Month: December 2013

When we moved back to Forest Hill, for a change dad was with us, so we rented a house just south of town. It was nothing spectacular, but it gave Richard, my bother, and me access to woods filled with pine trees. Sometimes we would each climb a different supple, young tree in front of the house until they bent over and touched. Then we would swap trees. Not exactly the thing Tarzan would do, but for us it was close enough. Of course, now that I have safety officer experience, I would be aghast if my kids or grandkids had tried that.

That Christmas both Richard and I got bicycles. Richard’s had pedals on the front wheels. I don’t think I could ever get the hang of riding it, but he did right away.

Shortly after we got the bikes, we had an ice storm ­– a rare phenomenon in Louisiana. I made the mistake of trying to ride my bike on an ice covered road. I headed up a hill that my memory says was steep (but driving through the area more recently I found nothing resembling the slope I remember). However steep it was, I tried to show Richard how you ride up an ice covered dirt road. The back wheel slipped and down I went. After I landed on a road that was hard as a rock, Richard decided not to try what his show-off big brother had done.

Later I had another accident with that bike. Riding home from the store, I followed the foot path I normally walked to get home. At one point the path crossed a gully by way of a bridge that consisted of a single 2×12 plank. I tried to ride across the plank. Have you ever noticed how you tend to steer toward what you look at? I looked at the edge of the plank until I rode off the edge. I ended up on my back in the gully with the bicycle on top of me. I am eternally grateful that I didn’t break my spine.

I told about this event in a speech many years back so I don’t see a lot of point in writing it from scratch. Only the names have been changed to protect the guilty.

The sheriff was standing there with his hands on his hips glaring at us with a look that said, “You’re in a heap o’ trouble, boys.” Besides the sheriff, half the town had turned out with him. We’d been caught red-handed. I swallowed hard and stuck one leg and then the other out the open window so I could drop to the ground and face the music. My partner in crime, Billy, followed me, and we stood there trembling. The sheriff beckoned us over. He didn’t look happy.

I think this happened between the third and fourth grade. Billy and I spent a lot of time together. This time we were both bored with summer vacation and were looking for something different to do. We decided it would be fun to check out the school to see what had been left behind for the summer. We did this in broad daylight. Back in those days schools weren’t very secure; in fact, ours was rarely locked. There was no reason to.

Whether we weren’t very smart or just weren’t concerned, we walked casually down the dirt road as if we were going to my house. When we got to the school we took a “short cut” through the schoolyard. When we reached the scraggly hedge under the windows, we took a quick look around to see if anybody was watching. We ducked into the hedge to keep mostly out of sight, smugly believing we couldn’t be seen. After all, the school was on the edge of town with a dirt road, an open field, a railroad track, and a highway between it and the nearest building that had any kind of view of it.

We found an open window. Checking to see that the coast was clear, we climbed into what turned out to be one of the fourth grade rooms. The overhead lights were off, but several large windows filled the room with plenty of light. The room had the old wooden desks with lids that were hinged in front so you could access the storage underneath. I looked in one of the desks. Jackpot!

Kids had left everything from erasers to pencils to fountain pens. Billy looked in another: more treasures of the past school year. Each desk we checked seemed to have something of value. We rummaged through several of the classrooms, finding more loot in each. In fact, there was so much we had to start being selective. I don’t know how much time actually passed. It seemed like only a few minutes, but it was probably half an hour. When we had both collected a bundle of plunder, we went back to the room where we had started. Outside, standing on the school lawn right in front of the window, the sheriff and a group of townspeople had gathered. I don’t know who snitched, but we’d been had.

They looked at us and we looked at them. No one said anything. It was a face off. I knew there was no use in trying to hide. They’d seen both of us and knew who we were. Heck, two years before I had lived next door to the sheriff. Reluctantly we climbed out the window leaving our treasures on the desks.

When we had made it through the hedge, we approached the sheriff. He was an imposing man by nature, standing over six feet tall and weighing close to two hundred and fifty pounds, and for two frightened nine year olds he seemed like the wrath of God embodied. He looked down at us and demanded, “What exactly did you boys think you were doing?”

Billy answered first, “It was open so we went in to look around.”

“Did you take anything?” The tone of his voice said that any answer that wasn’t the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth would call down lightning and thunder.

“We were going to,” I whispered.

“What did you say?” The same tone of voice.

“We were going to, but when we saw you, we left it inside.”

“You know that would be stealing, don’t you?”

I thought, “No Sir. It was just stuff that was left behind. During the school year I could take it home any day after school.” Fortunately, I wasn’t stupid enough to say that. We both said, “Yes Sir!”

It would have been so tempting to make an excuse, the same excuse we had used to justify climbing into the school in the first place: it was open and we didn’t plan to take anything that belonged to anybody. But I suspect that would have gotten us into more trouble. By owning up to what we did, we convinced the sheriff that we weren’t really bad boys. Fortunately, we hadn’t really caused any harm, so he let us off with a scolding and a talk with our parents.

I learned a lot from that episode. First, don’t make excuses. They can get you in a heap of trouble. Second, tell the truth. As Mark Twain said, “If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.” But perhaps the most important, if you’re going to do something you won’t be proud of, don’t do it in broad daylight.

