Judith Jo Sherman ( Jo for joie de vivre)

Unless you were abandoned and raised by wolves you can probably name the people who influenced you the most in your childhood. Those names and faces rise from whatever part of your brain good memories are kept. There are a lot of good memories from my childhood that include my sister Judy Jo.

Me and Judy

After the trauma of the airplane crash that killed our father Judy often took on the role of surrogate mother and mentor to Ruth and me.  Before we get to stories of  blue paper mache giraffes and man eating neighborhood cats we need to back up, and review a few of the incidents in Judy Jo’s early youth that lead to her moniker “ The Wild Child.”

Early in the morning September 24^th, 1936, mom woke with no labor pains, but with the realization that Judy had suddenly turned into position to be born.  Our father quickly drove mom the four miles to the hospital.  Skipping over the usual labor pains that precede most ordinary births the nurses realized this unborn child was in a hurry. The nurses weren’t able to finish the pre-op procedures.  Mom wrote this:

 “They put me on a cart and ran pushing the cart and me as fast as they could to the delivery room – I can still see my stomach swaying as we went around corners.  Judy never did care to wait around and started to come out.  Dr. Grabske had one arm in his white jacket and told Sister Hattie, Hold her back!”

Skipping ahead past the normal wrinkled and frankly unattractive newborn that prompts worried parents into asking “are you sure that’s our baby?” mom writes this:

 “A beautiful baby girl, over ten pounds, a perfectly shaped head and body, dimples in her rosy feet and hands, very fair, no redness or wrinkles like most newborns.”

 Judy was innocent enough in her first encounter with gravitational force when three year old Brother Dale wanted to take a good look at his new baby sister, and while peeking over the side of the bassinet, he unintentionally pulled it from the stand it was precariously perched on. Mom said Judy s nose was bruised and turned black. 

The next incident was a little prelude to the challenges mom was to face while corralling Judy Jo.  In 1937 our parents were still shoveling coal into a huge old style furnace in the middle of our basement. Octapal gray metal arms branched up from it and fed heat into the floor vents of the rooms upstairs.  The dining room floor vent was the hottest, being directly above the furnace, and a favorite place to thaw out in the winter after playing outside. When Judy was eleven months old mom had to tend the furnace, so she wrapped Judy up as tightly as she could in her blanket and told her to stay quiet. Judy was an early walker and had already been running around helter skelter for several months.  She was probably out of the blanket before mom was halfway down the stairs. 

When mom came back upstairs Judy was standing on top of the red hot grate. Her feet were burned and blistered so bad that it left deep scars in the bottom of her feet.  When mom would doctor her, Judy would look into mom’s sad eyes and try to make her feel better, a promising glimpse into the future caring person she would become. Not yet though, she had to live up to her “Wild Child” fame.

There were many calamitous consequences from her untamed nature that didn’t seem to curb her unruliness one whit.  As an infant, in a Houdini maneuver, she extricated herself from the tray that locks a toddler into a high chair, and standing on the tray itself, launched her small body off it to short-lived freedom, resulting in a broken collar bone.

Always a quick step ahead of normal Judy Jo arrived at the “terrible two’s” a half year early.  Our kitchen was actually not much more than a narrow hallway. The stove and refrigerator were on one side, and the cabinets and sink on the other.  You could turn from the sink to the stove without taking a step. One day my mother, the dog lover, allowed our neighbor’s Saint Bernard into the house.  He settled down and went to sleep between the sink and the stove and blocked foot traffic completely.

 Judy could block traffic just as successfully.  She loved opening the cabinet doors, pulling out the pans, and crawling in herself.  Mom laughed the first few times, but one day she tied the cabinet doors together with string.  “Wow, was Judy mad,” she writes in her journal. 

Judy threw a “terrible two’s tantrum,” a 9 or 10 on the fits of temper scale. Mom tried ignoring her at first, without even a hint of success.  Mom then escalated to “phase two” of behavior modification. She poured water on Judy’s head. Still unsuccessful in quelling the screaming and kicking with “water boarding,” she put Judy in a closet so the neighbors wouldn’t think she was beating her.  We don’t know the length of the internment in the closet, but as soon as she saw daylight Judy went right back to the kitchen, screaming and kicking in front of the cabinet doors mom had tied shut with string. 

At wits end, mom turned to the Lord and prayed, and received an unusual answer you won’t find in the scriptures.  An inspired idea came to her, and she cautiously looked out the back, and then looked out the front of the house.  She went back to the kitchen and got down on her back on the floor beside the Judy who was still in full “fit” mode. She started screaming and kicking her feet to match Judy’s tantrum..  Pretty soon Judy stopped, sat up and looked at mom with big round eyes. Alarmed at her mother’s bizarre behavior, she then back pedaled out of the kitchen as fast as she could into the safety of the front room. Mom writes: “That was the end of tantrums for that little girl.”

Although mom had checked the front door, she failed to see the mailman approaching from the neighbor’s yard.  In the summer we left the doors open for air flow, leaving only the screen doors to keep out the flying insects. The mailbox was on the front porch, and the mailman had an unobstructed view into the house through the screen.  We don’t know what he thought when he saw a small wide- eyed toddler watching her own mother kicking and screaming on the kitchen floor.  Mailmen probably witness a lot of abnormal behavior on their daily treks through a neighborhood. Perhaps he thought mom had joined the Holy Roller Hickman’s across the street, or more likely he had witnessed some of the daily activities of the “wild child” and thought “that poor mother!” 

I may have some of these incidents chronologically out of order, but it’s all too apparent by now that Judy Jo had things to do and places to go.  She didn’t appreciate being constricted or subjected to the normal norms of behavior, which brings us to the celebrated “streaking” event. At eighteen months old Judy was a runner with good hand eye coordination.  

The screen door latches had been raised to keep her in the house.  Mom gave Judy a bath, and after toweling her off the unadorned speedster took off, through the dining room, through the kitchen, grabbed the broom on her way, through the back hallway, then used the broom to unlatch the screen door without breaking stride.  Mom was in hot pursuit, but no match for the runner.  Wearing not a stitch, and still running, she went around the house, straight out into the busy street.  The street we lived on was well paved and used by the city transit system. It wouldn’t be a really memorable story without a bus, and of course there was one barreling down on the “streaker” just as she entered the street. There were no doubt passengers thrown from their seats as the bus driver swerved and jumped the curb in front of Mr. Powers home across the street. Luckily no one was injured and little Judy Jo was intact and pumped up for her next adventure.

It didn’t take long for Judy to find her way back to the kitchen.  The cabinet doors to the pots and pans were secured with string, but the doors beneath the kitchen sink were not.  The only things there were water pipes and a large can of lard. This early tactile experience may have been the gateway to her later interest in art and paper mache.

Mom was on the living room couch, exhausted from keeping up with Judy all day. She was having a rough pregnancy with Sherry. To top it off the unpleasant smell of wieners and sauerkraut cooking in the kitchen was making her green around the gills. Dad was in the chair directly across from mom, totally oblivious to the experimental art work going on in the kitchen. With pride from the tufts of kewpie doll curls she had created on her head with the lard Judy crossed through the dining room to the couch and proudly tapped mom softly on the knee.  When mom saw the cotton ball curls of Crisco on Judy’s head fluffed out like good meringue on a lemon pie,  she moaned (another version says she screamed) “Go see what Judy’s done this time!”  Dad put down his newspaper and reported back that the lard can was empty and its contents were smeared on top of everything Judy could reach, including the floor.  Dad manned up, since mom was down for the count, and cleaned up the kitchen, possibly with the newspaper, since paper towels weren’t a thing yet.

