Conflicting Destinations (1)

By Dave Plassman

Chapter 1.

Occidental and The Big TV

Looking back at my earliest memories I land on different occasions on different locales but the day the television came seldom fails to be among my readier dredgings. I must have been about Two at the time because I remember this day after a fashion; I can’t seem to reexperience a time when we didn’t have a TV. TV was definitely one of the truly formative factors in my early life and much later as well. The event is surrounded in a dreamlike surrealism, which may in fact have been actually dreamt. The way I recall it probably was not the way it really happened.

It seems to have been evening or perhaps late afternoon. I see myself standing with my adoptive parents in our carport as the delivery truck pulls up the sloping driveway. Now this may not be a thing really worth relating but it seemed to me that before coming to a complete halt, the truck lifted it’s front end up then settled back down again, up and down, through several repetitions, as if somehow pivoting on it’s rear axle. I not only recall watching this take place but it was a thing I remember thinking about curiously since I was very young. It was my strong impression that this had actually happened. It may have been that I was taking one of those "if you sleep then after you wake up you may find that something exciting has taken place" sorts of naps or perhaps it was my imperfect vision playing tricks on me. In any case, the rising-falling truck was the only thing peculiar about the incident.

Dad and the deliveryman wheeled the TV into our living room where it took up residence as a faithful and very much beloved member of our family. It was one of those five-inch Philcos in a big, brown stained cabinet with four wheels underneath and two handles on the back with which to roll and steer it. I don’t recall seeing it anywhere but across from Dad’s brown chair in the space between the opening to the kitchen and the expanse of hallway. I generally watched it squatting or sitting cross-legged on the hardwood floor in front of it.

The Lone Ranger was probably my earliest program preference but I also loved Leave It To Beaver, (especially Miss Landers) and Lucille Ball in I Love Lucy. I thought Ricky Riccardo was an unnecessarily cruel person who was always scaring or hurting his wife. Situations into which Lucy undoubtedly got herself into appeared to me as diabolical stratagems invented by her angry sounding husband to torment her. I would dream of rescuing Lucy so nobody could hurt her anymore.

When I was in my 30s, following the loss of my family’s home to fire, I saw a movie called Stone Pillow. It featured a much older Lucille Ball as a bag lady. I found myself weeping suddenly and wanting to find a home for Lucy.

Similarly I sympathized with Olive Oil, Popeye’s girlfriend, who was always needing rescue from Brutus, (also Bluto). But my inability to comprehend cartoons very well left me unsure of exactly who and how many the bad guys might be. I viewed Popeye with a suspicious and often jaundiced eye. Still one didn’t say, "I’m watching the Olive Oil show," though it was she whom I really wanted to see.

Most of my earlier images were I think, soft and feminine. I was in love with my sister’s Godmother, with my aunt and with Dr. Riley’s pretty nurse. I had a particular thing for women who wore glasses. I used to fanaticize about buying dresses for my various love interests when I got big and became either a cowboy or a truck driver, this later being my dad’s profession. "I’ll bring you pink and green dresses in my truck." I told my mom. I also remember climbing into bed with my older sister and her girlfriend to repeat the same offer. (No sense of anything untoward here. Kids in our family migrated with relative freedom from bed to bed.)

When on Easter morning the year I was three, Pammy and Fritzie came from across the street to show me their new underpants with a casual flip of the dress, I thought it was nothing particularly notable. Pam was a few months older than me. Fritzie was probably a year or so younger. We played together until I was six.

My other companions besides those on TV were most frequently Mike from next door, Tom and Vicky, grandkids of our neighbors from the other side and Roger from down the street. I don’t recall being particularly lonely but I do recall playing alone a fair amount.

My toys were a number of cars and trucks, (dye-cast metal in those days,) some plastic horses, cowboys, soldiers and Indians, stuffed bears and other animals. I also had an assortment of balls and yo-yos with which I never achieved much skill. I had a wind-up train, some pull toys , stick and rocking horses. There was also a tricycle serving as car or horse as mood dictated, and from a very early age, guns in holsters.

We neighborhood kids, boys and girls alike, played with the cars, trucks, toy boats and planes outside in good weather or when our parents got tired of us being indoors. I had a set of orange industrial trucks, dumptruck, roadgrader, and steamshovel; which were consigned permanently to the outdoors. If we had swings we played on them too. I seem to recall a great deal of time being spent digging in the one part of our yard which survived as Dirt until we were ready to move from that house.

