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.

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.