There is one more curious little incident that I hesitated to include but it actually puts an exclamation point on whether Judy Jo truly deserves the handle of the “Wild Child.”  While still in the “running around nude stage” Judy would pull all of her clothes out of her dresser drawer and pee on them.  Seems like out of the ordinary behavior unless you actually were a feral child raised by wolves.  Mom brings it up because she had to rewash all the clothes in the dreaded Maytag wringer washer, the only appliance I ever heard my mother swear at.  Judy is perplexed on why she did this but thinks it’s because she was worn out from the day’s frenetic activities, and a reluctant inability to make a decision on what to w ear. Standing there on the pile of unwanted clothes, she just couldn’t make it to the bathroom in time.  Maybe, but I don’t buy that explanation fully.

 It’s possible she was marking her territory. like a feral animal might, but I don’t buy that either. Mmmm?   Maybe a little.

Judy and Dale

 I think peeing on the clothes was an act of protest against the unnatural convention of having to wear clothes. Grudgingly over time, Judy buckled to society’s norms and was decently covered by the time she entered kindergarten.

Like Judy, my most vivid memory of elementary school was a trip to the woods in kindergarten. 

I wonder how many of Mrs. Flowers students were nudged towards careers in science and education by her influence. She gathered the entire class near the jungle gym and paired each of us with a partner. We had no idea where we were going as she lead us down us down the short set of steps to Cedar, the street that flanked the school on the west side.  We headed north up the street towards the woods that lead to the Missouri River. Mrs. Flowers kept a close watch over the rambunctious bunch of five year olds, repeatedly warning us not to let go of our partner’s hand.  I had been hoping for a girl partner but got Gene Pittman, who hated the pairing as much as I did.  We were still clueless as she led us off the road into the woods where she proceeded to tap some kind of spigot into the trunk of a tree and hung a silver bucket on it.  I can see why this is one of the most vivid memories of the “Wild Child,” though by now she was only half wild.

The next trip to the woods was to collect the sap and take it back to the classroom.  I still had no idea of the significance of the activity.  The kindergarten class was a large room on the basement floor near the cafeteria, but Mrs. Flowers had set up her own little children’s kitchen in her classroom. We all milled around the stove and the slow- slow-slow process of converting the sap to syrup.  Then the syrup was magically converted to maple candy, and while other teacher’s names have been forgotten, I will always remember hers.  Finally all the coming and going to the woods came together and made some sense! The hike to the woods was fun and memorable in itself; taking sap from a tree was at first a puzzling procedure to me, but then there was finally the magical conversion of tree sap to maple fudge candy. I circled the little classroom kitchen and got in line for fudge a second time, but there was no fooling Mrs. Flowers.

Judy says in her class they made maple syrup from the tree sap and put it on pancakes.  I promised not to dwell on my sister’s adult lives, but I can’t help but wonder how much Mrs. Flowers affected a five year old half feral child who later became a consummate science and nature loving teacher, who in retirement tapped trees at the Burr Oaks Nature Center and taught wild edibles classes.

Judy on the right age 8-10

We catch another glimpse of eight year old Judy in 1944, through letters written by mother to our father, who was training pilots in Kansas for the war.

“Judy had a little skinned place on her knee this morning and tried to pretend she couldn’t walk, but I finally got the poor little invalid off to school, much against her will!”

“Last two mornings Judy has been so mad at me because I made her put on galoshes that she said she was going to walk to school real slow and be late.  Yesterday she started out walking as slow as she possibly could, but when she heard the school bell you should have seen her coat-tails fly!”

I can sympathize with Judy about those wretched oversized rubber galoshes that sat at top of the basement stairs as a perennial safety hazard.  They were still there when I was in third grade, when I had a part in the school’s Christmas play.  Bundled in a large coat, gloves, and stocking cap I looked like the kid in the “Christmas Story” that couldn’t get through a door.  I was to enter offstage, run across the stage with a sled that had wheels, plant it midway, and glide offstage on the other side.  I had done it three times in practice without incident, without the rubber galoshes.  Mom insisted at the last moment that the galoshes looked better and more in the Christmas mode than my dirty tennis shoes.

The evening of the well attended play, in floppy galoshes three sizes too big, I came running on stage, stumbled, awkwardly planted myself facedown on the sled, and slid off the front of it, mid-stage.  So Judy and I share the same loathing of those rubber galoshes.

The anger Judy had towards those detested galoshes may have lead to the next event. She was forced to wear those over-sized men’s galoshes to school, which had to be an embarrassment to a girl that had just recently been domesticated. Mom’s letter about Judy being so mad at her for making her wear those galoshes was written in 1944 so Judy would have been eight years old.  There must have been rain that day, therefore the galoshes.

I have no direct proof that the galoshes lead to this little confessional that I found in one of my sister Judy’s later stories. It does seem in character for a partially domesticated little girl.” I can see this happening after school with the ground still partially wet and Judy still furious over the boots.

“I’m always in trouble for something. Mr. Francis must have seen me when I was throwing dirtballs at the cars going by and this guy had his back window down and my dirt ball ended up in his back seat.  He stopped and I ran and hid behind our house.  He went to our front door and told my mom and she made me clean out his car with a whiskbroom and dustpan.  I should have run behind someone else’s house.”

In another letter in 44 mom writes:

“Judy has broken one of the windows up at Linhare’s house. I thought that little girls didn’t do things like that!”

I lose track of Judy for several years since I was busy re-purposing the chicken house into a fort, and Judy and Sherry had begun “sashaying down the street” as mom puts it.  Most of the time they were “sashaying” over to the Terhune house that sat across the street from the ogre’s circle driveway we were not allowed to use.  Mr. and Mrs. Terhune were shorter than average Catholics, and they had four diminutive daughters.  At age six or seven my sister Sherry and one of the Terhune girls entered a talent show. 

Phyliss Terhune and Judy ran away via public transportation at one point, and Dale was sent to retrieve them. I think it was about this time that Judy and a bunch of girls tried their hand at smoking over at Donna Laugherty’s house.  In the fifties there were a lot of Lucky Strike ads that started with “More Doctors Smoke Lucky Strikes,” and then there was an ad with a teen age girl dressed for the prom with a dance card in her hand and a Lucky Strike cigarette held elegantly with two fingers outside the dance card. It was the cool thing for teenagers to smoke in the fifties.  Judy, Jeanette Gerber, Donna, and two other (Terhune girls?) teenagers smoked an entire carton of cigarettes that evening. A carton contains ten packs.  With 20 cigarettes in a pack that totals 200 cigarettes.  They smoked the entire carton.  Judy says she got so deathly ill she thought she was going to die.  To this day she can’t stand the smell of tobacco smoke.

Ruth, Me and Terhune girl on the right

 The prettiest Terhune girl ended up on the Jack Lalanne show helping Jack sell food blenders. I mention the Terhune girls because there seemed to be a lot of girl stuff going on over there at their house which included my older sisters, but that was a girl’s mystifying and confounding world. I was only interested in what western was showing Saturday at the Byam Theatre.  I loved the Lone Ranger and Tonto movies that came with a Looney Tune Cartoon.  I didn’t care much for the world news. Shown in black and white there was news about the end of the Korean War and bomb tests in the Marshall Islands, which seemed a world apart from important issues happening on South Huttig Street. 

From the ages of 12 to 15, when the question came up in our neighborhood and beyond on who would you recommend for a baby sitter, Judy’s name was at the top of the list. Maybe mother had sealed her lips about Judy’s early behavior, or maybe it was because there was no antic or behavior a kid could come up with that Judy couldn’t anticipate or handle, having been there and done that.  Judy developed a network of babysitting jobs that swelled to 22 families, and untold numbers of children.  She earned twenty five cents an hour.  I remember one of her jobs was in a house off of Winner Road past the High School that looked like a castle covered in aluminum foil.

Judy around age 15

 For some inexplicable reason, at least to me, I suddenly and unexpectedly was a beneficiary from many of those hard earned quarters Judy was squirreling away from her babysitting.  We had a small cherry tree on the north side of our house. I came around from the back of the house through the little gate that lead to the side yard and Judy was standing by that cherry tree holding a brand new English styled maroon racing bicycle.  