I was always fascinated with houses and houselike structures. I loved to draw pictures of houses with pencil, crayon or chalk; later painting with watercolors. I dreamed about truck campers, houseboats and cabin cruisers. Even horse trailers were a thing of intrigue. When the snack pack cereals came out I rubberbanded the little boxes to my trucks or boats and set up housekeeping for my little people. (We didn’t call them Action Figures in those days.)

In my backyard I enjoyed digging holes and covering them over with boards to create little basement rooms and underground garages for my vehicles. My dad or perhaps one of the Johnson men, (of whom more later,) had taught me to pound nails after a fashion. Like TV watching, I can’t recall a time when I didn’t know how to use a hammer. I often built crude but cherished toys hammered together from odd scraps of wood and crayon-colored according to present whim.

We also spent a lot of time running around the neighborhood, visiting one another, playing with black rubber innertubes or in summer, splashing in colorful plastic wading pools. I sometimes had tea parties or played restaurant with Pammy and Fritzie. I don’t recall other boys being present on these occasions but I don’t think there was really all that much difference between what boys did and what girls did, especially while interacting with one another.

The chief difference I can recall was that girls had dolls and boys had gunbelts and holsters. I think girls were generally willing to share their dolls with a boy who didn’t mistreat them and I sometimes leant a spare pistol or two to a girl who, being a girl, had none of her own. (Though I did note that Dale Evans wore a gunbelt on TV and in the movies, strapped on over her leather riding skirt.) We all wore cowboy hats.

I’m sure life then was full of little strifes and I recall being angry at Mike Blodgett and my sister Lois. Only in a couple of cases however do I recall over what. There didn’t seem to be any of the No Girls or No Boys Allowed nonsense that later so plagued grade school playgrounds and certainly the adult organizations of both gender persuasions. I can’t remember doing much hitting except in teasing play. Dad and I played at fisticuffs sometimes, usually with me hitting my fists into his much larger ones, though not sufficiently hard to hurt myself.

From as early as I can recollect I was described as Weepy, Easily Hurt, not one for taking risks or given to excitement. I said rather often that I loved everyone and everyone loved me. I think I believed that too, most of the time, though I recall an early fantasy matter-of-fact at the time but quite disturbing to me later, in which I envisioned killing my sister Lois and Mike Blodgett in a double execution.

Mike was a badly abused little boy who sometimes vented his anger and frustration as well as his precocious store of profanity outward and generally at me. Lois was twelve years older than me. She was still a kid because she drank milk instead of coffee and I’d seen Mother slap her. Still Lois was able to boss me around and I had to do what she said. Both she and Mike were frankly, more powerful than me and I’m sure I resented that.

I was born David Glen Shaw and given up for adoption at birth. I’m told that my mother never saw me but that she did know that I would have a vision problem. Her name was Violet. She was five-eight. My father was six-two. I know nothing else about him except that he was French-American and he was a mechanic. My mother’s people were British. My nationality was given as French and English (though studies I’ve revealed in adulthood have shown that most of the Shaws were Scottish, many of whom were relocated to Ireland in the later 17^th century.) This qualifies many of we Shaws , George Bernard included, as Scots-Irish.

I grew up thinking I was born three months premature. That may be so but a physician took exception to this claim, suggesting that were I that much premature I’d have likely lost both of my eyes in the incubator and not just one. I was born in 1954 toward the end of the unfortunate frequency of preemies being placed in incubators providing over rich oxygen atmospheres.

A lot of ballyhoo has been noised about in the last few decades about thousands of babies being blinded through the negligence of the medical establishment of the manufacturers of incubator equipment. Not a few lawsuits have been initiated on this basis. I will repeat now what I said the first time I was confronted with this notion and asked if I would participate in a class action lawsuit. I don’t believe that medical professionals or for that matter manufacturers would deprive babies of their eyesight. I just don’t believe it. When the problem was discovered, it was fixed, before the days on consumerism.

The first two years of my life I spent as a foster child with the Albertson Family. I have some recollections of this time. I can see myself sitting in the living room of their house. I recall riding the bus with my foster mom. I recall at least one Dr. appointment and watching a neighbor working on his flatbed trailer. I can remember having my diaper changed and I seem to remember wearing plastic pants with nothing under them at least once, though like the rising and falling truck this doesn’t seem to make much sense.

