Sunday, June 13

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

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

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

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

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

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

Common Carp

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

Bait-casting reel

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

Carp glamour shot

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

Carp on the doorknob, Bud at the window, 1951

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

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

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

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

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

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

Friday, June 4

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

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

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

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

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

Jackson Court

Jackson Court

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I'll pray for you."

That's my mom.



*Too complicated to explain

Tuesday, 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.

Friday, May 7

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May 7, Friday - Felt real good today - Went to store in morning. Delivered bait afternoon, then stopped to see Patty. She's doing fine.

May 8, Saturday - Bud got up with sinus-sick headache. Went to library first thing - then to Katz. Stopped by Gladys to give mom Mother's Day $2.00 Plan to have picnic at Jean's tomorrow.

May 9, Sunday - Had a lousy day for Mother's Day. Marv and I had a brawl - made me so upset I couldn't go to church. Ruined my whole day.

Bait deliveries and relatives in the hospital - it's our family theme.

I used to have crippling sinus infections. They felt like someone driving nails into my eye sockets. They just came and went. I got used to them.

I spent a lot of time at the library at Northeast High School - I remember that this time I was working on a speech for the Drama Club. It had to do with the Colossus of Rhodes. I'm not sure if I picked the topic or if Mrs. Womack threw me under the bus on that one. The Colossus of Rhodes? Really?

Katz Drug Stores was a midwest institution, and if you couldn't get it at Katz, you probably didn't need it. While we got our prescriptions filled at Fredman's Drug Store on the Ninth and Spruce triangle, we got nearly everything else at Katz. I bought records, cameras, film, and pretty much everything else there. They had a creepy animated black cat neon sign that used to freak me out. Not as much as the big glowing face on the U-Smile Court out on 40 Hiway, but creepy all the same.

Katz Drug Store

U-Smile

Again, I was totally and blissfully unaware of any of my folks fights. I just didn't know about most of them. Don't know why this one started, or how it went down. It must have been a rough one if it took my mom down like that.

Chances are, my dad raised a stink because mom was going out to her sister Jean's house in Independence. Jean never tried to pretend that she liked my dad - or anyone else, for that matter - and my dad had an inferiority complex where mom's family was concerned. Jean and her husband Frank built a house, stick by stick, out on Arlington Road before I-70 disconnected the north end of the street from the rest of the world. Uncle Frank, who, like my dad, was a meat-cutter of the A&P variety, did most of the work himself, and the house was a marvel of mid-century modernity - built-in televisions and appliances, rocker switches to control the lights, the steepest, narrowest, stairs I've ever seen, and a far-too-small kitchen. I'm quite sure mom saw it as a dream house, a dream that she would never see in real life.

At any rate, dad probably wanted to go fishing instead of going to Aunt Jeans.

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.

Sunday, April 25

April 25, Sunday - Took care of Greg today. He was fussy in the morning, but did fine afternoon. Mickey stayed for supper. Maxine was here, Mom Simpson came and stayed all night. Gladys was worse.

April 26, Monday - Went to see Gladys first thing. She's better. She had a case of nerves. Went with Marv to pick up stuff. He treats his mother shamefully. Bud was pooped this morning, but went to school anyway.

April 27, Tuesday - Took our laundry over to Mom's and helped her do her laundry, too. Stopped and got a hamburger and donuts for lunch.

Greg was the infant son of mom's coworker Mickey. Mickey was, as I remember her, entirely mom's opposite - a loose cannon, prone to cocktails and misadventure. She drove a British sports car - an MGB, I think, that mom described as riding like a "lumber wagon". The process of getting my mom in and out of an MG would have been something to see.

When my pal Vic went to Coast Guard Basic Training in 1970, I took care of and regularly exercised his Triumph Spitfire while he was gone. Horrible little car. I shoehorned mom into it for a road trip Leavenworth County, Kansas to see the family reserve one day. It was comical, at least for me. She never screamed once.

Maxine was our longtime family friend. My dad never said as much, but Maxine was our lesbian friend. Dad the Baptist showed remarkable restraint in not bringing that up.

My aunt Gladys had a case of nerves. I don't know what that means, nor did I know had dad mistreated his mother.

I was recovering from a weekend at the lake with Ron and his dad. Beer, water, boats, mosquitoes. I went to school because that's where Patty was.

Dad's supply runs could be anything - paper containers, plastic wrap, flavorings - almost anything. See the next post on April 28 for more on that.

Hamburger and donuts for lunch. That's my mom!

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.

Saturday, March 13

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March 13, Saturday - Made a trip to the hobby shop as usual, then downtown to get underwear. Margaret and Eva got me a pretty gown. Not very busy Gampper said I had a job as long as I wanted one.

March 14, Sunday - Pretty slow Sunday. Feel much better today. Myrtle and Lee came by to see me. Everyone in the store has promised to come and see me. Lois Ward is replacing me.

March 15, Monday - Paid rent, got hair fixed, went to store, did laundry, went to Dr. Hesser. Go to hospital next Sunday, operation Tuesday Went out for dinner and went downtown and shopped.

As usual, mom's expensive kid demands tribute in the form of ready-to-assemble plastic. Gampper, Kroger Zone Manager for Kansas City, Kansas just made a friend for life when he promised mom a job no matter what.

Slow Sunday at the store - Myrtle and Lee are mom's maternal aunt and her husband from Topeka. Lee Crawford ran a laundry a block west of the Kansas State Capitol building. Dad always referred to Lee as my rich uncle, and while he may have been well-off relative to our means, he wasn't a Patton family benefactor, and had a family of his own. His grandkids visited Kansas City a couple of times, but we really didn't hit it off. They were suburban kids, and we, the big-city mice, didn't agree with what passed for a Topeka sense of style.

Grandma Patton (Pansy) with Lee and Myrtle Crawford

Rent. Mom and dad moved us into our little house on 11th Street in 1955 after several years in Fort Scott, Kansas. My uncle Lawrence, aunt Gladys' husband, was employed by Cirese Investments, owned by Big Joe and Mary Cirese. They charged mom and dad $60 a month for the house on six lots. Lawrence and his son Frank helped dad excavate a large enough area under the house to serve as dad's bait factory. (Just thinking about that makes me cringe. There was a small area that held a water heater and room for a washing machine. They dug out five times that much area, hauling the dirt out in buckets. It was like something from The Great Escape.)

Dad's gigantic industrial Hobart mixer had a permanent spot on the original concrete pad, and the rest of the operation horseshoed around the basement, through the center grade beam, and over to the east side of the basement. Dad eventually put a ladder and trap door in our bathroom that allowed access, though not easy access, to our basement in case of a tornado or the beginning of World War III. Either seemed likely in those days. The original entrance, a short ramp facing south, was still handy for doing laundry or dropping off 55-gallon barrels of blackstrap molasses or cheese trimmings that dad used to manufacture various baits. Stick around, this gets interesting later in the summer.

Anyway, sixty bucks a month. In today's money, maybe $550. A few years later, when big Joe died, there was talk of raising the rent, but Mary held off. When dad had his heart attacks in 1962, Mary reassured mom that she would never have to pay more than $60 for rent. Mom finally moved out of that miserable little house and into assisted living in 1979. Her rent was still $60, the equivalent then of about $130. Anyone who says anything bad about Mary Cirese will have to answer to me. She was a saint.