It looked like the imported ones in the Raleigh ads in “The Boy’s Life” magazine, with small racing tires and hand brakes.  It looked nothing like the heavy and fat tired Schwinn I had been riding.  It wasn’t my birthday, not even close to Christmas, so I was perplexed.  Judy had that impish smile at seeing my complete surprise. I can only presume she was paying forward, before it became a thing.  If this wasn’t enough to cement my undying affection for my sister Judy, the best was yet to come.

In 1953 the cold war was heating up, Dwight Eisenhower and his side-kick Nixon were inaugurated President and Vice-President,  and Jonas Salk was trying out the polio vaccine on his own family members. The things that concerned a ten year old like me were the rising price of the Saturday matinee, fear of contracting polio, and the premier event that happened in our inner-city neighborhood every year in October. The Fairmount Pet Parade.

 In 1953 and 1954 I would get my taste of fame and revel in seeing my name in print in the local rags. Very little of it, I realize now that I’m older and wiser, was due to my own efforts.  The two Pet Parade triumphs were orchestrated almost entirely by my sister Judy.

 In 53 I was ten years old, and one of the 350 inner-city kids who would compete for trophies and ribbons in the Pet Parade.  There were ribbons given out in different categories: Smallest dog, largest dog, dog with the longest tail, shortest tail, longest ears, on and on with similar categories for cats. 

There were other categories for kids who brought turtles, snakes, and ferrets. There were ribbons for the best decorated bikes and the best combination Halloween pet and owner costumes. My younger sister Ruthie won second place in this category dressed as a Genie carrying a small cage. I think Judy made the costume, and the cage might have held Judy’s parakeet.

Then there was a foot high trophy for the best overall float.  The following Tuesday a long article in the “Inner-City Sentinel leads with:

Daniel Sherman Sweepstakes Winner with Caged Tiger.  Danny’s float consisted of a cage mounted on a wagon which contained a ferocious man-eating tiger.  Atop the cage was the limp effigy of a man whose unfortunate association with the beast resulted in his decapitation.  The roaring carnivore within the cage, however, was naught but a timid kitten.”

Timmy Bly on right who as an adult joined the "Hell's Angels."

Let’s break this down.  Judy did most of the work converting the large cardboard refrigerator box to a barred cage, made the life sized stuffed effigy that laid atop it, made my circus ringmaster’s outfit, including a top hat, bow tie, and a coat with tails.  She somehow also found a kitten in our dog loving neighborhood.  The float was not sitting on a wagon as the reporter reported, but on a cart I had made from scrap lumber earlier that summer.  So the cart at least was mine, and I got to parade in front of the float for an hour as the parade went right down the length of the Fairmount Business District lined with 500 or more spectators. Timmy, Kenny, and David, members of the “Chicken House Gang” pulled the float and I walked in front of it cracking a rope whip that Judy made. Life was good, especially when I was handed a foot tall trophy cup inscribed with “Best Overall Float.”

Did I announce at the ceremony “I’d like to give a little shout out to my sister Judy who did most of the work?”  No, I was ten years old and reveling in the publicity, and a new elevated status in the pecking order of the “Chicken House Gang.” The icing on the cake was witnessing the takedown of our “Gang’s” arch enemy, John Cernech, the rich doctor’s kid who lived up the street in the white house with the white fence that kept his purebred  pets, swing set, and toys away from the mongrel mixed breed dogs, and riff raff like ourselves.  John Cernech, even with his brand new store decorated bike got only a third place ribbon, and his younger brother Bill didn’t even place. My sister was improving my life in every category.

The “Pet Parade” in 1954 turned out almost as good.  Judy, with her off the wall imagination, was again the power behind the scenes. She came up with an idea that placed Ruthie and I at the exalted pinnacle of Pet Parade dominance.  The crowd was down a little because it was chilly, but the participants showed up in the hundreds because every kid got free dimes and five pounds of dog food, plus a free pass to the Saturday matinee at the Byam Theatre, showing two Zane Gray movies 

and four cartoons.Eight year old Luann Leach literally stole the first place trophy with a tricycle that had been extended on both ends with an elaborate framework to resemble a battleship.  It was covered with crepe paper in patriotic colors. First of all, her float had already won prizes in a Fourth of July Parade months before somewhere else, and should have been disqualified. This was a Halloween themed Fairmount Pet Parade, and it was obvious with the intricate framework that no  third grader made the float, but who was I to lodge a complaint? 

 If I had been interviewed by a reporter or grilled by Hal Roberts, the master of ceremonies, about how I had come up with such a unique idea as a blue giraffe the jig would have been up.  Judy had spent hours, and then more hours, wetting and applying home made glue to strips of paper to assemble a 7 foot tall paper mache giraffe. Then Judy painted it blue, added white spots, big eyes with extra long black eyelashes, and with two cardboard yarn cones added two of those bulbous giraffe knobs on top of its head.

This was not an entire giraffe, just a 7 foot tall neck and head that I balanced on top of my head with the aid of a broomstick handle.  For the body Judy coordinated a blue and white spotted fabric over Ruthie and me so only our legs were exposed.  She put two very small eye holes in the front of the fabric so I could guide the giraffe down the parade route. Ruthie really got the bad end of the deal because she was the rear end of the giraffe and had to hold her head down so she didn’t poke her head up and make us look like some mix of a blue giraffe and a one humped spotted camel.  In addition to the difficult task of trying to follow my lead and match my step rhythm, she had to reach behind herself with one hand to constantly wag a rope tail. 

I had no peripheral vision at all.  We were constantly bumping into things and out of step, with Ruthie headed one way and me another. The police had shut off one complete lane of U.S. 24 Highway, and although I couldn’t see, I presume we passed by the same buildings we had the year before, a little non-descript restaurant, a service station with two open bays,   a Firestone Store, the feed store where we bought chickens, Charlie’s Market, actually owned by two brothers, neither of them named Charlie, a hardware store where I bought nails for kool-aid stands and carts, Roy Mennis’s Inner City Appliance, where mom bought the Maytag with the wringer washer she swore at, then the Standard State Bank where we never had a savings account, then a couple of stores I never had interest in because they had to do with women’s hair and clothes. Because there were so many entries the parade organizer lined all the entrants four across.  I imagine the trikes and bikes in our row were constantly trying to avoid the blue giraffe that was weaving and meandering blindly down the parade route. The crowd lining the streets probably thought it was part of our act.

At the awards ceremony, the giraffe somehow made it up onto a flatbed truck bed where the trophies and ribbons were being awarded, and Judy said both of Ruthie’s hands came out from each side of the fabric that was covering us to receive the trophy. Adding to our ascendancy in the neighborhood pecking order Ruthie and I won first place ribbons in the “Most Unique Pet” division.  John Cernech, our arch enemy rich neighbor, with his high dollar dog and new clothes, merely won a ribbon in the “Best Dressed Owner and Pet” category.  Davy Bly, one of the poorest kids on our block, and long time member of our “Chicken House Gang,” won a first place ribbon for the dog with the longest 
nose.

Judy 1954 - Senior Photo

 A few years ago I visited my sister Judy at her booth at the Rock and Mineral Show in Kansas City, Missouri.  For many years she has set up an educational booth to share her rocks and mineral collection with the public, especially the youth.  I was prompted to write this after the visit.  Like our mother, she recognizes God’s presence in all of nature.        