I have a general recollection of Mrs. Albertson, my foster mother and for a while I thought I remembered my foster dad. I seemed to recall him as a rather tall, purposeful man, perhaps wearing glasses, who was definitely a regular part of my life but with whom I recall little conversation. The facts were evidently quite different.

Mr. Albertson was in a wheelchair and never walked. He had however, by the account of caseworkers, spent many hours reading to and teaching me. According to my adoptive mom, whom I came to at age two, able to count to fifteen, knowing a large number of nursery rhymes, and in her words, conversing like an adult. All of this was due evidently to Mr. Albertson’s special attention to me. The strange thing is, I have no recollection whatever of anyone in a wheelchair or having been read too. It is the case that I was frightened of most men when I came to the Plassman’s home.

I’d had a lot of medical attention during the first couple years of my life and any man who walked seemed to be either a Dr. or someone who would take me to a Dr. where I would likely be given a shot. I evidently raised quite a ruckus when first taken to the barbershop, for barbers, like Drs. in those days, wore white coats. I think the blank in my memory regarding Mr. Albertson is significant. Either he was someone so painful for me to lose that I must forget him, or it may have been that I didn’t see him as being male since he did not walk. My early years were filled with visions of disfigured, often cruel male figures who threatened to take me away from home and mother.

The Albertson’s evidently kept me pretty much as a baby until I left their home. Though I was still in diapers when I came to the Plassman’s home, I had toilet trained myself and reportedly would wait all day without wetting myself. I had also no experience with eating except baby food and my new family spent some amusing meals teaching me how to chew.

In a fairly predictable manner my new family assumed that in putting me into training pants, teaching me to eat solid food and cutting my hair they were erasing my unacceptable past and ushering me into a more valid pattern of development. The Albertson’s had wished to adopt me I’m told, but were judged to be too elderly to take on the responsibility of parenting a child only two years of age. It is interesting to note that they were still in the fostering business twenty years later.

Observing my own daughter at age two, I asked myself how she would feel if suddenly uprooted and sent to live with a new family. It seemed clear to me that she would have had "issues." At about age 32 I found myself weeping often without apparent provocation and feeling a great deal of unlocatable pain. After a lot of self-searching I realized that I’d never been allowed to grieve for my lost family. Everyone in my new household had been so happy over how things had turned out that I’d never really mourned the parents who had loved and cared for me through the first two years of my life. I can’t recall being sad over being in my new family and though I’d been afraid of men I got along well enough with Dad. Still there is evidence enough of my suppressed grief and anxiety. It was several months after I moved into the Plassman household that I was able to cry out loud.

When I was about four, I had a dream in which my mother was leaving home and I couldn’t come along because I’d acted like a smart alec. In my dream’s eye I see myself, my sister and my dad watching out the front window as Mom leads a horse to the corner, mounts it and rides away.

Later I dreamed that Mother told me she couldn’t be my mamma anymore and she had to choose another lady to take me. There were two women under consideration. I preferred one. In an attempt to be polite I told Mom that I thought the lady chosen seemed very nice.

Whether these dreams are partial memories or insufficiently buried fears I don’t know. I’m just sure that my change of family at age two took a nontrivial toll on me. I’ve been asked often enough, "Aren’t you lucky that you were adopted and didn’t have to be an orphan?" Well yes, perhaps, but in those days white children, reasonably intelligent and attractive, well-mannered and able to speak, all of which I was, had reasonably little trouble to be adopted. Also, two families had wanted me.

I can remember going into a courtroom and talking to the judge and lawyer. I’m told that on my last day in adoption custody court the judge greeted me as always before, "Hello David Shelton." Though my birth name is Shaw, the courts assigned a pseudonym to a child while in the foster care system. I don’t recall it myself, but I’m told that I said "Hello, but you’ll have to call me David Plassman now." What I do recall is a candy machine and a little girl waiting in the corridor with her mother.

Lois took me to get a treat. I chose a package of peanut M&Ms. I offered a piece of candy to the little girl who happened to be nearby. How we came to be in contact with one another or by whom it was initiated, I don’t know. I asked the mother repeatedly if her daughter could have another M&M. She responded each time "If you want her to have another one." In this way the little girl ate almost all of my candy. This incident has often been a source of wry amusement to me since a good deal of the work I’ve done over the years has been for or has significantly involved women and girls.

