Thursday, May 13

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kansas City Municipal Stadium - probably pre-Charlie Finley

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

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

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

It was probably a Wizard, from Western Auto.

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

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

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

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.