Spring Offerings

This is your gathering of stones

Wrapped carefully in paper and cotton cloth

 These are not familiar field stones to form walls

Or perimeter stones to mark boundaries between neighbors

There is not one grindstone - useful as they are

These are astonishing stones gathered

From fractured fields and broken valleys

Rose quartz, hornblende, agate, schist and shale

Each year in mid-march you carefully un-wrap these stones

To be shared as a communal gift –an offering if you will

To those who wish to stop at your spring garden of stone

Where you’ve carefully labeled and separated

Meteoric stones fallen from broken stars

From those spewed through volcanic fissures

From tins and cartons come your surprising stones

Feldspar, blue schist, gneiss, green veins of malachite

The purple altars built crystal by crystal into amethyst

There are oddities formed from lightning strikes

And magnetic stones and curious floating stones

Stopping students and scouts in mid-stride

I unfairly asked you to pick your favorite

And you turned in a slow constrained circle

In the middle of your museum considering

But it was not long before you led me to a closed tower

And carefully reached in to gather in your hand

A mystifying illusion called Labradorlite

When you held it to the light it was translucent

Shimmering an aurora of indigo and streaks of gold

Depending on how you positioned it

This stone is more than a product of heat and pressure

More than a mere complex crystalline structure

Shaped slowly by the physics of ions and diffusion

It is a mystery-and I know its ghostly transparence

Fires your imagination- and its flashes of color

Bring you joy and a sense of oneness with the earth

Fold that one carefully in a soft cloth when you bundle it

As if it’s a small bird with a beating heart

 “

I preferred the playground to the classroom

What happened in Mrs. Hudson’s third grade class might have actually happened in Miss Straw’s second grade class.  My memories of childhood are like unstable electrons that jump from one orbit to another.  This will probably be one of those blogs I delete when I think better about it.  As I remember incidents, and put them on paper, I realize I wasn’t the brightest bulb in the box as a child.

Fairmount Elementary was a long monolithic three story building made of red brick, stone, and concrete embellishments. Long rows of large windows in the front let plenty of daylight into the class rooms.   Part of the basement floor is underground, since the hill the school sits on runs uphill, with the playground behind it sitting at least a floor above the playground that sits in front of it.  The huge asphalt playgrounds left no green space, except for a little stretch of green embankment on the Cedar side that served as a bleacher when we played kickball.  The trouble with kickball was the s lo w w w w n e s s of the game – think of something worse than baseball where you sit in the dugout and wait impatiently for your turn to bat.  With kickball you don’t get to stand there at the plate taking strikes or balls. You get one kick.  Miss it and you’re out. Actually kick it, and the under inflated pink excuse for a ball rarely got out of the infield.  So mostly you sat on the bleacher sideline, or in the kickers- up box, slinging insults at the other team members. Some boys played little league baseball and tried to bring their scripted insults to kickball. “The pitcher has a rag arm” just doesn’t work in kickball. All the pitcher in kickball does is roll the ball up to home plate.  A very boring game, and not much exercise. 

In second or third grade, I was sitting and waiting in the grass bleachers for my turn to kick.  Checking the fence row behind me, out of boredom,I found a piece of cardboard with a round metal insert embedded the size of a large washer. I couldn’t imagine its purpose, still can’t.  The hole in the metal ring sort of thing was just the size of my index finger. It took a while to work my finger into it, but with kickball you’ve got all the time in this world, and the next. It didn’t look like I was going to get a second time at the plate. That inner clock told me it was about time for the school bell, so I began working my finger out of the metal ring of a thing. Twisting usually works with rings.  I worked diligently, then desperately, keeping my hands between my cocked knees, so my bleacher sitting team mates wouldn’t see the predicament I was in. The finger was visibly swollen, looking more like a long thumb. The bell rang and I lollygagged as the schoolyard emptied completely. Entering the mostly empty hallway I stood outside Mrs. Hudson’s third grade door. 

So the electron of fluctuating memory has settled in its orbit. It had to have been third grade.  Second grade with Miss Straw was on the basement floor, near the lunch room.  So there I stood between the first bell and the tardy bell, with the principal’s office at the end of the hall.  There was no escaping the fact that I had a throbbing index finger, trapped in an unforgiving metal ring, attached to a piece of cardboard about five by six inches. I needed a hideout.  I chose the unknown door directly opposite from the door to my classroom.

 I entered a dark space.  When my eyes adjusted, I realized I was standing on a small metal perforated platform. Steps descended into the dark space below me.  I was on the back side of the building, where the basement rooms were buried without windows in the steep bank the school was built on.  I descended the clanging stairs, and found a custodian that worked, or maybe lived there. I think he stayed there, unless there was a disaster in one of the bathrooms. I remember he was an older man, somewhere between twenty- five and my age now.  When you’re seven or eight almost everyone is old. You couldn’t really tell with the one dangling Edison sized light bulb.  He seemed to understand my embarrassing predicament, and with a hack saw and metal snips, he carefully freed me from the metal ring thing.

. 

I was at least fifteen minutes tardy, but Mrs. Hudson didn’t send me to the principal’s office. Maybe it was because she had her own problems.  She was the one that often went to sleep after lunch.  She would eat her sack lunch at her desk, while the class was at lunch in the basement.  When we returned, she would read to us from a book for awhile, and you could see it coming.  Her eyes would droop, and her words would begin to slow down. A few little preliminary half snores, and then there was not enough oxygen to digest her sandwich and supply the brain at the same time. Her chin would tilt forward on her clavicle, and the book would somehow remain open in her hands. She could stay in this position for ten or fifteen minutes. There were times the worst of us would quietly flood the hallway, and cavort stupidly in our stolen freedom.  We were always prepared to act innocent in case the principal might suddenly appear at the end of the hallway.

One other little kickball incident revealed something about my flawed character that’s came up several times in my lifetime.  I have a reflex anger response, that doesn’t quite reach the part of the brain that thinks through the pros and cons of an action.  

One of the rare times in kickball, when someone must have put an extra two ounces of air in the sorry excuse for a ball, I kicked it over the head of the second baseman and it looked like a three baser kick.. Richard Appleby was the second baseman.  He had been chattering some nasty baseball epithets, and getting away with it, since the teacher on playground duty was on another part of the playground.  As I rounded second base he said something I won’t repeat about my mother, and I punched him in the nose hard enough to give him a Niagara of a nose bleed.  Total reflex- zero thought process. I stood on third watching Richard bleed.  

I don’t remember any punishment. Today we’d have a lawsuit. Looking back I wonder if I was given a pass more often than not, because of the publicity of my dad dying in a plane wreck. The teachers might have felt sympathy for me. I never really thought before now about what neighbors and teachers were thinking. It might be why I was able to walk into the Calico Cat Saloon and sell Boy Scout Round-Up tickets to men at the bar who never intended to go.  Maybe it’s why the Inner City Press covered Ruthie and me setting up a Kool-Aid stand on the street.  Newsworthy?  I think not.  That reporter was probably the one that set up the fund drive for my mother after the accident.  She may have also been the reporter that covered the back yard talent show I set up. It was woefully short of talent. I charged neighbor kids a quarter, to primarily watch my dog sit up and roll over. I also tried to play the marines hymn on my trumpet.   Worst of all is realizing those Fairmount Pet Parade Trophies might not have been totally deserved.  The parade was in part sponsored by the Fairmount Studebaker dealership that donated a car to raffle off after my dad’s plane accident.

The electrons are jumping again, so a little more about third grade. I was failing. I hated kickball, but I loved the other playground activities more than schoolwork. We had all the dangerous equipment, a merry-go-round you couldn’t stop, and a tooth chipping jungle gym.

“Run through” in the morning on the back playground involved any, and everybody that wanted in.  All grades, mostly boys.  Simple Rules.  Start with two catchers in the middle of the big playground.  Nobody wanted to be a catcher. Everyone wanted to be a runner. Object was to run from one end of the playground to the far end without being tagged.  Then back again. When you were tagged you became a catcher.  Eventually you had a lot of catchers and only a few runners, and a few cheaters who had been tagged already, or who had waited on the sidelines till the end.  I loved this simple game – nothing like kickball.

