Saturday, June 19

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June 19, Saturday - Took Bud to Susan's for swimming. Marv and Sandy went fishing. Such a quiet day. Baked a cake, waxed the floors, and took a bath.

June 20, Sunday - Father's Day. Mom's birthday. Nice day. went to church and then took Marv to dinner at Waid's. Good meal. Went over to Mom's in evening. Frank and Jean were there. Jean's hearing is much improved. Thank goodness.

June 21, Monday - Marv and I washed. Then I paid rent and went to store. Stayed home in evening. Not much doing. Went downtown and bought two new dresses. Bud went to drive-in and got in at 1:30 a.m.

My cousin Susan was my closest relative on the Patton side of the family. She lived near the Wyandotte-Johnson County line in Kansas City, Kansas. We had always been pals, and when the family gathered at Pansy's, we always found ways to entertain ourselves.

Susan belonged to the Sun and Surf Swim Club out on County Line Road. Although I was recovering from the Mother of All Sunburns, I jumped at the chance to go hang out with Susan and her pals. Susan was two years older than I was, and was thus far more sophisticated and way more clever than I was. Her friends were smart, confident, and popular. They teased me mercilessly. It was like landing on Venus.

Most of my time this trip was spent preening and trying figure out how to wear my hair. I had given up the little dabs of Brylcreem and the polished Princeton haircut I had been wearing for years in favor of a more Beach Boys inspired fluffy mop, with just the right amount of front coverage. Not Beatles-style by any means, but certainly not my previous L7 square look, either. I'm sure I looked a fool, but I was so unaware of my place in the universe, it really didn't matter. I added a light spritz of peroxide to the front to add a bit of highlights. Jesus, really?

It must have been a special day indeed to break out of the Crane's Cafeteria rut and head over to Waid's for dinner for Father's Day. We always made a fuss over such days.

My aunt Jean's hearing has improved. Good thing. We were starting to yell at her so she could hear us. Family gatherings had started to sound like Sundays in Little Italy, except we didn't have anyone named Anthony to yell at, and there was no Caruso to be heard.

Monday is wash day, and mom went to Cirese's and paid the rent, ran downtown and just generally puttered. I get my puttering gene from mom. Man, I really hate puttering.

Mom and dad rented their house on 11th Street from Joe and Mary Cirese. My uncle Lawrence worked for them as a handyman and maintenance worker. When we moved into the house in 1955, the rent was set at $60 per month. That equals the buying power of about $575 in today's dollars. When the Cirese's son died in a horrific car crash in 1960, mom and dad sent flowers to the funeral home and visited before the funeral mass. Mary Cirese took my mom aside and told her that as long as she lived, she would never pay a dollar more in rent than she did on that day. My mom moved out of our house in 1978 to live in an assisted living complex. Her last rent payment was for $60. Mary Cirese was a saint. She died in 1999 at the age of 97.

I went to the drive-in, although mom doesn't say who I went with. There are only two possibilities - I might have gone with Ron and Mike, or I might have gone with dad's fishing buddy Sandy. I preferred Ron and Company because of the movie choices. Ron would have been more likely to go see Beach Party movies, and Sandy and her friends were more chick-flick and drama prone. There were, however, additional benefits to hanging out with Sandy.

Usually, it was Sandy, one of her girlfriends and me. We sat three across the front seat, gnawing on drive-in corn dogs and pizza, and slurping huge Cokes, and more or less tried to track with the movie. Sometimes we parked ourselves on a blanket on the hood of her car.

It took an entirely new turn the first time Sandy invited two friends. Sandy and her original friend sat up front, and I shared the back seat with a younger girl, who we'll call Friend Number Two. (Kevin help me, I can't remember her name.) She was maybe five feet tall, slightly built, freckled, had short-cropped hair, and was a bit high-strung, as I remember. The second it got dark enough for the movie to start, she peeled off her shirt and settled in, now topless, to snuggle up against me and watch the movie. I sensed that I was the unwitting and red-faced butt of a giggly girl-joke, but I really didn't care. It's difficult to explain how unprepared I was for all of this.

For a shy fourteen-year-old, the proximity of compact and unfettered teenage breasts in the back seat of an old Dodge was like a birthday, Christmas and the Fourth of July all rolled into one. My blushing, stammering overreaction to her sudden partial nudity made her laugh. She encouraged me to make the best of the situation. This routine happened maybe a three or four times that summer.