Early memories of my family include (besides TV-watching,) trips to the dump on Saturday, walks with Lois in which I’d choose the direction and we’d try to step on our shadows as we went along. I just barely recall my third birthday and I think perhaps, my fourth Christmas when I was three years old. I got a small, plastic wading pool for birthday number Three and other things I’m sure, though I can’t recall what. My first Christmas with my new family is very hazy but I know I went to see Santa that year, possibly my first trip to see him. I was shepherded by Marilyn; my parent’s Goddaughter and I don’t remember the visit being particularly thrilling. I think there was considerable doubt in my mind as to what was about to happen.

Dad drove truck for Safeway in those days and he worked nights, Darkstop they called it. We ate dinner as a family then he’d go off to work with his lunch pail. I was confused that someone could eat lunch at Midnight. Dad came home again sometime in the wee hours of the morning and wasn’t seen again until early afternoon, except on Monday when things were a little different. Since Dad worked a five-day week, he usually had Saturday and Sunday night at home. Monday he was home all day until evening when he started his new week.

Mom worked at Allstate Insurance as a claims clerk I believe. She was gone most of the daylight hours. I had babysitters a lot of the time in those days. Sometimes Lois, but more often one of the neighbor women or Ruth Johnson.

With my father home on Monday while Mom was gone, I had the opportunity to learn that a man can care for children and can cook as well. Dad was a machine gunner in the Marines on the second wave across the Pacific during World War II. but he’d also cooked for his unit at various times and he was a good cook. So was Mom and so was Lois.

Into the midst of this plenteous good cookery came a skinny timid little kid who never much wanted to try anything new and hardly ate of that which was taken. I know this was a frustration to my family. From my earliest recollections after arriving at My Home I hear myself being called someone who was a picky eater, too skinny, small for my age, (weepy) afraid of loud noises, heights, the dark, easily hurt, prone to catching colds, insecure away from home.

I was also someone with an excellent memory, good hearing, good speaking ability, willing to share. Adults seemed to like me.

Mother used to say, "Oh, they’re just Normal Boys!" of ill-mannered young males with whom she was unfortunate enough to come into contact.

On one occasion I asked "Mamma, I’m not normal, am I?"

"No," she said, "you’re my nice little boy." Mom admitted that she did not particularly like little boys in general. Perhaps this stemmed from the fact that she spent much of her girlhood in a nearly all-female environment.

Mom was born in Fourth of July Canyon in Northern Idaho. That was in 1924. She lived in the wilderness through part of her early childhood and part of the time in Spokane Washington. Her mother and father were both married three times and divorced twice. Grandmother Rowe died when Mom was three. Her dad was a miner and a lumberjack who contracted consumption in the coalmines. He would leave, find a logging job, regain his health, and then go back into the mines. Country singer Merle Travis has sung of the addictive nature of coal mining and the miner’s love-hate relationship with the work there. In Grandpa Rowe’s case this seems to have been exemplified.

Mom was nine when she began a year at a fresh air sanitarium near Spokane where her dad was sent in an effort to combat his tuberculosis. In those days fresh air was the chief cure attempted for TB. Even the children, tubercular or no, slept year-round in screened open-air porches, under heavy quilts to keep off the winter freezing chill.

Mom’s dad died when she was ten. She spent a year with cousins in the Wenatchee area. A fairly miserable year it seems. Then she requested to be placed in the Hutton Settlement in Spokane. With all of the divorcings, remarriages and untimely deaths in Mom’s highly complex family, almost everyone felt to be or actually was an orphan in one way or another. The family included three sir names and with seven siblings, Mom had no full brothers or sisters. One of her half-sisters was permanently estranged from her since early adulthood. One half brother did time in prison on a rape charge. Another died on the Death March on Baton. Mom also had a couple of stepsisters, of more anon.

The Hutton Settlement, (then an orphanage, now primarily a home for troubled youth,) was rather a progressive social experiment and a model for projects of this kind. In the ‘30s it was a working farm on which the boys worked the fields and tended stock. The girls picked, cooked ,canned ,sewed and did laundry. Meanwhile everyone went to school. Mom was there something like six years, living with two dozen or so other girls. Their contact with men and boys were seriously curtailed.