I also made friends, some of them rough, and not just around the edges.  Melvin Cook and I had shin kicking contests.  He was a short stocky kid that could kick like a mule.  It had simple rules like run- through.  You stand face to face, with enough room in-between to get a good kick.  You look each other in the eyes.  You take turns kicking each other in the shins.  If you flinch, or react in any way verbally or physically, you lose.  It didn’t really catch on.  Come to think of it, it was mostly Melvin and me.  After we bonded, I visited him at his home at the end of Cedar,where you entered the woods that led to the Missouri River.  He slept primarily in an old sedan without wheels that sat in the front yard.  It was in better shape than the broken windowed house.  Melvin was accused of stealing a sack lunch later that year.  The inquiry kept all of us in the classroom past the lunch hour.  He didn’t steal it,as it turned out.  It was a girl that was almost as poor.

Ralph Brackstail was another rough character, outlandish and funny.  He conducted loud open ended bartering sessions in the lunch room, where you trade your peanut butter sandwich for an ice cream cup, or your celery sticks for chocolate chip cookies.  Ralph always ended up with the good stuff.  I always wondered what happened to Ralph as an adult.  Wall Street, an Auction House, or maybe acting on the big screen.  He wasn’t actually a shin kicking close friend, but I wanted to be like him, the center of attention.  I got my chance.

There were two intersections in front of school that required school safeties to stop traffic.  One was at the intersection of Home Street and Kentucky, and the other at Cedar and Kentucky. The safety crossings were a block apart.   School Safety was an appointment by the principal.  I would think character traits like maturity and responsibility would be key factors in the selection.  The job came with a wide white belt and a white band , that extended from it up and over the shoulder.  The job also came with a red and white flag. It was a heady ego trip, to have the power to stop adults in their vehicles, by simply extending the flag out into the traffic lane as you shepherded school mates across Kentucky Avenue.  Kentucky was a  corridor for Sugar Creekers headed to jobs in the Kansas City.

Ralph was always in character, being Ralph, and I watched him at his post.  He introduced a new twist to the job of school safety. When he had an audience, he would pretend like the cars had run over his foot.  He would lie down by the road and grab his foot in pantomimed agony.  Only Ralph could make this funny.  I envied the attention he got from his school age bystanders. He was smart enough to let the cars pass before he started his antics.  I was not. Not the brightest shining bulb, I was caught the very first time.  My job lasted for three days, six crossings. Three before school, and three after. The principal had a disappointed sad look as he relieved me of my sash and flag.  It wasn’t my finest hour. I realize now that my status as a half orphaned son of a hard working widow gave me another Get Out of Jail Card,   I don’t think Mr. Maclin ever told my mother. 

Fairmount School doesn’t boast a lot of famous alumni.  They produced a lot of civil servants, teachers, and factory workers.  No astronauts, senators, or Nobel Prize winners that I know of.  They did have some competent teachers that made a difference.  Even Mrs. Hudson, the sleeper, recognized I was failing her class, and did something about it. .  She informed my mother, and sent me home with a thick workbook, that focused on reading and spelling.  I was required to do a worksheet each night.  I wish she had also sent a workbook on math with it. My mother insisted I do the worksheets despite my protests, and the extra work pulled me up from the bottom of the academic barrel, at least in reading and spelling.   I am convinced that the biggest difference teachers make is in the lower level grades.

I really miss being a kid in the fifties.

.

  

"Poor Mom" he kept repeating

. 

Leonard Dale Sherman

My brother Dale is more than a memory. In some ways he is still here, a presence that can’t be explained. The warmth of his low bass voice still rings in my ear with his standard greeting to me, “Hey Brother.”  Our nine year age difference, a chasm in our youth, closed completely as the years slipped by.  I know I should let him go, but I’m not ready. His presence still surrounds me, like the warm welcoming bear hug he was known for.   I hope keeping him close doesn’t upset the thin veil between this world and the next.

Nine years ago I picked him up at his home near Saint Louis, and drove him to the Veteran’s Hospital in Fayetteville, Arkansas.  He was admitted immediately, without his veteran records.  After a preliminary exam, they put him in an ambulance. On a rainy night, and with lights flashing, they sped two hundred miles to the larger Veteran’s Hospital in Little Rock Arkansas. I followed in my Ford pick-up.  The few nail biting times I glanced down from the rain splattered windshield, the odometer was bouncing in the mid-eighties.

The first two weeks he shared a room with other fading veterans. Then he was moved to an Intensive Care Unit. A young Japanese doctor from the adjoining Research Hospital brought groups of six or seven medical students at a time to surround Dale’s bed.  Dale had a rare cancerous neoplasm on his pancreas the doctor was doing research on.

The cancer could have been a genetic weakness, or one rogue cell, but I suspect it was the result of radiation. Dale wrote a letter to my mother in 1954, while on board the U.S.S. Genesee, a gasoline tanker.  He was in the Marshall Islands. Their mission was highly secret, and the letter was first sent back to the Fleet Post Office in San Francisco, where all letters from the ship were checked before they were forwarded.

            Excerpt from Dale’s letter: “We are here at Eniwetak now.  It’s kind of a pretty place, much nicer than Bikini.  Yesterday I went skin diving and got a couple of small fish, a rock cod about a foot long, and something else about 8 inches long.”

           

Eniwetak and Bikini were two of many locations in the Marshall Islands where the United States tested nuclear bombs.  Testing began on Enewetak in 1948.  In the next ten years there were 43 separate blasts.  Enewetak, where Dale was skin diving, was one of the most radioactive places on planet earth. Maybe it still is.

 Dale was diving very near the site where a massive nuclear bomb was tested in 1952, 24 months prior to his dive.   It had a force 500 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan. (That’s no typo)  It vaporized one entire island of the Eniwetak atoll, leaving only a massive crater.

I dig back through notes I was writing when I was with Dale in Little Rock in 2009.  Visits in ICU were limited to thirty minutes every two hours. On the night he talked about Japan, the night nurse pulled the curtain around us and let our visit go past the two hour time limit.

 Years after he was sworn to secrecy, he still seemed unsure whether he should even be talking about the nuclear testing.  He lowered his voice, and said he had witnessed two tests from the deck of his ship with other sailors. He said they were not more than a mile from the explosions.

 After they left the Marshall Islands the ship sailed to Japan, and their ship docked at the U.S. Naval Base in Sasebo, on the island of Kyushi.  Sasebo was headquarters for the Japanese Imperial Navy, before they surrendered. The island was ironically shaped like a mushroom, and so close to Nagasaki that Japanese sailors and citizens who were there August 9^th, in 1945, would have seen the mushroom cloud from the blast that rose to a height of 45000 feet. Commercial jets fly much lower than that.

Dale had forgotten he had sent me a Japanese silk jacket with dragons embroidered on it.  He said he must have bought it in Hong Kong on a shore leave.

Then he shared a story with me that points out how disconnected he had been from the effects the war had on everyday Japanese citizens.  We were a family that never discussed world events in depth.  We were too caught up with living, just surviving.  I expect it was the same for other young men like my brother on both sides of the conflict.

On one of Dale’s shore leaves in Sasebo he rented a bicycle and pedaled through the town and out into the Japanese countryside.  Sasebo had been heavily bombed time after time by allied forces, destroying much of the urban area, and a significant portion of the shipyard.  Even though they were not the primary target, the rural areas were also affected.

Dale said he rode by homes that had windows and sliding doors made of translucent rice paper. He saw a lot of homes still showing signs of damage from the bombs.  Some men and women were missing limbs.  He said he could sense the hostility as he rode his bicycle by them. 

I couldn’t help but ask Dale the question that immediately popped into my head.

“What were you wearing Dale?”

“I had on my Navy Whites.”

