dad was spoiling me into the ground, a theory that I can confirm without hesitation.

"My Fair Lady". If my mom and her mom were going to a movie or a theatre production, you can bet your valve oil and harmon mute it's going to be a musical. 

*Why dad didn't buy a pickup truck is still a mystery to me.

Thursday, April 22

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April 22, Thursday - Went with Marv to buy paper, and then tried to get to St. Luke's hospital. Never did make it. Came home and went to bed. Had to take Bud to library. 90°

April 23, Friday - Got Bud all ready to go to Ozarks with Ron. Went fishing (sigh) with Marv and Sandy. Mom went to Topeka for convention. 90°

April 24, Saturday - Had quiet day.

Remember libraries?

Dad buying paper is shorthand for buying packaging supplies for the bait business. Usually at Wayne Paper and Cordage on Prospect Avenue.

This Lake of the Ozarks trip was a real adventure for me. Ron lived up the street from me, and we ran around a lot together. He was a couple of years older, and had a car, so he was my escape mechanism when I really needed one. He also had a half-sister, the doe-eyed Linda, who was, in my mind, the most beautiful girl I had even seen, so I turned up at Ron's every chance I had. So, anyway, off to the Ozarks. Ron's dad and step-mom had a cabin on a cove somewhere near Sunrise Beach, and they kept their boat there for shits, giggles, and water skiing.

Ron's dad drove trucks for a living, and was a decent man with a wry sense of humor. The trip to the lake was an adventure because Ron's dad always kept a beer between his legs all the way down. He was good for five or six beers for the duration of the trip. This was amazing for a kid like me from a family of absolute teetotalers. By the way, beer doesn't smell or taste like that any more.

The weather late in April in Kansas City is unsettled. We were having a heat wave - temps in the 90s, and the idea of hitting the lake seemed like a good idea. Friday night we got out the boat and headed to the marina for gas and beer, and looked forward to some serious water time on Saturday.

I've never been much of a swimmer, and Ron's dad didn't want to take any chances, so he got me a ski belt, and Ron and I headed for the dock on the opposite side of the cove. We jumped in, and as I plummeted into the thirty-foot deep water, I realized that it was still April, and the water was probably forty-five degrees. About halfway down, I gasped, and filled my lungs halfway with green Ozark lake water. When the ski belt's bouyancy kicked in, I bobbed back to the surface. I was quite sure I was drowning, and flailed like a carp on a stringer, until Ron's dad reached down and pulled me out. The rest of the weekend was spent on dry land, or lounging in the stern seat of the boat. I know when I'm out of my element.

Grandma went to a convention, it was probably for The Navy Mothers

Mom got rid of everyone and had some time to chill.

Tuesday, April 13

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April 13, Tuesday - Felt less tired today. Cold and damp today. Patty called, said her doctor recommended surgery. Hope she doesn't put it off too long.

(tilt)

April 14, Wednesday - Didn't get check from union. Called Roberta. She called and then turned it over to (unknown name).

April 15, Thursday - Marv and I went to Northeast's Easter Assembly. Bud was in it. Very good. Depressed today. Talked on phone a lot - an hour with Florence.

The Pattons continue to help keep up the doctors' Lincoln payments.

Roberta is mom's Union Shop Steward. The union provided for lost wages during sick leave. Retail Clerks Local 782 was a monster union in grocery retail in Kansas City, outmuscled only by the Amalgamated Meat-cutters Union. This association by proximity will become more evident later in the year.

The Easter Assembly. This seems hard to imagine here in 2018, when religion in public schools is relegated to the close cover of the individual. In 1965, the schools didn't so much as participate in the establishment of an official religion as allow the majority Judeo-Christian faction to express its majority openly. It's just the way things worked back then.

We had a Christmas Assembly, an Easter Assembly, and others as needed to support the beliefs of the residents of Northeast. As a musician, I was always somewhere in the mix, usually in the horn section, playing Christmas carols or other music in support of the holiday.

The Easter assembly was one of the few school functions held during school hours that was well-attended by parents and family. It was a big deal, a series of living tableaus staged by the previously mentioned freshman Drama Club, "Taming of the Crew".  It depicted The Last Supper, The Crucifixion, and the Resurrection and Ascension. If the school year lasted another 40 days, they probably would have celebrated the Pentecost, but I digress.

The scenes depicted were taken from famous works of art - The Last Supper was modeled on Da Vinci's 15th century mural in Milan. The Crucifixion was actually the Descent from the Cross, as depicted by Rubens. The source of the Resurrection's artwork is lost to me, but I remember it being a simple depiction, probably also by Rubens.

Here's how it worked. The stage was set with the basic set pieces and props, but without actors. In my part, The Last Supper, there was a long table center stage, set with plates and cups, Judas' salt cellar and various other pieces designed to recall the Da Vinci fresco. I kept imaging the whole thing laid out with Fiestaware, Melmac, and depression glass. The cups and the Holy Grail might have been some of those colorful anodized aluminum tumblers.