Girls were allowed to date boys from the high school, (in theory) but they must submit their boyfriends to third degree probing from the Settlement’s superintendent. This process was one through which most boys declined to pass. Mom was told by a teacher of venerable age "Any siwash can have kids. You should make a life for yourself. Become an English teacher." I’m sure she’d have been good at it.

As a result evidently of a hair brained whim, the entirety of which I never did understand, Mom and another girl ran away during their Senior year in high school. They were caught, brought back. Mom was kicked out of school and no longer allowed to live at The Settlement. Girls gossiped that Mom was pregnant. (She wasn’t.) One of Mom’s friends beat up another girl in the school restroom for declaring otherwise.

Mom spent a few months then being hired out as mother’s helper to various households in the Spokane area in exchange for board and room. An unpleasant experience generally. She had a boyfriend from school who had moved out to Seattle in order to work as an aircraft mechanics of those piston-driven planes Boeing was building for the war effort. When she could, Mom joined Keith and they were married. Mom gave birth to Lois when she was about 18 and a half. Keith’s skills as a mechanic were such that he didn’t actually get called up until the mopping up operations in 1945-46. Mom worked at the B-17 plant in Seattle, bucking rivets on the wings of the big bombers, then later worked in the tail section, installing chemical toilets.

After she’d told this story to us kids a few dozen times we christened Mom a Commode Commander, and we developed a salute in which the hand was held at the brow then pushed downward in imitation of a toilet handle being pushed downward, accompanied by a strident "Flush!"

I think Mom and Keith were married about nine years. He was a man superficially quite pleasant, generally well liked, rather taciturn perhaps but intelligent and fairly generous. At home things were different. He communicated very little and was given to violent fits of temper. I don’t know that Keith ever hit Mom but he frightened her. I knew and liked Keith but saw him go through three sets of wives and family in fairly quick succession. In listening to Mom and observing her other two husbands I tend to believe what she said about her first.

It must’ve been about 1951 when Mom and Keith divorced. Mom worked for a time as a store clerk I think and eventually went to work at Allstate. It was on a bus from Spokane to Seattle that Mom met my dad. He was at the time a Sergeant in the Army, heading to Fort Lewis, which is near Tacoma Washington.

I believe they dated for six months before marrying. Dad was stationed for a time bossing a construction battalion in Alaska. Mom and Lois were alone again. Mom said once that she’d been married for three weeks when she realized she’d married an alcoholic and she cried herself to sleep that night.

Dad was born in 1922 in a log cabin somewhere in Deschler, Napoleon County, Ohio. In spite if the county’s French-flavored name, the place was full of German-speaking farmers. Dad spoke Low German at home but did very well in the English-speaking country school.

If accounts can be believed, beer flowed like a river there in those days (and had yet to be staunched when I last visited in ’76.) Folks said of Grandpa John, "when John stops drinking you know it’s time to go home." Grandpa was a farmer who worked his land with horses. He also had a polka band, being himself a skilled accordionist.

Uncle Bob was about a year and a half younger than Dad. They had another brother named Ferd who was a little younger than Bob. When Ferdinand was three he was evidently teasing a plowhorse who kicked him in the head, breaking his skull. Dad said he saw his little brother’s brain come out of his head.

They called in Doctors from Cincinnati and even Baltimore I believe but Ferd died though not before Grandpa was bankrupted. The family farm was lost but Grandma and Grandpa Plassman had three more boys, Verne, Willy and Vick.

Grandpa was pretty resourceful. He and Dad ran moonshine all over Western Ohio and Eastern Indiana, selling out of the Model T the Prohibition-era hooch brewed from corn and wheat and run off in Grandpa’s own still. On the heels of the tragedy of Ferd’s death however, came the Depression and I think Dad was nine or so when he had to leave home to live with and work for their Uncle Herman and Aunt Henrietta (Eddie).

Dad and Bob helped worked their Aunt and Uncle’s farm and continued going to school. They quite literally earned their keep and took some of the financial burden off their own parents.

Dad quit school during his freshman year to work full time. He was evidently quite the brawler in those days. Up into the Sixties stories were still plentiful in Napoleon County about his exploits.

Besides farm work Dad was also employed at a bakery for a while and became quite ill from "Flour Poisoning".

