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.

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.

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.