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.

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.

Thursday, February 25

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February 25, Thursday - Cold again 5° Getting starter fixed. Fell in the store. Hope I didn't injure myself. Bud and I made out his schedule for next year. He's taking band at my suggestion.

February 26, Friday - Stopped at Mom's this morning. She's better but not her old self. Busy today, warm - 50° at 6 p.m.

February 27, Saturday - Had a good day. Felt real good and got a lot done. Spring day - 70°.

Not much to see here, but it bears mentioning that I would have been in band, no matter what Mom suggested. The push here was to step up to Varsity "A" Band at Northeast High School while I still had classes across the street at the "Junior Building". This put me in marching band, for what that was worth, at Northeast. The marching unit was a small, ragtag, group, 25 members tops, with questionable musical talent, and marching skills to match.

Truth be known, I was pretty excited about the whole thing. After six years of trumpet in the public schools, private classical lessons, and suffering through the hormone-infused middle-school shenanigans of eighth-grade band, "A" band seemed like a free ride to Juliard. They had uniforms in the Viking signature purple and white, and silver metalflake Shako hats with white plumes. It was Meredith Wilson's "Music Man" come to life, and I loved it. Did I mention the white bucks?

I'm glad no recordings of our actual playing exist. It would be horrifying to hear that today. The best connection to come out of Varsity Band, under the direct tutelage of one Mr. Harry Bianco, was Stage Band, what most might call Jazz Band today. Here I learned to improvise, 12 bars at a time. It was a small, select group of high school musicians playing hits from the Big Band era. We visited tea rooms, women's clubs and nursing homes and played the music of their lives.  This connected me back to my folks in interesting ways. Because of this connection and a family dedicated to the musical TV stylings of Mitch Miller and His Sing-Along Gang, (don't judge) I still have a soft spot for the music of the forties. Mitch helped me appreciate mens' choruses and Welsh Mens' Choirs.

Magnus Chord Organ

My dad had an emotional attachment to music that I never could put my finger on. He encouraged me at every turn, and the songs he reacted to the most were songs that I wouldn't have guessed he would have a connection to. He bought me a Magnus chord organ from Jenkins Music when I was about twelve. I wanted something I could noodle out trumpet arrangements on, and a piano was out of the question, money-wise.

The Magnus was actually pretty cool. It was a reed organ, which meant that it was basically an accordion with legs. There was a motor inside providing air that was channeled through the reeds based on which keys were pressed. It had thirty-seven piano keys and twelve chord buttons on the left side - six major, six minor. The sound was not at all unlike a parlor pump organ, a harmonium, or a large Melodica. Sheet music was available for these things that had the key notations by number as well as the chord designations. I didn't need the numbers because I could sight-read but the chords were pretty handy, because my left hand wasn't.

Outside of Christmas and the ever-present Baptist hymnal selections, dad's request list was pretty short - "The Band Played On", "Back Home Again in Indiana", "The Banks of the Wabash", "Yankee Doodle Dandy", and not much else. I always suspected that these were songs that reminded him of his first wife, an old flame, or just another time, but dad never really said as much. There was definitely a connection to Indiana, or so it seemed. He had never been to Indiana that I was aware of. I know he was envious of my ability to read and play music, but he grew up dirt-poor, and music was a luxury when there were eight people living in a 700 square foot house in Fort Scott, Kansas.

Music was a gift my dad gave me that has lasted my entire life. He bought me my first horn and signed me up for classes without even checking with mom when I was six, and used his connections to get me a classical tutor from the Kansas City Philharmonic, and it has made an incredible difference in my life. I really should have stayed with it and done more with it, but the fact that it occupies such an important part of my being is good enough. Thank you, dad.