I kinda wish I could remember her name. Nah.

Thursday, June 10

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June 10, Thursday - Bud didn't have to go to school today. Hot. Not much doing. Spent the evening on the back porch. Thelma was up. Mom went to Denver last night - will be back Sunday.

June 11, Friday - School is out. Hot today - 85°. Bud went swimming. Marv and I had to bring Lambs' car home. Jean goes to Memphis Sunday to have her ear operated on.

June 12, Saturday - Nice quiet Saturday. Sold some bait in morning. Rain all afternoon and evening. Mom called from Salina - will be home about 12.

Kansas City Public Schools year ended in June in those days, and reconvened after Labor Day. My birthday, in the first week of September, was often the last day of summer vacation.

Back on the back porch with the neighbors. Thelma is my friend Leonard's mom. While it was hot and humid, dad never wrestled the window air conditioner into place until the first day that it hit 95°. Installing the huge, energy-gulping window unit was an ordeal on many levels. This was before the days of window units that one person could easily manage. This thing was a behemoth. Dad, of course, being dad, had a system. He kept the air conditioner on top of mom's hope chest, and in the corner of their bedroom. When it came time to install it, he put the chest on a pair of carpet pieces, slid the chest into the living room, and through a series of short lifts and feats of superhuman dad-strength, slid the monster into the window. It was always a joy to feel the cool air fill the house, and to feel the humidity drain away. The neighbors may not have agreed, though. When we switched on the massive Frigidaire, all the lights in the neighborhood dimmed.

I went swimming with my step-cousin (!) Marsha at the Raytown Swim Club. There's that "club" handle again, shorthand for "whites only", though I wasn't aware of all this for quite a few more years. Marsha was my newest cousin, having arrived only the year before when my uncle Bob married her mom, my new Aunt Mary. There was a lot of weird sexual tension between me and my new cousin, but after a few nervous slap-and-tickle sessions, we worked through it.

Our day at the pool was spent entirely in the water, splashing and goofing around. All day. Hours and hours in the sun. Years before the invention of sunscreen. When I got there, I was early summer fish-belly blue/white. When I left, I was bright rose-red, and getting redder by the minute. It was the single worst sunburn I've ever had. I'm just so grateful that I had a full head of hair back then, otherwise, my brain would have cooked in my skull. It was just horrific.

By the next day, my shoulders and back were covered in blisters. I asked for morphine, but all I got was a lecture and a small fan. It didn't help. I couldn't move. When my back peeled, it came off in huge, crinkly sheets. I molted like a cockroach. This is not Kafka. I was not transformed.

From the What Goes Around Department: The Raytown Swim Club became Super Splash U.S.A sometime in the 1990s. I did two location shoots for them not long afterward, enlisting a group of ten or twelve parent-approved and model-released kids to do what kids do in pools in the summer.

Raytown Swim Club, now Super Splash USA

My aunt Jean, mom's sister, had issues with her hearing, and years later, after my mom died, she had issues with me. When mom was facing her end-of-life issues from her third go with cancer, she moved from her efficiency apartment in Temple Heights Manor, a Baptist-sponsored high-rise assisted-living facility, and into Jean's house for a while. When it became clear that mom wasn't going to get the care she needed at Jean's, she moved to a nursing home in Raytown. After mom died, I went to Jean's to get what was left of mom's stuff, and was informed that she had decided to keep a number of items instead of letting me go through mom's things - pictures, letters, etc - as well as some furniture and other effects. I may well have said some unkind things. I'm not sure, as I was blind with rage. I found out later that several members of mom's family gave Jean a dressing-down over all this. I wanted nothing to do with her.

My aunt Jean described herself as the "mean one", and after nearly thirty years had passed, she and I buried the hatchet, and we found common ground as she joined me in my search for my ancestors on her side of the family. May she rest in peace.

The Lambs are Sandi's parents. They always had car issues. Cars are the bane of poor people, more so in a spread out town like Kansas City. It's the Los Angeles of the Plains. For no more people than it has, it takes up massive amounts of real estate. House lots and yards there are huge, with ample spacing.

Thursday, April 22

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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.