Aluminum Grails, Non-Holy Variety

Between the stage and the audience was a semi-sheer scrim in white. It lowered the amount of detail visible on the stage, and gave the scene a painterly effect, with several small lights sweeping across parts of the scrim. More light equalled less detail.

Last Supper, Leonardo da Vinci, Santa Maria delle Grazie, Milan
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Portrait of the artist as a disciple. Bartholomew, the missionary; also Nathanael

At a signal, the orchestra began to play. I don't remember the music, but I'm sure it was something subdued and reverent, probably a simple Bach piece rendered entirely unlistenable by the screeching eighth-grade violins and shrill clarinets. On the same cue, the actors started to drift onstage, in full costume and makeup, and made their way to the table. It looked like total chaos, until, at the last possible moment, the players snapped into the positions depicted in the painting. There was a crescendo from the orchestra, an audible gasp from the audience, and we heard someone in the auditorium exclaim, "Oh, my God". We were truly awesome.

Offstage, someone read the account of the Last Supper from the Bible, probably from Mark 14. I can't imagine who it would have been, as no one in our group had the voice to carry it off, and most were on stage. You certainly didn't want a pre-pubescent male channeling "Our Miss Brooks'" Walter Denton. It might have been Mrs. Womack, the drama teacher. I don't know. I knew a couple of eighth-grade guys that were shaving twice a day, and might have been able to lend a solid baritone to the proceedings, but it was unlikely that they were actually able to read, much less evade detention long enough to participate.

I was Bartholomew, on the far left, mostly because I was so tall that I could lean over the table next to James and Andrew and still maintain the height relationship. St. Bart had flowing robes, and greasepaint-enhanced facial lines and wrinkles. I don't remember who played Jesus or some of the other major characters, but I do remember being relieved that I didn't have to play Judas. My dad, the Sunday School teacher, would have had a litter of three-legged calico kittens if I had been chosen to portray the betrayer of Christ. 

Parenthetically, many years later, one of my professors at seminary was known to say that the actual event, if it happened at all, would have been a rough, crowded, and a wholly unruly affair. He should have seen the level of chaos that a bunch of Junior High School kids brought to the story. Maybe they should have had it in the cafeteria.

In retrospect, it's probably a good thing they didn't try this with Christmas, too. Anyone playing a 14 year-old pregnant Mary would have been the laughing stock of our rowdy and somewhat unruly blue-collar school, although I know who they should have picked for the part. 

Ahem.

Wednesday, March 31

March 31, Wednesday - Came home. Rather hated to leave hospital. Made a lot of friends and met some old ones from the store. House looked so nice and clean. Marv worked so hard on it. Furnace is nice. Marv took Bud to Doctor - he has deep sinus infection.

Home is a special place, more so when you've been away for a while. Dad worked tirelessly to get the place cleaned up for mom's return home. I remember one night that he and I polished and waxed the hardwood floors throughout the house. He could get a bit obsessive, but I also know that he was trying to stay distracted.

Dad was a believer in paint for everything. Our little house was probably a couple of inches smaller inside after all the coats of paint dad put on the walls over the years. I did not get dad's obsessive paint gene.

Our heat plant was a gas-fired floor convection furnace. There was no blower, no heat vents save the large grate in the floor, no return air. When it came on, it did so with a satisfying "whump", and the house heated slowly and mostly unevenly. We often closed off the front of the house to keep the main section warmer. Poor folks have poor ways.

Mom had the chair closest to the furnace, that seat befitting her role as breadwinner. Dad, however, controlled the thermostat. I think it was my friend from across the street, Steve, who christened my dad "Thermostat Rex".

Every fall, dad would take the grate from the floor and vacuum the inside of the sheetmetal heat exchanger, light the pilot light, and balance a square cake pan on top of the exchanger. As the weather went from cool to cold, dad added water to the pan to keep some humidity in the house.

Thinking back, I can't imagine how we all avoided a quiet death by carbon monoxide poisoning.

When my hair went from Vitalis and Brylcreem to Beach Boys to Beatles and far beyond, the furnace served as a rustic, awkward, but extremely efficient hairdryer. This was years before the invention of the handheld hairdryer. 

Google "Remington Hot Comb". 

When you came in from shoveling snow or trying to dig the car out of a snowdrift on 11th Street, standing on the floor grate wrapped you in an column of warm, dry air and you had to be careful if you were still wearing rubber overshoes, or you'd melt the soles to the grate. Even the smell of burning shoes somehow smelled like home.

One of the happiest moments of my life was in 1970 watching the Girl from Iowa drying her chestnut hair over that grate.

Monday, March 22

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March 22, Monday - More blood - and an Xray. Al Mathis stopped, Marv and Bud sent flowers. Marie and Betty J. came up and paid for TV for me whenever I want it. Nice group of people I work with.

23 March, Tuesday - Surgery at 8 a.m. Everything that has ever happened to me has made me a better person in some way. Whatever happens today will be all right  do the same and be all right.