Dale was just out on a Sunday ride, curious and enjoying nature, in his Navy Uniform.  I try to picture the reverse scenario – if we had lost the war:  A Japanese soldier in uniform riding a bicycle down South Huttig, past our damaged houses with some of our injured neighbors sitting on their porches.

Poor mom, Poor mom”, my brother repeats this often over the next few weeks, as we talk about our memories from our Fairmount home, where we grew up. Our walk to Fairmount Elementary had been the same; north on Huttig to Kentucky, then west to the school. Total distance was less than a third of a mile. Two diversions presented themselves, a small grocery at the end of Huttig, and Maupin’s candy store at the corner of Cedar, just before you cross the street to the school.

                                                                 
We had two similar experiences as six year olds that prompted another “Poor Mom” from his bedside.  Dale pilfered a dollar bill from the top of a buffet in a neighbor’s house, walked to the grocery at the end of the street, and purchased four little colorful knives that were attached to a cardboard backing, and a toy gun. Money went further in the forties, and he probably got change back from the dollar. Mom discovered the ill gotten gains in his sock drawer, and the inquiry began. Dale’s initial lie that his friend Billy gave them to him was quickly proven false, and Dale’s subsequent remorse, repentance, and forgiveness were the substance of a story my mother wrote forty seven years later.

          
As a six year old, nearly ten years later, (after Dale’s childhood misdeeds), I walked halfway to school, turned around and went back home to an empty house.  My mother had left for work several hours before, my two older sisters were at school, Ruth was being cared for by Mrs. Cathy, and fifteen year old Dale was probably with his friend Wally, waiting for the Pool Hall to open in Fairmount.  So we were both playing hooky on the same day.  “Poor Mom.”

           
When mother got home, and discovered I had spent the day alone entertaining myself, the inquiry began.  My story was that a man had stopped his car and offered me candy from a briefcase he opened.  I told her I became frightened and went back home.  This alarmed my mother naturally, and the next day she took sick leave and went with me to the school.  As we waited in the principal’s office for Mr. Maclin to get the school started, I polished my cover story.  By the time he closed the door and sat down behind his desk I was a nervous wreck, but I thought I had every detail covered.  The story broke down somewhere during the description of the car, and the man’s clothes.  ‘Big - black -shiny black new car.  Black suit with black hat. (Too much black I was thinking.)  And a purple tie, and purple shoes.’ Purple Shoes?  The principal and my mother shared a knowing look.  Busted!.  “Poor Mom.”  I think she was so relieved that there wasn’t some creep roaming the neighborhood with a briefcase full of candy that I got a very light punishment.

            
We talked about the day he took me with him to Crisp Lake on the back of his bike. It was in direct disobedience of mother’s wishes.  She had specifically asked him not to take me with him.  “Poor Mom.”  Dale was fourteen, and I was five. We got to the corner of Ash and Arlington the next road over, and as Dale stood up on the pedals, to get us up a small incline, we wobbled, and I shifted on the uncomfortable rim behind him, making it worse..  My sandaled foot got caught in the wheel and broke out twelve spokes.  “Sixteen spokes,” Dale corrects me.  This prompted another story my mother wrote, about my miraculous healing.

            
We talked about other shenanigans that Mom never caught wind of. With money earned from working at Byam’s Drugstore, Dale eventually had enough money to retire his bicycle, and buy a car for less than a hundred dollars. Dale was having his share of teenage rebellion, and hot rods were a big thing in the late forties.  Teenagers would have impromptu drag races on the old  highway out by the Lake City Arsenal, and also the long lonely strip of highway before you came to the Missouri Bridge, headed to Liberty, Missouri.  There were times Dale would take me with him.  Mother would have been horrified if she had known about the car racing, especially the day Dale and I nearly bought the farm.  We were on the long downhill stretch of the  Highway, with the Missouri Bridge in sight.  We were in the passing lane, neck and neck with the car Dale was racing.  The odometer was bouncing at the top of the dial, which was 110.  We were creeping ahead, inch by inch, when a tractor with a trailer loaded with hay pulled onto the highway in our lane, at the base of the hill.  Dale never let up on the accelerator, and we were able to barely pass the other unrelenting teenager, with only a few feet between us and the oncoming tractor.  “Poor Mom.”  Dale and I both cringed at the memory of what could have been.

           
It wasn’t long after that, when Mom was doing a routine sheet switch in Dale’s small bedroom, that I heard her muttering loudly.  When I got to the doorway she had uncovered a mass of letters from beneath the mattress.  They were from the principal at Northeast High School, about Dale's chronic truancy.  He had gotten away with it for most of the school year, because our sister Sherry was writing letters back to the principal,with mother’s name perfectly forged.  “Poor Mom.”

          
  My mother’s antidote for this teenage rebellion was a trip to the Navy Recruiting Station in Kansas City. She signed him up for a four year tour of duty.  The remedy worked to perfection, and Dale was soon put in charge of other men in his unit because of his maturity and leadership skills. The letters I’ve been reading between my mother and Dale during those following four years reveal the depth of love they had for each other, and the enduring religious influence she had on him.

           
As Dale’s time became short, and his food was fed through a tube, he dreamed of people he was meeting and conversing with on the other side.  I’m sure they found that he was always planning a great venture, a lover of nature and gardens, and always spiritual, even if at times it was subdued.  It’s not surprising that “spirit” dominated much of his thought, as he vacillated somewhere between this life and the next, meeting people in his dreams that he'd always wanted to meet.

            “God is love and energy---------not a white haired man-----------I carried that for years!”  Dale’s demeanor got animated when he talked about God and the scriptures. I hadn’t realized he was such a student of the bible.

Dale talks about the fractious nature of Peter that does not allow him to see the other side of the veil.  By the look in Dale’s eyes, I think the veil had been lifted for him, and what he saw was the true nature of God’s love in the spiritual beings he was conversing with.

           
I had plans to scatter Dale’s ashes. but they remain in a beautiful silver metallic envelope, with a black and silver bow tied lovingly by his wife Bess.  They sit on the table by the front door.  I’m having second thoughts about disturbing them..  His presence still brings warmth each time I pass.  “Hey, brother.” is what I hear, as if it was yesterday. Time and distance between loved ones living on either side of the veil are not as significant as we think they are.       

Earl (mostly) and Lrae (barely) hatch a plan to ruffle Donald’s feathers

Earl and his backward brother Lrae

“Lrae, there’s only one way to chip away at Trump’s base, we have to gaslight him!”

“Duzn’t sound safe or praktical Earl.  He’s got all them burly bodyguards. He probably wears non-flammable underware.”

“Not literally set him on fire Lrae, metaphorically.” 

“Never herd of or seen a metaphor.  Are they burnable?”

(Earl scores higher than Lrae on the standardized poultry IQ test, but he’s not sure himself about metaphors and abstract thought.)

“I’m just a rubber chicken Lrae, but there’s a lot of high octane political chatter out there in the barnyard. It’s getting ugly, and it’s not going to end well."

(Even though Earl’s brain is smaller than a dime there is evidence that birds possess impressive intelligence.  Shorter connections between sections of their miniature brains suggest they make decisions more rapidly)

“I’ve come to a really rapid decision Lrae. Something in my dime sized brain says we have to act quickly, before it doesn’t end well."

“I have no plans for the future Earl, except mebbe crossin that rode over there.”

“What I’m saying, Lrae, is that we can bring this presidential pretender down with a play from his own gaslighting playbook.”

“Explain it reel simpel Earl, and explane how you stole Donald’s playbook.”

(Gaslighting refers to a type of psychological manipulation used to get people to question their direct experience of reality.)

“Well, Lrae, Donald gaslit Obama. It’s so simple even Donald could do it.   First he said, A LOT of unnamed people, not me, not me, say that Obama is not an American. 

