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, May 7

Click to enlarge

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.

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!