Friday, February 19

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February 19, Friday - Slow business, but Ruby, Ethel, Eva and I had a ball. At lunch & on our breaks we laughed till we cried. Went to the program with Bud. Good! Marv still doesn't feel well.

February 20, Saturday - Dr. Gripkey. Marv wants to go to California on vacation. Weight 167 - I've lost 35 pounds. Sure get around better. Bud asked Pat to go bowling Monday. His social life will bankrupt us. 70º today - 20° by morning. I hope I get to go to church.

February 21, Sunday - Slept till 9:00. Bud and I went to church. Ate lunch and started out to new airport. Too much traffic, so we came back to Municipal.  

Mom always had great friends in the stores. While I don't know these people by name, I know they kept mom happy in her work.

I've been racking my brain trying to figure out what this school program was, but I can't put a finger on it. It almost had to be a band event of some kind, but I'm not sure.

Dad's health is a constant concern. While he was a large man, and strong as an ox, his heart disease weighed so heavily on his mind that he was often convinced of his own frailty and impending death. He had worked hard all his life, and until his heart attacks, was a two-pack-a-day Pall Mall smoker. After his heart finally and dramatically betrayed him, we became a salt-free, caffeine-free, nicotine-free household. Dad's worry was contagious. Sometimes he would nap on the couch, and I would stop as I walked by to watch his chest rise and fall and make sure he was still breathing. Crazy begets crazy.

I think Dr. Gripkey was mom's weight-loss advisor. She's down to 167 from just over 200. My mom is 5'-2" on her best day. Dad wants to go to California to see his son Bill and daughter Sonnie. I have it on good authority that this trip won't happen.

Apparently, I had asked Patty Saunders to go bowling. On a Monday night. You would certainly think I would remember that, but I honestly don't. It would have taken me four years at this point to work up the nerve to ask her to do anything with me, although we were pretty consistent phone buddies. . It's very likely that afterwards, we would have been dad-chauffeured down to Allen's Dairy on Independence Avenue for carhop-delivered hot fudge sundaes. There's nothing so sexy as a chubby kid having a panic attack sitting next to a petite blonde in the back seat of a baby-blue Cadillac. My hands are sweating just thinking about it. Patty and I still converse via the occasional email. Hi, Patty!

I am a high maintenance, extremely expensive, 14 year old, but one very smooth date.

Mom and I went to church - Bales Baptist, with its thundering pipe organ and horseshoe-shaped sanctuary. The pastor was probably still Reverend Moad, the minister that baptized me a couple of years before.

Airports were, and remain to this day, an important source of entertainment for me. All during the late '50s, my dad and I would trek down to Kansas City Municipal Airport, (MKC) and head up to the open-air observation deck atop the south terminal. There, we watched Vickers Viscounts, Convairs, Douglas DC3s, and Martin 404s take off and land. As the planes taxied to the gate, they feathered their propellers and shut down all but one engine, but there was still enough prop wash to knock your hat off. The real star of the show was always the Lockheed Super G Constellation, the "Connie", still, to my way of thinking, one of the most beautiful airplanes ever manufactured. It looked like a swan with a distinctive triple tail and four thundering Wright radial engines.

Lockheed Super G Constellation in TWA livery

It was later in the fifties when the first jets appeared at Municipal, and if you were fortunate enough to be on the Intercity Viaduct when a Boeing 707 took off to the south on runway 19 in the days before noise abatement, you received an eardrum-busting treat as the plane flew over you at an altitude of a couple hundred feet. More than one driver, hypnotized by the big jets, drove straight into the guard rails as the mighty 707s flew over.

Municipal Airport was built in the crook of the Missouri River, and had no room for expansion. Jets required more runway than Municipal's 6,500 foot north/south could provide.**

 To help drag Kansas City, kicking and screaming into the future, they built Kansas City International Airport, (MCI). It had three circular terminals, each of which provided for short sixty-foot walks to the gates from the drop-off area. It was a pretty big deal in Kansas City, and mom and I set out on the 25-mile trek to see it. At that same moment, it seems 75,000 other Kansas Citians thought the same thing, and headed north to see the new miracle airport. We got snarled in Northland traffic and gave up. Back to Municipal where we belonged. I still hate driving in traffic.

When I owned my studio, my favorite work-avoidance venue was Downtown Airport. I would sit at the south end of Runway 1-19 with my aircraft radio and listen to air traffic control. You can seriously kill off several hours that way with no effort at all.

