Sunday, June 13

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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.

Monday, June 7

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June 7, Monday - Feel much better. Went with Marv to pick up ingredients. Nice day. Went to take treatment. Plan to go to Colorado the last week in June with Patty. Hope it helps my mental outlook. Marv and I had a terrible row, so I went down and did washing and then Bud and I went for a ride.

June 8, Tuesday - Not much doing today. Spent most of the day sleeping.

June 9, Wednesday - Got permanent. Feel better. Raining hard. Bud went bowling and we bought two new chairs for the porch and then used them all evening.

Another day in the city. My folks battled it out - I'm guessing it had to do with Sandy and/or the bait business - probably both. I only heard my folks fight one time in my life, and I confronted them about it. They never fought in my presence again, but I know they had a few verbal Donnybrooks.

When mom and I went for a ride, it meant I was going to get to drive the Cadillac. I can't believe we all lived through this. I had so much experience behind the wheel when I finally got to take Driver's Ed in high school that the teacher would tell me where to go, usually on the freeway, and having just finished his lunch, would nap in the passenger seat until we got there, I woke him up, and we changed drivers. One day, I changed directions after he dozed off and much to the delight of three other Northeast High School students drove to the rustic confines of the old Kansas City Timing Association Drag Strip down on Front Street. We made two strong quarter-mile passes before he woke up as we pulled up to the starting line for a third go. It was the first time I ever heard a teacher say "Fuck!" I got ten detentions and a good talking to from the principal, Mr. McKenna before he commuted my sentence. He was getting up in years, and mistakenly thought I was a football player and thus, entirely blameless in all things. The other students told the story for years.

The back porch. What might be referred to as a deck these days, though not as attractively appointed. It faced Chuck Capo's junk yard, the Twelfth Street bus turnaround and the Jackson Hoe Bar. Beyond were the train tracks of the Santa fe Railroad, and the constant stream of freight and passenger trains going from Chicago to Los Angeles and back. People told me it was noisy. I didn't notice. When I moved to rural Colorado in 1972, I couldn't sleep because the train tracks were at least a mile from my bedroom window, and it was way too quiet.

Our back porch was the default portal to the house. You drove into our yard from the 11th Street side, onto a huge gravel apron and right up to the porch. The front porch, a real concrete porch, had two doors - one to what was originally the living room facing the street, and one to the parlor, or dining room. Odd layout.

What passed for our living room was staked out of the original parlor, and my folks used the living room as their bedroom. When I was very small, we all shared that bedroom, and dad used the only real bedroom as an office. It later became my room, and my bed faced the alley that fronted Jackson Court. The neighborhood teen Visigoths' favorite sport was waiting until I went to bed at night, and as I lay there reading or listening to the hapless Kansas City A's on the radio, they would creep up around the window, and stand just far enough out that my reading light wouldn't shine on them. On some agreed-upon signal, they'd all yell at once and scatter. Fuckers. I still don't like  open shades when I can't see out.

The back porch was the gathering place for the neighborhood. Good chairs were a necessity.

Chairs - they weren't "vintage" back then.

Dad held court with the kids, and mom caught up with the Ladies of Jackson Court™. Dad sent up clouds of pipe smoke - he had given up cigarettes a few years earlier when his ticker betrayed him, and as a pipe-smoker kept Sir Walter Raleigh in business. The aroma was as though he was inhaling a pile of cherry-flavored Three Musketeers bars bars wrapped in vinyl seat covers. Old vinyl seat covers. Really old.

If you don't know any pipe-smokers, they are the contemplative thinkers of the world. Decisions have to wait until the pipe is stoked, set alight, the match shaken and disposed of, and few thoughtful puffs have been negotiated, the pipe studied, relit, tamped, and puffed again. You do not hurry pipe smokers. Don't even try. The more you hurry them, the slower they get. If they smoke a pipe and also wear a hat, abandon hope, all is lost.

I tried pipe smoking a couple of times, mostly as an affectation of anti-establishment hip style, but I didn't have the patience for the damn things. Cigarettes were cheap* and easy to come by, packed the required nicotine punch, and had the cool factor that a pipe just didn't have. Cigarettes gave me credibility with my denim and Acme boots costume swagger. I started smoking when I was sixteen, and only managed to quit twenty-one years later. An horrific bicycle crash left me stuck to the couch for a few days. The ashtray was mounded so high with butts that no more would fit, so that was that.