Donald just sat on that until the media picked it up. Then he did a lot of interviews on talk shows where he brings up Obama’s half African roots, and that turban his daddy wore.  This is the Oogala Boogala stage of his playbook. There’s something scary under the bed, or in the henhouse, or maybe even the White House.  Trumped up fear and suspicion works for whoever is on Donald’s hit list. It cast a lot of doubt and suspicion about Obama for a couple of years.  It was good press until Obama produced his birth certificate.”

“So what’s your plan Earl?” I voted for 'The Donald.' He’s a fun kind of guy like Don Rickles. You never know who he’s going to viciously attak or twitter about.  He goes to bed late, gets up reel erley, and crows bigly about his grate achievements.”

“Well, we should cast our own little doubts about Donald’s paternity. Little things that might be believable.  We could say he’s not a real human being.”

(Lrae’s mind is wandering.  He’s feeling sorry for himself, realizing most people don’t have any sympathy for a latex rubber chicken.)

“You’re not paying attention Lrae, I’m saying that Donald's early morning crowing isn’t natural for a real human that needs their coffee, and maybe a donut to get on track.”

“Ever notice Lrae how he struts around like a Rooster and tilts his head to one side when he talks and juts his chin out to make himself look more like the macho Rooster Cogburn?”

“He might jes be watching out for incoming hawks Earl.”

“Ever notice that abnormal shelf of feathery hair that sticks out from above his forehead with nothing to support it?  That isn’t natural!”

“It duz look a littel like tale feathers stuck on the wrong end of a south bound chiken,  come to think about it.”

“And those heel spurs Donald suffers from, ever take a good look at your own feet Lrae, that little worthless spur that sticks out from the back?”

(The plan begins to make sense to Lrae)

“You sayin Donnie is related to us chikens Earl?

“There’s a lot of resemblance Lrae. His loud crowing in the early hours of the morning, his preening and strutting.  He picks on anyone beneath him in the pecking order, just like the chickens out there in the barnyard.”

“So -- who’s his reel daddy Earl?” I herd it was that filthy rich slumlord Fred.”

 “They don’t look anything alike Lrae.  We’ll say we heard it through the grapevine that his real daddy is Foghorn the Leghorn, straight out of the comic books.”

(For Lrae, and others who don’t watch cartoons, Foghorn is a large obnoxious Leghorn Rooster.  He struts around the barnyard inflicting loud and boorish little sayings on all the luckless creatures he encounters.)

(As low as his Poultry I.Q score is, even Lrae has some misgivings about this plan of attack.)

“We’ll say a disgruntled doctor who lived in one of Fred’s roach ridden apartments took Foghorn’s DNA from old comic books and spliced it into little Donald on a routine pre-natal exam.”

“Can scientists do that Earl?”

“Sure------- maybe------- I don’t know.  Voters don’t keep up on things like genetics or climate change.  They believe that chemicals in the water are turning frogs gay and that Hillary is still running a child sex ring out of the basement of a pizza parlor. I’m pretty sure a lot of people will believe Donald’s got a lot of Leghorn in him.”

(Actually, glow in the dark cats may sound like science fiction but they’ve been around for years.  Scientists have engineered cabbages that produce scorpion poison.  Really? Yes, it’s a strange new world we live in.)

“What do you think Lrae, shall we post this?”

(Lrae has a short attention span. He is wondering why chickens cross the road and wondering if Donald crosses the cart path to retrieve his own golf balls from the rough.)

 “Should we cross that road Earl?”

“Sure, just watch Lrae, Donald’s poll numbers are going to drop like a Plymouth Rock.

Maybe social media will re-post this, and eventually Donald will be forced to make his DNA results public, to prove he’s a real human being.”

Genealogy Bites: Alberti, Pendergast and JC Nichols

I research in some capacity just about every day. Most of the time I don't find anything. I do more ruling out of theories and resources than anything. I learned from watching crime shows that even a lack of evidence is evidence. Maybe that is why I like research. Even the negative result tells you something and eventually proves useful. Over the last few weeks I have discovered a few interesting "one-off" items that I really want to share, but they don't warrant a full blown blog post.  

These stories can get a bit long and we all have busy lives and schedules. Who has time to read so many words, right? With you all in mind I am introducing a shorter, more digestible blog format, called Genealogy Bites. I am sure that name isn't original. I'm going to use it anyways. It was a long day at work and I can't think of anything more creative right now.  

So here we go....

Today I was poking around on the Missouri Digital Heritage website. The site is old. It still lists John Ashcroft as the Missouri Secretary of State. Honestly, it is hard to use. The search feature is straight out of the 90's. Imagine the Ask Jeeves layout but without the welcoming little butler. I have used this site to find Birth and Death records for a lot of the Alberti family. It's great to have those records online and free. What I have never done before is execute a plain old search for any of the family names. 

Today I entered "Albert Alberti" in the search field and B-I-N-G-O! 

The first results was a call number for a book from the Missouri Valley Special Collections Room. Also known as my version of heaven. This room sits at the top of the 10th Street library in downtown KC. It's a small room, but it is packed full of Kansas City's little known histories. I handed over my Special Researcher card and waited patiently for the archival librarian to pull my book out of the back stacks. I get really excited when they go back there to retrieve by book! 

The book was titled: Kansas City In Caricature, published in 1912 by a group of newspaper cartoon artists from the Kansas City Star, The KC Journal and the KC Post. It's pages are filled with quirky little cartoon versions of Kansas City's business elite.

On page 65 was our very own Albert Alberti, Superintendent of Metropolitan Life Insurance. Even in cartoon version it is unmistakably him. The artist captured his stern gaze, strong jawline and pomade parted hair to perfection. I sat there, all alone, giggling over the contents of a 106 year old book...    

I was tickled for so many reasons. One, because this is such a cool find. It is almost as good as the horsewhipping story. Two, because it looks JUST like him and for a man who I always assumed took himself very seriously, this was a relief to discover. He was able to laugh at himself! Perhaps I got my self deprecating tendencies from him? 

Every person featured in this book provided a portrait for the cartoon artist to work from. It was all in good fun. I imagine this as the 20th century version of a comedy roast. 

Our ancestor was in great company among these pages. Snuggled up with the likes of Tom Pendergast and JC Nichols. We might not be Italian royalty just yet, but we are certainly descendants of Kansas City's royal founding family. 

The Day my mother outdid Jesus, and other memories from the fifties

Me standing in front of the big maple tree in our front yard - the neighbors grapevines behind me

I Googled and Zillowed a street view of the South Huttig home where my siblings and I grew up.  The side yard on the south side, that looked so wide in my childhood memories could be traversed with a hop, a step, and a jump.  Not an adult hop, step and jump,
but my ten year old hop, step and jump when I weighed 69 pounds and was barely the height of a fence post.

The two majestic maple trees in the front yard have been cut down, replaced by a flagless flagpole and an unimpressive spindly tree with a trunk smaller than the flagpole. The house was recently listed on Zillow as a two bedroom one bath bungalow for $69,000.  It is off the market so I couldn’t take a virtual tour of the inside, but there’s no need for that. For seventeen years I lived in that house. I carry images in my head of every square foot of it, from the dark basement to the braided cloth covered wires in the attic that wound around little white ceramic knobs to keep them away from the wood.

 With little arrows on the computer screen I clicked my way up and down the street to see the neighboring houses.  It’s sad to see the houses `looking so poor and neglected.  The house directly across the street that was owned by the Catholic family that wanted to adopt me in 1946 looks completely abandoned.  Weeds and small trees are so thick you can’t see the house.  The house just north of it, once owned by a preacher for a short time, is on the market for $49,000 dollars.  I was only in the front room of that house once as a child but now with Zillow I virtually went through every sad room of the 720 square foot house and wondered if the caved-in couch with the exposed spring visible on the tour had once been owned by the Holy Rollers that lived in the even smaller house beside it.