Then he and Uncle Willis worked for a while, putting up signs from Ohio to Illinois. Dad was 20 when he joined the Marines. Dad was sent to the South Pacific in due course after working as a prison guard and in riot control here in the U.S.

When I was young, Dad never talked much about his time in the Service. "Don’t ask me about the war," he’d say. "Ask me about women." What I do know about his time in the Marines was pieced together from chance remarks and from a certain opening up when Dad was in his late forties and beyond.

I know Dad was on Guam and Okinawa. His best buddy, a Mexican fellow, was killed in a Japanese bayonet charge He stood guard over piles of his dead comrades in the 140-degree heat. He never learned to swim, though in Basic Training he was forced to jump in and somehow cross a swimming pool with a full field pack and his rifle. He dug foxholes with a little pick in one hand and his helmet in the other with no time to spare and hardly any time in which to do it at all. Rats as big as dogs got into the foxholes with the men. Until he died Dad couldn’t look at a rat without throwing up.

On Okinawa, an island in the Philippines, Dad was near an ammunition dump when it exploded. Though it took him till about age 41 to believe it, he lost the majority of his hearing because of that accident. He learned to read lips, both face to face and on TV without knowing it. I used to relay things that were said at gatherings for Dad and if it was a joke that was being told Dad usually laughed a beat or two behind everybody else. This made him appear perhaps a bit simple sometimes, which he was not.

I believe Dad stayed with the Marines until the war was over in the Pacific. He was with the Occupation in Japan. He came home to Ohio to find that his parents had taken the money he’d sent stateside from his pay, (presumably to be banked against his return,) and had used it to buy themselves a house. Grandpa had been working with the railroad for some time by now. I don’t know very much about this period of Dad’s life, but from what relatives have said and Dad himself; this is evidently when the family first became aware of the nightmares.

Through all the years I lived at home the family would be awakened from time to time, perhaps once a month or more by Dad crying out in his sleep. By the time I came along things had become less violent but Dad would still fling his arms around sometimes as if trying to get away from something horrible. His brothers told of how he destroyed a hotel room one night because they weren’t able to wake him up in time.

Dad said that in his dreams he was being pursued by strange-looking men or creatures with greenish skin. He didn’t say much more but anyone who had heard of or seen firsthand the atrocities of torture, and mutilation, admittedly on both sides of that jungle war from which he’d come, could easily imagine what else those dreams might have held.

Possibly because of the dreams or the family’s tendency toward alcoholism or both, Dad was drinking very hard in those days. I’ve heard that Grandma and Grandpa told Dad to get back into the service. That was a fix-all for all young men at that time. I’m sure Dad worked as hard at being a Marine as he did at any other job he ever held but he hadn’t particularly liked the Marine Corp. so this time he enlisted in the Army. He rose fairly quickly to the rank of Master Sergeant.

Dad drove an Army truck for a while. I think he was in Korea for a time during that war. The part of his army experience he’d talk about was his time in Alaska where he built barracks and other military buildings. I gathered that Dad gained a considerable affection for the place before it became our 49^th state. He talked about visiting there some day but never made it back. By the time he had money for travel without having to take the whole family into account, Dad was much more interested in Reno and Vegas.

Dad had been in the army for about six years when he took his discharge and came back to Seattle to work first at a company called Pacific Car and Foundry where he handled shipments of steel and other industrial material. Later he got on with Safeway, where he was when I came to the family and he was a trucker most of the rest of his working life.

I asked Dad once with the marks he made in school and as smart as he was, why he hadn’t gone to college and become a scientist or something. At age twelve being a scientist was about as close as you could get to heaven without actually having to die and it seemed the appropriate occupation for any sufficiently intelligent person. Dad told me how even as a boy he loved to stand out by the highway and watch the big semis rolling by, wondering where they were going. "That’s all I ever really wanted to be." In all his years of trucking Dad had one jackknifing mishap on the Evergreen Floating Bridge, due to another driver’s error. Other than that his professional driving record was flawless. (His Civilian record was not always quite so clean.)

My adopted sister Lois was the only child Mother ever bore. (Mom had a hysterectomy at age 28.) Lois was between 14 and 15 when I came to them. She was born in 1942 and grew up during the war and postwar years pretty much at the spearhead of the Baby Boom.