What goes around, I suppose - I like a pipe now and again, but Sir Walter Raleigh and his fruit-salad tobacco-packing ilk need not apply. I prefer an artisanal herbal kick these days.

*I started smoking cigarettes in 1967. They cost about thirty cents per pack, the equivalent of about $2.50 today. 

Friday, June 4

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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

Friday, May 28

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May 28, Friday - A new angle in treatment today. Cool again today. Took mom to Dr. Curran and back home. Bought plywood for bait shop. (Went to union hall for money. Paid me $240!! We're rich.)

May 29, Saturday - Lawrence and Gladys came up and spent the day. Lawrence and Marv built bait shop. Bud mowed the yard. Gladys and I ran errands. Everybody was tired at end of day.

May 30, Sunday - Went to Bethel Cemetery for memorial services. Very nice. I hope I am buried up there.

Mom's check from the Retail Clerks' Union is the equivalent to $1857 in 2018 dollars.

The Bait Shop. This is difficult to explain, but bear with me. Our house was situated on the northwest corner of a property owned by Saint Mary Cirese. The best I can figure is that it was large enough for at least five or six houses, but whether those houses ever existed, I don't know. I seem to remember the remains of house foundations in the property, but that may be a manufactured memory. The corner looks like this in satellite view:

Our house is at the upper left, next to Jackson Court, and everything else in this rectangle was our yard. The bottom quarter was usually planted in corn, tomatoes, green beans, pumpkins, and watermelons. Everything else I mowed with a 20 inch push mower.

At any rate, we wound up with a large early '40s Chevrolet box truck on the property. It didn't run, and we used the back part as storage - lawnmowers, garden tools, tillers, etc. It landed on the lot around 1958 - I remember climbing on the truck with the neighborhood kids. We used it as playground equipment, and found the top of the truck a suitable place to keep an eye on the entire neighborhood. It was the high ground for our games and a constant worry for my dad.

Something like this, if you will, except in a faded red:

1941 Chevy Cab-Over-Engine (COE) Truck

My dad was looking for a way to eliminate the middleman from his bait distribution network, and the only way to do that was to launch a retail venture. He didn't have the means to buy or lease a storefront, and the area pay lakes already were selling bait on their own, so dad hit upon the idea of building a bait shop on our lot.

He and my uncle Lawrence came up with the idea of using the old truck as one wall of the shop, and attaching the rest to the side. Dad and Lawrence were blind optimists, and could always make something from nothing - depression-era thinking at its Midwestern best. They built a framed wall parallel to the side of the truck, hung rafters from the area near the roof of the truck, and enclosed the front of the truck in a kind of ship's prow made from corrugated metal, painted white. Inside, he put his bait and tackle on display in an old glass-front display case he bought from Jerry Fredman's drug store up the street. Dad ran a power line from the house to run a small refrigerator to keep fresh worms, and - this is the bit that sent my mom over the roof - a night service bell. Dad figured that any fisherman worth his sinkers would want to be up before the sun, and so would we. Dad stocked most small tackle items - fishing line, hooks, leaders, sinkers, nets - along with a complete line of his carp and catfish baits.

The shop had several iterations - 11th and Spruce Baits, Sniffy Baits, dad's trademark brand; and much to my teenage mortification, Bud's Baits. Dear God. Dad painted big signs shouting our glory to the passing traffic, and later in the spring of '65 launched the store. Stay tuned for more on this delightful story.

Bethel Cemetery is our family reserve in rural Leavenworth County, Kansas. Mom was born in Jarbalo, just down the road, and the family, when it came to Kansas, thought Leavenworth County would be their last stop. That wasn't quite right, but even as her family moved to Topeka, and eventually Kansas City, Bethel Cemetery was the one constant, the gathering place in times of grief, sorrow, and remembrance. Had some laughs there, too.

We buried mom there in March of 1979. She died during the Great New Year's Blizzard of December 31 to January 2, but the cemetery was frozen solid, and her grave couldn't be excavated until March. It's always something with these people. Her mom's funeral procession got lost on the way to the cemetery, and had forty cars piled up and trying to turn around on a narrow Leavenworth side street. Barrel of freaking monkeys, I tell you. Best funeral ever. I took a date. We laughed our asses off. More Wes Anderson material.