Municipal Airport - now the Charles B. Wheeler Downtown Airport (MKC)

** I think it was ahead of the 1992 election when George H.W. Bush visited Kansas City. They flew that big ol' 747 Air Force One into MKC - KC Downtown Airport.  Lou Holland Drive - the road immortalized as "Road Song" in 1967 by photographer Pete Turner -  was barricaded and they parked that monster out near the Airline History Museum. I got to the airport about four hours ahead of Bush's announced departure,  just to watch the launch.

I don't know who was at the controls of that aircraft, but that sucker came up out of the airport at full throttle like a rocket off of Runway 19, kept climbing as it banked right over Kansas City, Kansas and was well on its way to cruising altitude before it got to Worlds of Fun five miles to the northeast. Wow!

Unrelated detail: my first cousin, once removed, Johnnie S. Simpson, after 27 years in the military became, in 1947, crew chief of "The Sacred Cow." The airplane was designed so President Roosevelt could navigate his wheelchair around the cabin. 

Saturday, February 13

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February 13, Saturday - Bud had to have a model. Sure hated to come to work - beautiful day. mom has a terrible cold. Dropped by there before and after work. Took some cough syrup by.

February 14, Sunday - When I left the house Marv was having chest pains. Wonder what's around the corner. Stopped at mom's on way to work. Not too busy. It's nice to come home and have supper ready. Marv is a good cook.

February 15, Monday - Nothing spectacular. Beauty shop, laundry, rent, store, and downtown. Bought Bud some pants for his program Thursday and Friday nights. He'll probably wear them tomorrow.

It's only now that I realize how expensive I was as a kid. A typical model kit by AMT or Revell in this days cost about 4 bucks. There were a few that I bought just to have parts for customization, and there were the additional costs of glue, paint, body putty (a sort of scale model Bondo) and other raw materials. A trip to Northeast Toy and Hobby might have set my mom back five bucks on average. In 2017 dollars that's a whopping $39 in buying power. If I had been my folks, I would have considered putting me up for adoption, or at least selling me off for scientific experimentation.

Dad was a good cook, in a basic meat and potatoes sort of way. Compared to my grandmother, it was Cordon Bleu. The chest pains were a fairly regular part of dad's life, and continued to make him crazy and a little hypochondriacal. Since his 1962 heart attacks weren't remedied in any way except for bed rest, there was always some residual angina and his teeny nitroglycerin pills were always with him.

Another Monday for mom. I got new pants for an unknown program at school. Mom has doubts that I can hold off wearing them until the program. She's probably right.

It bears noting that mom went downtown to get her shopping done. At that time, there was really only one shopping "mall" in Kansas City, "The Blue Ridge Mall". It sat at the confluence of 40 Hiway and I-70 in eastern Jackson County, some nine miles from the house. Mom preferred going downtown because she could could walk a couple hundred feet to the bus turn at 12th and Jackson and ride into the city instead of navigating the freeway east. Most of the downtown stores she shopped at were within a block or two of the bus stop at 12th and Main, so it was really an easier option all around. There was no advantage to the mall - at that time it was open air, with shops lining both sides of a central pedestrian mall. Later, in the early '70s, they enclosed the mall and it became a four-season shopping area.

Blue Ridge Mall, ca. 1958

Parentehtically, after they razed the Blue Ridge Mall, the built a WalMart Supercenter on teh east side of the property, and a Lowe's on the west half. That Lowe's was to become my store from 2010 to 2016, and when I stood watch at the front door at closing time, I was standing near the ghost front door of the old J.C. Penny's.

Monday, February 1

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February 1, Monday - High 10º - Very cold - quiet day for me. Got my hair fixed and did the laundry. The rest of the day I loafed and took a nap. Marv is so good to me.

February 2, Tuesday - Cold today - the same old thing at Kroger. Zone meeting at the store Mom says she will take us to see Mary Poppins Sunday.

February 3, Wednesday - Went to Dr. Williams and had my back cracked. Getting ready for the weekend. Looks as though we'll be busy. Every man looked like Dad today.

A typical day off, another couple of days at work, and a trip to the chiropractor. A zone meeting is the Zone Manager, in this case, I think it was Charlie Gamper, plus all the store managers from his zone, converging for a butt-chewing day of motivation. Grandma Patton is taking us to see Mary Poppins next weekend.

Mom still misses her dad terribly. He died suddenly about four months earlier. It was one of the few somber funerals I can remember in our family. Most of our funerals were light-hearted, even fun to attend. When Grandma Patton died in August of 1971, the services at the Fulton-Nickel funeral home in Kansas City, Kansas were serious, but not somber or tearful. She had been in declining health for quite some time, and her last days at the nursing home on Benton Boulevard were painful to watch.