My sister Ruthie and I, as curious youngsters, hid in the grapevines and watched the Holy Roller Hickman’s one evening in that house from across the street.  Mr. and Mrs. Hickman, and their church friends, worked their way into a religious frenzy. From our vantage point we could only see the couch against the living room wall, and the Holy Rollers jumping on and off it, as if they were suddenly appearing from off stage.  I guess they had opened the front door to cool the place down.

  At the time I was quite interested in Holy Rollers, and caught wind of a Holy Roller Revival Service being held in the theater on St. John’s Avenue in the Italian District, where they normally featured spaghetti westerns.  My buddy Tom, and I, caught the city bus in Fairmount, and put our dimes in the anchored cylindrical obelisk that set next to the bus driver.  It had a glass top and required exact change.  The driver would glance over to make sure you weren’t dropping a washer in it.  Tom and I got off near the theater.

 We sat in the back of the ornate theater, not knowing what to expect.  It didn’t take long before a cripple that had to be helped on stage was healed and started what looked like tap dancing.  Not long after that, the Holy Rollers in the front rows were throwing their eye glasses and hearing aids high into the air.  Tom and I were spell bound watching the flurry of prescription eye glasses and hearing aids arcing through the low stage lights near the front. Glued to our seats we waited until the service ended and the preacher had left, passing us as he came up the ramped aisle.  The theater was vacant except for me and Tom, and a dozen or more Holy Rollers, crawling up and down the dark aisles searching for their hearing aids and eye glasses.  The whole service was more exciting than any of the spaghetti westerns that Sergio Leone produced.

                                                                                                               

As an example of my mother’s Christian outreach to neighbors, no matter what sect or religious faith, I offer up this little exemplary act of hers. Once Mrs. Hickman became deathly ill, and her Holy Roller husband stubbornly refused to take her to the doctor.  He evidently held beliefs reminiscent of the Christian Science practice that prayer is more potent than medicine.  My mothers spent three days nursing her and finally figured out her bowels were blocked.  She took the dreaded pink enema bag from our bathroom cabinet, carried it across the street, and administered a service normally reserved for only a very-very close member of the family.  That selfless act, in my book, was several steps up the Christian ladder of simply washing a stranger’s feet. That’s the day my mother out -Jesused Jesus.  

I Googled my way past the homes on both sides of the street, all the way north to Kentucky Avenue, then west a block to the Fairmount Elementary School, where all my siblings and I attended kindergarten through the seventh grade. Google lists the distance from our home to the school as .03 miles, a leisurely five minute walk.  We didn’t own a car and there weren’t school buses then, so it was always a walk.  The few parents who owned cars dropped their kids off by the school entrance on Cedar. I Googled my way the other direction, south to 24 Highway (Independence Avenue), and arrived at that commercial disruption on the Interstate Highway called the Fairmount Business District.  We always said we were walking “up the street.” Explain to me why up the street was south and down the street was north. We say we’re going up to Minnesota or down to Georgia, based on a map.  It was just the opposite on our street.

 Distance to the school north was .03 miles, equidistant to the town of Fairmount south, also .03 miles according to Google, but listed as a seven minute walk instead of five.  Is that because it was slightly uphill?  

It was very depressing to see the dilapidated buildings in Fairmount where we once shopped, dined, banked and entertained ourselves.  Maybe not the bank so much since our family was cash only. The dime store, the theater, the drugstore, and the appliance store all provided jobs for us at one time or another. The Standard State Bank that looked so solid in the fifties, with its black slate exterior, is now condemned and may already be torn down.  The iconic Byam Building that housed the Byam drugstore and the Byam Theater is looking worn, and that’s an understatement. The whole Google thing was a real- time shocker on how a once vibrant neighborhood can disintegrate over time. I won’t Google it again.  I don’t think I’ll ever go back to the neighborhood. It would be too painful.  I prefer to remember it as it was when I was growing up there.  I want to leave my good memories intact, especially some of the best years of my life between the late forties and all through the fifties.

            There are so many great recollections I carry around from our Huttig Home and the Fairmount area, (unincorporated at the time). Fairmount had two stop lights that interrupted the highway traffic coming from the west.  In that direction was the Badger Lumber Company; a little roadside trolley owned by a Greek that sold crusted brain sandwiches, and then the huge Mount Washington Cemetery where the pioneer Jim Bridger is buried. I worked there two summers as a teenager trimming around the gravestones. Not long after the bus stop in front of the cemetery you could see the Kansas City skyline and the Power and Light Building with its art deco top that was constantly changing colors at night.

            Going the other way, out of Fairmount on 24 Highway,  you would pass a slummy neon- lit bar, (for some reason named the Calico Cat); the Studebaker dealership that donated the Studebaker that was raffled off to raise money for my mother after the plane accident; the Nu-Way Drive Inn (the fifties edition of Sonic), then the cluster of warring gas stations that drove prices down to seventeen cents a gallon.  Eventually on the left was Slover Park where I won a medal in a Cub Scout footrace even though I was late to the starting line. The Park I used to play in has now been replaced by Harry S. Truman’s presidential library.

Before my mother married she was an Episcopalian, and taught a Sunday School Class at the Trinity Episcopal Church in Independence. Harry Truman’s daughter, Margaret, was in her class.  This might have been around the time someone tried to kidnap Margaret from Bryant Elementary School, when she was six.  Harry always remembered my mother and would stop to talk to her when they crossed paths on the Independence Square.

 Harry also had history in Fairmount, where he and his political buddy, F. L. Byam, were thick as thieves.  Before being President, Harry was a hat salesman, and later a Judge.  He held political meetings at Jerry’s restaurant in Fairmount where a thick permanent cloudy layer of cigarette smoke hung in the air like a curtain.  It was so thick that it masked the features of the men sitting on the bar stools by the counter.  Harry’s meetings there were a little before my Fairmount days, but on the rare occasion our family ate a sit down meal at Jerry’s, the cloud was an undiminished feature of the restaurant, constantly kept intact by the heavy smokers.

           

I’ve never fully processed the idea of how a man who started out selling men’s hats and ties ends up ordering the vaporization of over a hundred thousand Japanese citizens.  I’ve heard persuasive arguments on both sides of the decision.

 One of my favorite things in Fairmount was the Byam Theater, which featured Tarzan movies, The Three Stooges, and lots of Westerns.  General admission was ten cents; except on Friday nights and the Saturday afternoon talent show, when entry was raised to a quarter. Popcorn and candy bars cost a nickel, and colas were a dime.

 One summer day, my sister Sherry was babysitting Butch and Johnny, the next door neighbor boys, in their house. I was constantly there, so she put all three of us in the bedroom for a nap and closed the door.  Butch and I felt we were too old for babysitting and escaped through the window and walked the seven minute walk to Fairmount, and watched a western in three dimensions.  I think it was “Hondo” starring a young John Wayne.  It came out in 1953, when I was ten years old. I remember ducking behind the theater seats in front of me when spears and arrows flew out from the screen.

         

If you left Fairmount, traveling north on South Huttig, you would cross over Kentucky and continue up the hill until you ran out of road.  If you entered the woods and crossed over Rock Creek, you would soon come to the bluffs that overlooked a looping branch of the Missouri River. My childhood friends, Tom and Richard, and sometimes Butch, would fish from “Look Out Point, or roam the shore line looking for the entry to the elusive Jesse James Cave.

 I once caught a large carp that had one side completely eaten away by the chemicals dumped into the river.  The nearby Standard Oil Refinery and chemical plants all dumped caustic chemicals and heavy metals into the river.  That’s another story.

I’m trying in this wistful moment to remember only the long list of good times I experienced in the fifties growing up in Fairmount..  There was very little crime, drugs were unheard of, and we never ever locked our doors. My mother left for work at five- thirty in the morning and didn’t return until five- thirty at night, leaving me and her other children the priceless gift of discovering the consequences of making bad choices on our own.  There will be more stories.