Saturday, May 22

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May 22, Saturday - Felt so low today. Bud went on a rock hunt and was gone all day. Feel as if my whole life is a failure.

May 23, Sunday - Went to church. went fishing this afternoon with the group but got sick and spoiled everyone's day. No more social life until these treatments are all over. Windy, but nice.

May 24, Monday - Went to take treatment, to the store, and home for TV. Sick till I took my sick pills. Such an exciting life.

Rocks. Fossils, to be more exact. Kansas City is built on fossil-rich limestone.

We're in a long stretch where mom just goes through the motions of life. The radiation treatments for her breast cancer have laid her low, and the fatigue is setting in.

There isn't much to add today

Thursday, May 13

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May 13, Thursday - Felt miserable today - treatment 10. Asked Mary how many more - she said quite a few. I knew that. Nice weather 80°. Rain tonight.

May 14, Friday - Treatment 11. Went to store and then to take treatment. Windy. Bud went to ball game with Steve Fairhurst.

May 15, Saturday - Gladys and Lawrence came up and spent day. Lawrence and Bud mowed lawn. Bought mower from Lawrence for $20

More radiation treatments. She's not very far into the process, but I remember her feeling a little crazy in the routine, and the helplessness she felt.

Steve Fairhurst was one of my neighborhood stalwarts - the smart one. Steve had a brilliant mind, and a knack for details. In later years we joked that if we had the computing power available in 2000 when we were kids, we'd just now be getting out of jail.

Baseball was a big deal for us. This was a tragedy because we lived in Kansas City. The A's never had a winning season in Kansas City, even though toward the end, they had the nucleus of the Oakland A's' winning teams of the '70s.

From our corner of 11th and Spruce, we walked the one block to the bus stop at 12 and Jackson, took a bus to Brooklyn Avenue, and transferred south to the stadium at 22nd Street. General admission tickets were cheap, and because so few people went to the games, a GA ticket was as good as a box seat once the game started. For this night game against the Minnesota Twins, the total paid admission was just a tick over 6,000 diehard fans.

The Twins, an American League expansion team in 1961 were the former hapless Washington Senators. The A's held the Twins scoreless as the home team marched three batters across the plate - one in the fourth, and three more in the seventh:

Kansas City Municipal Stadium - probably pre-Charlie Finley

As we sat in the big, green, extremely fan-friendly behemoth that was Municipal Stadium, it looked as if Kansas City might pull one off. Nope. The Twins chalked up three runs in the eight, and two in the ninth to win 5-3. The A's record after that game was a dismal 5 and 21.

The incredible groundskeeper George Toma with Harvey, the Athletics' ball delivery rabbit

Gladys is dad's sister, Lawrence is her husband. Lawrence could fix just about anything. He brought down a power mower with a 2-cycle Clinton engine that he had rebuilt. 2-cycles, for the uninitiated, use a mix of gasoline and oil instead of straight gas. It looked a lot like this:

It was probably a Wizard, from Western Auto.

There was no recoil starter - the rope you used to start it was separate. You wound it around the starter spool on top, and gave it a good yank - it usually started. You kept the rope, with its T-handle, tied off to the mower handle, where you were certain to lose it at the worst possible time. If you were me, you invariably ran over the damned rope, shooting it and the handle across the street. To shut it off, you had to ground the spark plug until the engine died. I carried a screwdriver for this purpose. This mower was half the size you would have probably wanted for a yard our size, but poor folks have poor ways, etc.

After I got the hang of the mower, I had dad take me to the hardware store to buy a screw-eye and at least fifty feet of rope. I drilled a hole in the back of the mower deck and bolted in the screw-eye. I could now attach the rope and lower the running mower to cut the steep terraces that Northeast was famous for. A regular yard fetched $3 to $6, but a terraced yard brought almost $10. I made a lot of money that summer, burned up the Clinton motor and went out and bought another mower, and still had a ton of cash left over for my nefarious teenage plans to take over the world.

Terraced yards in Northeast - fun to mow
Google Maps Street View of houses across the street from ours.

Tuesday, May 4

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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

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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.