As we formed the half-mile-long funeral procession that would take her body to our family cemetery near Leavenworth, Kansas, I assured my date - yes, I took a date to grandma's funeral - that the lighthearted party she had just witnessed really was our family's way of remembering Grandma Patton.

My mom and her family were in the limousine following the casket-bearing hearse and a heavily-laden flower car. My dad gave the driver directions through Leavenworth, and out onto Highway 92 west of town. Somewhere after the Highway 92 turn, things went horribly wrong. Dad got a little confused, and got us a little lost.

The hearse, and subsequently, every other car, made a series of wrong turns and eventually onto a three-block-long dead end street near the edge of town. As the hearse driver realized that there had been a horrible mistake and began to turn around, the centipede of cars scrambled for a way to get back in line behind all the black Cadillacs. The limo that I was riding in came to a stop directly next a woman in a flowered duster who was weeding her yard.

She waved at our car, and we rolled down the window. As the hearse pulled even with us on the other side of the street, she informed us, "You can't stop here, this is a dead end!"

This brought the parade to a complete stop, as everyone, included the staid and double-starched funeral director broke into fits of uncontrollable laughter. Eventually we negotiated our way out of Leavenworth on Highway 92 and pulled into the little oak-shaded cemetery on the northwest side of the road - there was only enough room for six or seven cars on the cemetery grounds, so the rest were parked down the highway toward Easton. When everyone had assembled graveside, the minister began the service: "Pansy Elizabeth Patton . . . and everyone just came unglued. There wasn't a dry eye in the house, and no one was crying. Pansy loved to travel, and had zero sense of direction or the time involved to actually get anywhere. She would have loved the meander to her final resting place.

The girl I was with talked about my grandma's funeral for years afterward, although I'm fairly sure she thought we were all batshit crazy. This funeral was the most fun I've ever had in a cemetery. Check that - it was the second most fun I've ever had in a cemetery. Ask me about that story some other time.

Saturday, January 16

January 16, Saturday - Ran errands before work. Bud had to have some models - Marv a tax book. Real busy. Doug had the books messed up. Will finish in the morning.

January 17, Sunday - Worked today. Not real busy. Mom spent the day by herself. Will have her over for supper one night this week. Marv clipped his dog - got too close - clipped him in the butt.

January 18, Monday - Took Bud to school. Got hair done, ran errands, groceries, laundromat - the usual. Picked Bud up and watched television till 10. 
30°

I probably milked that broken left foot for all it was worth, at least a couple of model cars to work on.

Mom was still dealing with Doug The Horrible Trainee.

Dad needed someone to talk to during the day, so he bought an AKC registered platinum miniature poodle from the Tutera family, a subset of Mary Cirese's family, and named him Rebel. He had him professionally groomed a couple of times, but decided that the cost involved was well beyond his budget. He bought a pair of clippers, and proceeded to do it on his own. Dad would have Rebel stand on the ironing board, and would proceed to give him an overall buzz-cut. There would usually be at least one instance of the plaintiff yelp of a bleeding poodle followed by dad cussing. We used the same pair of clippers to cut dad's hair. I have continued the tradition and have cut my own hair since 2003. I do not have a poodle. So it goes.

Mom's dad died the previous October, and the Patton kids watched over their mom pretty much all the time. Up until just before Grandpa Tom's death, my uncle Bob lived at home, upstairs at the house on Garfield. 

Monday - mom's day off, but never a day of relaxation - always a long list of things to get done. More television. Mondays were TV throwaway nights, but mom never missed "Andy Williams/Perry Como" or "Ben Casey".

Please keep in mind that our TV was an aging Admiral table model a lot like this one - tubes aplenty, a mechanical channel tuner, and certainly no remote control. I was the designated channel changer and volume controller, and woe to the child that spun the channel knob too quickly. In the middle of the front of the set was a gold removable door that covered the vertical and horizontal hold controls, as well as the brightness setting. We never put the door back on, because you had to futz with this stuff all the time. On top of the set there was always a pair of rabbit-ears that required a deft, nearly mystical touch to readjust for each of the three stations in Kansas City - WDAF, Channel 4, NBC; KCMO, Channel 5, CBS; and KMBC, Channel 9 ABC.

About every six months or so, the TV would go on the fritz, and Bert, our TV repairman, would come out and swap out a handful of tubes - 6AU7, 6AU6, 12AU7 - these were nearly always the culprits. Once replaced, things went back to normal for a while.

Come to think of it, we were completely surrounded by "Berts". Bert, the TV guy, Bert, The Manor Bread delivery driver, Bert the chiropractor . . .