As often happens with elder or only children living with single, working parents, Lois had learned early on how to keep house, clean, cook, budget and generally run things when necessary. She made fairly average but solid grades in grade school but in High School showed a flare for Journalism and was soon involved with the school newspaper as business manager and Ad Layout director. She also did stage make-up for the Drama Club. Lois’s ads sold for the school paper were often picked up, with or without pay, by the local daily newspaper and she was offered a job on graduation if she wanted it.

At an early age I recall talks of printing and editors and I see Lois in those days with a stack of books on her arms or laying on her bed, sometimes on the floor, with an open book and an orange from which I wheedled sections.

I’ve mentioned walking with Lois toward dusk in the evening. Sometimes she’d ride me on her bike. She had several fascinating girlfriends, notably Vicky, on whom I perceived a considerable crush. Sometimes I went on car outings with the older girls, sometimes getting treats at the store, sometimes just coming along, there being no one at home to watch me.

I am somewhat unclear about the timing of some things that were happening around my fourth birthday. Mom was working at least part time when I was pretty young. There seemed to be a time when she worked only two days at a time, with two or three days off after that. Later she moved to full time. About this period we were also caring for foster children for the Lutheran Welfare.

I was the second foster child the Plassmans took into their home. The first was a little girl named Anne who was with them quite a few months I gather and whom they very much wanted to adopt. For some reason the adoption wasn’t possible so Anne went back to the agency and they got me. Sometimes I’ve wondered if it was at all significant that my family had really wanted Anne.

There were four other foster babies after me. The last was my younger sister Chris. I recall one other baby girl named Anne also. Two of the babies I do not recall at all. Ricky does stand out in my mind. We kept him for several months also and Mom desperately wanted to adopt him too. So did I.

I don’t pretend to understand all of the issues associated with foster care and potential adoption. In those days foster agencies tended to move children around fairly frequently so they would not bond too closely with any family. I suspect that my relatively long tenure with the Albertsons may have stemmed from the fact that as a child with only one eye, (my right eye ulcerated at age One and I’ve had a plastic eye since then) I was considered handicapped and therefore hard to place. Sometimes there are custody issues preventing an adoption as well. For whatever reason it appeared that it would be only a matter of time before we would have to give up Ricky. Our family planned a trip to Disneyland in the summer of 1958 and it was decided that it being inevitable, this was as good a time to let Ricky go as any. Mom broke out in hives and lost her voice for a week.

We were in those days, a fairly strict Lutheran family. I think I learned about Hell before I heard about Heaven, though not necessarily from my parents. I learned my bedtime prayer at three or four. Mom said I came from the foster home knowing about God. This isn’t surprising. When I was twenty-four, my boyhood pastor, Robert Rieche performed the marriage service for Lenore and me. He told us that he had driven me to Dr. appointments before I was adopted. We attended church regularly until I was about six and I talked to God rather often, asking, sometimes bargaining, often just passing the time of day.

There was a fairly strong German flavor to our family. Dad and Mom both liked Polka music. Dad drank beer daily. We ate a lot of sausage, wurst, hot potato salad, and sauerkraut. Mom balanced this somewhat with the Irish in her rather nebulous background. Many expressions and figures of speech, I.E. Smithereens, Like a banshee, Wipe that smirk off your face, Hotter than Old Billy, are highly typical examples. Mom actually had Saint Patrick’s day cookie cutters and she never told me that fairies didn’t exist.

We were in those days a one-brand family. We washed with Camay, laundered with Blue Cheer, brushed with Crest, drove Fords and shopped only at Union stores, most usually Safeway.

We were also a teasing family. You didn’t survive long around us if you couldn’t dish it out and take it back again. This was a source of distress for me at first, which I recall in snatches, and in the general undertone that I was "weepy". I can see my Dad dramatically taking down candy or nuts from the fireplace mantelpiece as I waited expectantly, then he’d pop the item into his own mouth causing me to cry. It wasn’t as if I ever was deprived or felt unloved. I am sure I was loved. It was the case though that one seldom asked a question of Dad without getting a humorous or downright silly response in return, which was sometimes corrected, sometimes not. Dad carried on this sort of joking more often than Mom but she was by no means a stranger to this fun either.