24 March, Wednesday - Not much good today. Bud and Marv came over and spent the day. Oodles of flowers from so many nice people. All my family has been up at least once.

There are few things that will make you feel more helpless than spending the day visiting someone you love while they're in the hospital recovering from major surgery. Mom lost her left breast and a major amount of chest tissue and lymph nodes to cancer.

Dad and I spent as much time as possible on the fifth floor with mom, and then we'd retreat to the coffee shop in the lobby to decompress.

At one point dad went out to the parking lot to smoke his pipe. I stayed inside and tried to do homework, but I was so distracted, I went to find him. He was sitting on the curb, sobbing. It was the first time I ever saw him cry.

I only saw him cry one more time - the day in September 1972 when I left home and moved to Colorado. It shook me to see him like that, and it's only recently that I have come to understand the depth of hopelessness and painful despair that causes emotions to spill out like that. For all his faults and myopic shortcomings, my dad truly loved my mom.

Friday, March 19

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March 19, Friday - The usual Friday. Bought groceries - $18.00 A little warmer today, but not much. That bunch of girls I work with are goofy. Sure have a ball. Marv had supper ready, as usual. He's so good.

March 20, Saturday - Got my hair fixed this morning. Stopped by mom's, then to work. Turned in my keys - feel as if I'm leaving for good.

March 21, Sunday - Carol's shower. Bud and I went to church, home for lunch, and here I am in Room 521. Didn't even get to my room before they started taking blood.

Mom is just treading water here. She's headed for the hospital for a radical mastectomy on Sunday, and she's just trying to hold it together. If she played one game of solitaire in front of the TV that week, she played a hundred. Mom usually reserved solitaire for the times when she didn't want to deal with dad. It was her mute switch. It was her sole foray into the world of the passive-aggressive. The sound of riffling cards makes me nauseous to this day.

Knowing my mom, the idea that she had to turn in her keys would have felt like jumping off a cliff and into the void. She loved her job - most of the time - and it kept her centered and grounded. Kroger was like home to her, the people she worked with were like family. This was my mom, in a nutshell. She created a new family in every setting. People depended on her, and she relished her role as the rock. 

Sunday, March 7

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March 7, Sunday - Took Ron, Mom, Bud and Marv to the airport. Tried to go to church, no place to park. Had a good time, took mom home and watched TV in evening.

March 8, Monday - Carol did my hair, did washing. Marv found out about my left breast & rushed me to Dr. Sims. (Now what?) Sims rushed me to (Dr.) Hesser. Took Marv out to his birthday. May be pretty busy on 3/29, or I may not be busy at all.

March 9, Tuesday - Low day. Blue, blue, blue. Told Johnson about my operation - he was so kind and understanding. I bawled like a nut. Tomorrow will be better. Worked on the front end - real busy, too.

Again with the airport. No one is traveling anywhere - we're just going to look at the airport. It's real Wes Anderson stuff.

Then the shoe drops. Mom found a lump in her left breast the size of a golf ball. If I remember the conversations properly, she had known about the lump for more than six months, but didn't think it was alarming enough to see a doctor about. Dad wasn't so calm, in fact he was furious that mom had sandbagged the discovery.Her regular doctor, Dr. Sims, was equally concerned, and immediately sent mom to see a surgeon, Dr. Hesser, the same day. The surgery was scheduled immediately and would take place about two weeks later at Bethany Hospital in Kansas City, Kansas; the same hospital I was born in some fifteen years earlier. They had the nerve to tear it down in the 1990s.

Bethany Hospital's Early Days

Mom took dad to his birthday celebration early - which can mean nothing besides a dinner at Crane's Cafeteria at the corner of Truman Road and Hardesty. Crane's fried chicken was and still is, to my mind the best I have ever eaten, and while they closed years ago, the very mention brings the taste back to me as though it were hot on my dinner plate. This was pretty much the only restaurant my mom and dad ever went to on any kind of regular basis. Cafeterias were, in general, the venues of choice for my family. Cranes. Myron Green's, Putch's - we knew them all, plus a few more in Topeka. Standing in lines as we pushed trays along seemed like second nature. It was the time of the factory worker. 

Crane's Cafeteria

Dad's real birthday is March 29, but mom didn't know if she would be able to follow through when that date rolled around. My mom was strong, but the reaction of dad and the doctors terrified her, and rightly so. In today's parlance, mom had Stage III metastatic breast cancer. It was entirely likely that they would take her breast, some muscle tissue, and as many affected lymph nodes as possible.

The reality of what's about to transpire has hit mom, and she's laid low. I'm sure she dreaded telling her store manager the news. Mom's manager, Kenny Johnson, was a strong manager, and he treated his people like family. Mom, and most everyone who worked with him, was crazy about the guy. My mom was the store mom, and a lot of the employees there would have walked on hot coals to keep her out of the hospital.

We all would have.