One final note about my childhood in Louisiana and we’ll leave the bayou country. We may return as other memories surface, but for now let’s look at the event in the spring of 1948 that changed history.

Dad went out that morning to hunt for quail. He went east, and I went north to stay out of the way. The forest was thick enough that we lost sight of each other almost immediately, but I could still hear dad whistling the come-hither call of the Bob White. I was almost ten so I didn’t have a gun, but I wondered if I could attract a quail. When dad got far enough away that I could no longer hear him, I tried to emulate dad’s quail call as I walked along. I got a response. I eased my way toward the source, calling as I went, and the quail kept responding. Neat, right? Well, not quite. I came to a clearing. As I was looking around, dad showed up on the other side, shotgun at the ready. He had been responding to my call.

I got a lecture on the dangers of luring a hunter, but that was it. I don’t know why, but when he was through, a pile of trash pile of trash in the clearing caught my attention. I checked it out. I found that a large part of the pile consisted of leaflets advertising for construction workers needed on Guam.

Dad was looking for a fresh job so he filled out the included application and mailed it. He was hired and headed off to Guam. The following September the rest of us followed. I’ll save that for the next post.

Dad’s job in the Tioga area didn’t last long. I never knew why he changed jobs so often, but he found a new job with an oil company (ESSO, I think) outside of Baton Rouge. We stayed with my grandmother while he settled in and found a house.

The house was just outside of Denham Springs on a few acres. If I recall correctly, the owner kept cows on the acreage while we were there, but we had the run of the place. It had a stream running through it, and I spent a lot of time there looking for crawfish (real ones) and checking out the other wildlife. One critter I became familiar with was the water moccasin. Seen in direct sunlight, it had the same diamond pattern that rattlesnakes have — just in shades of dark gray. It did make me wonder about wading in the creek.

The creek also provided us with a meal once. It was the only time I remember dad cooking anything. He caught some bullfrogs from the creek and fixed frog legs.

Denham Springs was a pleasant, small town – bigger than Forest Hill but not a lot. One peculiarity was that the county had a lot of farms that grew strawberries. The school schedule in Denham Springs was adjusted to end in early May rather than early June so the farmers’ kids could pick strawberries. Of course that meant that it also started a month earlier.

When we moved there we didn’t have a car. That wasn’t a problem for getting into town, but dad needed transportation to get to work. For a while he had a borrowed motorcycle – a Harley, I believe. One day he went into town for gas and let me ride behind him. While we were at the gas station, I bought a comic book. I was in such a hurry to read it that I started reading on the way home. No hands, on the rear fender of a motorcycle. I trusted Dad that much; however, when he realized what I was doing, I got a safety lecture I didn’t soon forget.

I had my share of mishaps while I was there. The ones I remember weren’t particularly important, but they left their mark. While playing in the barnyard one day, I stepped with a bare foot on a piece of a broken bottle. The curvature of the bottle caused it to rotate and gash my foot just below the ankle bone. It gave me another permanent scar. And then I used my bare hands to catch a rat. That incident taught me that rats are more limber than crawfish. This one turned its head around far enough to bite the web between my thumb and forefinger.

At some point while we were there, we had a really heavy rain that filled all the local streams to overflowing, including the one through the farm. The water almost made it up to the house. It took a while to go down, and the cows were wading until it did. I don’t remember missing school for it, so it was probably the summer after we arrived.

One day when I was walking to school, I saw an Army recruiting poster in the Post Office window. A picture of a spaceship on a star covered background defined my life from then on. The ship was cigar shaped and had multiple rows of lighted portholes, suggesting it was large. That ship captured my imagination like nothing else had. I became determined to be a spaceship pilot when I grew up. Even though I haven’t achieved that, it guided me to where I am now.

We stayed in Denham Springs for about a year – long enough for school to start again. Since I knew we were moving back to Forest Hill before school started there, I showed little enthusiasm for the local school. One day I dawdled all the way to school and arrived very late. My excuse was that what I did in the local school didn’t matter. I would just have to start over when I got home. The teachers and administrators were not amused.

Next, a third installment about Louisiana, such as riding a bike on an icy road and breaking into school while it was closed.

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Mom and Dad were both from Louisiana and my Grandmother Tannehill lived there, so we tended to gravitate back on a fairly regular basis. Dad was drafted during World War II and served in the Corps of Engineers in the Pacific. We stayed with my grandmother in Forest Hill while he was gone. One of the things I remember about that time was that we had commissary privileges, and we lived close to Camp Claiborne (Just north of Forest Hill on the west side of the highway. There is almost nothing left of the camp these days, but I believe it is still federal land.

I have since learned that Dad trained for his job in Ft. Lewis, Washington. And he spent most of his time in the Pacific on Ie Shima (now Iejima). On my last tour in Southeast Asia I flew into Kadena AB on Okinawa. Ie Shima lies just off the northwest coast of Okinawa, and had I known where it was then, I would have arranged to fly over it.

