Wednesday, July 7

July 7, Wednesday - Went to Fort Scott - thought we'd stay all night. 104° so we came home. Nice trip - nice day. Mom is better.

July 8, Thursday - Hot today. Loafed most of the day. Betty Hendricks got on a crying jag and sat on the back porch crying for an hour. We will move soon. (I hope)

July 9, Friday - Went to store in Missouri. Went fishing in evening.

Strikethrough: Went to 201 in p.m. to pick up my keys. The kids gave me $20 for my birthday.

Grandma's house in Fort Scott wasn't air conditioned.

A trip to Fort Scott during a heat wave is made much more enjoyable by the meat-locker-cold air conditioning of the Big Blue Cadillac. Previous attempts at staying cool along the way included outfitting one of our old cars - probably the ghastly oxidized-green 1951 Plymouth - with a window-mounted evaporative "swamp cooler". The hitch is that in the sopping, dripping humidity of the Missouri/Kansas summer, water never actually evaporates, it just loses all hope, gives up, and changes directly to mildew.

Evaporative Cooler

The idea was to fill the tank with water, and before you set out, pull on a rope that rotated a fabric wick through that water, and then as you drove, the water evaporated, cooling the air that was forced through it. You only pulled on the rope while you were standing still. It wasn't designed for Kansas and Missouri, and once, mom, frustrated by the lack of cooling yanked on the rope while we were doing about sixty on 69 Highway. The resulting cold-water shower soaked the entire interior of the Plymouth. We were all wet, but not really all that cool. We were never really all that cool.

Fort Scott, Kansas is where my dad's family is from. His folks bought a little house past the city limits way out on East Wall Street in the 1920s so they could raise a family without moving every year. Before that, the family's listings in the city directories show them as renters, and moving every single year.

My grandpa Simpson died when I was very young - 1954 - and Grandma lived alone in the little house until she could no longer care for herself and moved to Kansas City to stay with my Aunt Gladys in the 1970s. The house on Wall Street had only rudimentary indoor plumbing - cold water in the kitchen, and an outhouse in the back. To get to the outhouse, you had to walk past next-door neighbor Ora Fairman's chicken coop, and occasionally, they'd raise a fuss. My relationship with Mr. Fairman's chickens was mostly with them as a curiosity. I'd feed them from time to time, and spent a lot of time watching them, trying to figure out what made chickens tick. I'm still not sure. Chickens are odd people.

This trip to Fort Scott, there was a show-car custom 1950 Ford sitting next to Fairman's house. The Candy Apple Red** lacquer had begun to craze some, but the interior was Rod and Custom Show perfect. Red and white naugahyde tuck and roll, with a custom horseshoe shaped rear seat. At the focus of the seat's inner circle was a built in cooler. I would have swooned over such high-gloss automotive sex anyway, but the car had just been featured in one of my many car magazines. It was like being in the presence of royalty.

Rod & Custom, March 1965

Grandma's house, (r) and Ora Fairman's place

Fort Scott was a military town during the Civil War, and, I'm told, had it not been for market pressures brought on by the war and the Chicago fire, of all things, it would have been the major rail hub in the midwest instead of Kansas City.

As a kid, there was plenty to see in Fort Scott - the Frisco train depot was at the foot of Wall Street near First Street, and in the early fifties, there were still a couple of steam trains that came through town. There is something about that whistle that you never forget. We would grab soft-serve cones up the street and sit on the platform to wait for the Frisco to roll through. Dad put pennies on the rails and waited for the train to mash them into little copper dinner plates.

Time and progress has filled in Harkey Park, a baseball diamond and gathering place a bit closer to town. It was situated in a deep bowl along Wall Street, and was dad's baseball venue when he played in town, and a point of assembly for Klan Rallies and other fun small-town activities.

In the older part of town, Gunn Park was a family-friendly place for fishing, picnicking, and when the weather in Kansas turned into a raging furnace of heat and humidity, a place to go sleep. During heat waves, the park would fill with families on blankets, trying to avoid the stifling heat long enough to get a good night's rest. Imagine. I know we slept in the park a couple of nights during the heat wave of 1954. That was the year that dad finally broke down and bought his mammoth Fridgidaire Air Conditioner. We moved to Kansas City the following summer.

Any discussion of Fort Scott, Kansas should include mention of renowned photographer and native son Gordon Parks. Born in Fort Scott a couple of years after my dad, he became one of America's most prominent photojournalists. Fort Scott Community College operates the Gordon Parks Museum on its campus.

Leonard Bernstein, New York
Photo by Gordon Parks, from the archives of The Gordon Parks Foundation

Anyway, mom's optimism about moving was just that, optimism. It never came to pass, ands more nights than that one, the back porch was where mom and dad held neighborhood court - crying jags, police calls, lost kids, and stray dogs all found their way to our house.

Mom's getting ready to go back to work - she's got her keys, birthday money from her store kids, and a willingness to get things back to what passes for normal. More fishing. Always the fishing.

**Note from the Hyper-Pedantic Car Guy: "Candy Apple" only applies to the color red. It's Apple Red, but it's shot with Candy Colors. There is no such animal as "Candy Apple Orange". "Candy Colors" or in some cases "Kandy Kolors" are simply transparent layers of richly hued lacquer applied over a gold or silver base coat. The process in the '50s and '60s, as invented by immortal hot rodder Joe Bailon was laborious and fraught with danger:

• Apply the appropriate base coat - gold or silver metallic
• Apply the first coat of transparent color 
• Rub out most of the lacquer by hand, eliminating bumps, dust, and other imperfections trapped by the rapidly-drying lacquer 
•  Apply another coat of transparent color
•  Lather, rinse, repeat until the color is uniform and clear and deep as a pool of liquid gemstones
• Finish by sanding, buffing, and polishing the top coat until you forget why you started this process in the first place.  

You might have Candy Titian Orange applied over either silver or gold basecoats, or possibly Candy Cerulean Blue over silver. Candy Lime Green would usually be over silver. You get the picture. These days, Candy Colors are acrylic, and only a small part of the pantheon of Kustom Kar Kolors***, and much easier to deal with than the old lacquer finishes, but the result is much the same. Deep, rich colors that dance in the sunlight. Pure sex.

 

Candy Apple Red Chevy

 

Candy Apple Red Merc

Now, let's talk about Pearls and Metalflakes . . . . . 

***You'd think this stuff was invented by the same guy that names cafes in the Missouri Ozarks.

Thursday, June 10

Click to enlarge

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.