Wednesday, June 16

Click to enlarge

June 16, Wednesday - Did washing and had my hair fixed. Beginning to feel better. Went fishing with Marv until dark at Joe's. Real cool. (Marked through: Played Bud a game of golf. He won!)

June 17, Thursday - Marv did ironing. We took Mike fishing. Marv took a ten pound carp. Mike took it home. We had to go up there and clean it.

June 18, Friday - No fishing today! Went to the store - got my vacation check. I can go back to work as soon as doctor releases me or take two weeks more. Think I'll go to work.

Life goes on. Fishing goes on. "Joe's" refers to 40 Hiway Club Lake. They had a miniature golf course that fronted the highway, and it was a pretty good place to get away from the constant fishing.

I know I've mentioned it before, but it might have been the year before - memory fades - that I invited Patty Saunders to go fishing at Joe's with me. That seemed perfectly normal to me, and looking back, it was a loaves-and-fishes-level miracle that she agreed to go along. Maybe I was a wholly charming, if perpetually chubby schlub that was simply irresistible to cute petite blonde teenage girls. Nah.

Mike was my buddy up the street, and it seems that while he was proud to drag dad's lunker carp home, he was less enthusiastic about gutting, skinning, and prepping the scaly monster.

Mom seems pretty excited that fishing takes a holiday on Friday. She's waiting now for clearance from her doctor to go back to work, and she can't wait. Mom has been spinning in circles since her surgery. She has always worked for a living, and all the spare time is making her crazy. Plus, when she's at work, life is a lot more predictable. Mom likes a well-organized life. So do I.

Sunday, June 13

Click to enlarge

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

Click to enlarge

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

Click to enlarge

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.

Sunday May 16

Click to enlarge

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

Click to enlarge

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.

Tuesday, May 4

Click to enlarge

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

Click to enlarge

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.

Thursday, April 22

Click to enlarge

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.