My grandmother was a first grade teacher. I had her for my first year of school, and I think that because of her I have always been enthusiastic about learning. Well, learning about most things anyway. In the second grade we had a course about health. It was so boring that I had a hard time reading it. One night I skipped my assignment entirely. The next day we had a multiple guess quiz. I’ll probably never forget the one question I missed, especially since my answer has since been vindicated. It asked how you should brush your teeth – back and forth, up and down, a combination,… .

That year for Halloween one of the other first graders talked his parents into hosting a party. I was invited. I’m not sure who came up with the idea, but mom and grandmother dressed me up as a girl. I wore a dress with my slacks rolled up underneath. They put a head scarf with a hair piece sticking out the back to give the illusion of long hair. And of course I had on lipstick and rouge. It was effective, No one recognized me. I heard all kinds of comments wondering who that little girl was. Then came the unveiling. Being an introvert I was mortified by the boys’ reactions. I suspect my shame over that incident stayed with me a lot longer than it should have, but strangely enough, no one bothered me about it at school.

Forest Hill was on the Missouri Pacific line back then, and in those days the locomotives were steam engines. I was fascinated by the big, black engines as they chugged through town. I often went outside just to watch them. We had two whole grade crossings, and I can still remember the whistles blowing, spraying out clouds of steam, when the locomotives approached them.

Alexandria was the “big city” for us. We had regular passenger service on the railroad between Forest Hill and Alexandria. For Christmas (1944 I suspect) we caught the train into Alexandria to do some shopping. Almost everywhere I looked, there was Santa. We caught up with Santa at a Christmas tree lot. When I got through making sure he knew what I wanted for Christmas, no one was standing in line. Santa took a break. We hung around so mom and grandmother could talk to him for a while. I still remember being shocked that Santa had a son and he was serving overseas.

When dad got back from the Pacific after the war, he found a job north of Alexandria so we moved to a town nearer his work. Once again our house was next to the railroad. This one ran past my school which was in Tioga. One day, instead of catching the bus I walked home along the railroad tracks. The only problem was that I didn’t tell anyone. I guess the bus driver must have gotten upset about me being missing, because I got home early to an uproar, I didn’t do that again.

I was born in Winchester, Kentucky on July 18^th, 1938. I learned from my parents that at the time my dad was working for the Missouri Pacific Railroad building bridges. We were quite literally living in a box car. I don’t know the details, but I do know the box car had been converted to living quarters and we had at least a bedroom. I suspect that our toilet was a chamber pot and that if we had a sink it drained onto the tracks. But then, I was only a tiny baby at the time so I have no memory of it. That’s one of the things that mom or dad could have written down for posterity.

We didn’t stay in Kentucky for long. The box car and its inhabitants went where the work was. And wherever it was, there was always the ubiquitous pile driver, a steam powered hammer that drove the bridge pilings deep in the ground so they could safely support the weight of a train. Dad talked about it so much I figure it meant something special to him, but I don’t know what.

I have fleeting memories of my early childhood. I don’t remember what order the following events occurred in, and I don’t remember a lot of details. Take them for what they’re worth.

• Much of the time before I turned four we lived in Louisiana, probably with my grandmother Tannehill. I know this because I was four years old in Oklahoma, and I was already familiar with crawfish. We lived for a while in Stigler, where dad worked for a coal mine. He wasn’t a miner. He had something to do with the ventilation system.
• Here’s where the crawfish came in. When we first moved to Stigler, our house had a gas meter buried in front. Right after we moved in, I was exploring around the yard when I found the meter box. The lid wasn’t attached so I picked it up and looked inside. The bottom was covered with little, white “crawfish.” I reached in to pick one up. A hammer slammed down on my thumb — hard. I don’t think I’ve ever felt pain that intense, either before or after.
• If you haven’t already guessed, the “crawfish” were scorpions. I give scorpions a wide berth now.
• One of our neighbors had a motorbike that he regularly rode to church. One day I rode with him on that motorbike. I was sitting, barefoot, on the back, not paying much attention. Somehow I swung my foot into the rear wheel of the bike. With spokes more widely spaced than for a conventional bicycle and small four-year old feet, my heel actually went between the spokes and struck part of the frame, stopping the wheel and slicing up my heel.
• My parents both smoked. One day while mom was at the store, a friend and I (both four-year olds) got a couple of cigarette butts out of an ashtray, went under the back porch and lit them. Mom came home in time to catch us smoking. I haven’t smoked a cigarette since.
• For a while we lived just across the street from the railroad. I was always fascinated by trains and was standing in the front door looking at the tracks in a heavy downpour, when lightning struck something – I never found out what – right across the street. Lightning flashed and thunder blasted at the same time (That only happens when the lightning is close, really close). It scared the heck out of me at the time, but left me more curious than afraid.
• I remember other things about Oklahoma – a gas leak that came up through the ground near our house and burned steadily, sort of like a Bunsen burner made of clay; eating stale Cheerios at a friend’s house and not being able to eat Cheerios again until fifty odd years later because of that taste; Dad’s strep throat and using ultraviolet light to treat it.
• I don’t think either mom or dad really liked Oklahoma. We didn’t stay there very long. We were back in Forest Hill, LA before I started first grade, but that’s another story …