My eccentric Great-aunt Daisy had a model skeleton hanging in her bathroom. Dad told me that was what happened to kids who didn’t eat. "They put a string through your ribs and hang you up on somebody’s wall." I asked Dad one evening why it was that boys stood up to pee while girls did not. I’m told that Mom and Lois waited with held breath to hear whatever words of wisdom Dad might bring forth. "It’s real simple Dave," Dad said. "just goes to show you that girls are plain lazy."

The teasing was not always verbal. On one occasion when I was three or four, I recall being chased around the livingroom, my underwear having been pulled off, while Mom attempted to pin a diaper on me. I hadn’t wet myself or anything. This was the result of some banter between my parents and I.

I was told that I teased Lois unmercifully. She seemed to be the one in our family, (besides myself perhaps,) who was most easily frustrated or infuriated by harassing verbiage or gestures. I think most generally I took things very literally with Lois. This upset her a great deal. When I didn’t eat fast enough, she’d say "Chew!" demonstrating with her straight, white teeth. In response I’d open my own mouth, whatever it’s current contents and gnash my teeth back at her.

I must’ve seen a sign someplace with a crab or shrimp represented on it and must have heard someone read "Seafood cocktails" or some such. I had the idea that a cocktail was some sort of ugly, red animal and likely dangerous. One day when totally at patience-end with Lois I cried "If you don’t stop that, I’ll let my cocktail bite you!" This was a source of family humor for years.

This chapter began with the huge, vacuum-tube-munching television set in the living room and so it ends. I think my time in history is fairly unique because I was born into a Betweentime. Though TV came into my life at a time so early that I have trouble recalling when it was not, I was raised by people who were of the radio generation and who had seen serial westerns in the movie houses. We didn’t yet have TV lore and hadn’t yet laid down rules for it’s use and how we should think about it. The messages TV seemed to deliver, at least for kids, were simple and plain.

Kids shows were mostly small-screen versions of Movie western episodes and some kid adventures as well as an array of fanciful cartoons. The kid adventures showed usually boys, (not girls) doing things that were so much more exciting than anything else I ever did. Women in most of the series seemed mostly incidental. They were most often there to administer warnings, admonishments or to express concern over stoically endured male mishaps.

The men seemed generally to be dark, (since all was black or white,) tall, strong, reserved, courageous and resourceful. Few of them had much use for elegant grammar. They were always prepared for action. Many of them were defined by the weapons they carried. Zorro had his sword and whip, Maverick his hideout gun, Jim Bowie his fabled knife, forged from a meteorite, Lucas Mccane, (the Rifleman) his fastfiring repeater rifle, Bat Masterson a multitrick cane, Wyatt Earp his mythical Buntline Special.

Men on TV seemed to be all the things that I wasn’t. I talked too much, was little and skinny, not even able to wear Levis without suspenders to hold them up. I was towheaded and shrimpy. Girls loved to baby me. Most boys paid me little attention. On TV the boys all knew how to ride a two-wheeler, hang upside down by their knees, climb a tree or a rope, swim, row a boat, build a campfire. I’d have been afraid to do any of these things even if I’d been allowed.

I suppose the TV gave me a grand sense of my own inferiority to bigger, stronger and older males but it also gave me a standard, if fictional, toward which to strive. The TV was our first view of the world outside our neighborhood. The Golden West was much more real to me than anything in news broadcasts or in chance heard adult conversations. Fiction and fact had yet to truly separate and the Western was as valid as the local news or the weather report. In Westerns we learned there was Good and Bad. The Bad could and should be wiped out whenever found. The West was somehow better than the East. The Old Days were inherently more exciting than our parent’s lives or our own. There didn’t seem to be any job more exciting than that of a cowboy.

When I wasn’t the Loan Ranger I was Jean Autry or Roy Rogers. Many of us borrowed a TV persona and kept it for months or even years. I didn’t give up this practice till about Third Grade. Until I was about Ten some people still called me by my cowboy name.

I carried six-guns and wore a cowboy hat whenever possible until entering school and after school for a good while after that.

TV watching may have begun for me with feminine symbols but the experience was quickly masculinized. I still appreciated Miss Landers and Ellen, Jeff’s mother on the first Lassie series, Jeff’s Collie. I thought I could break through the glass of our big Philco set and find myself among my TV friends. It was always one of the female characters I aimed to visit on such adventures. Still my view of what men should be and what I should become, was someone who built things, someone who fought, someone big and strong, hard living and rustic of speech. The feminine influence in my life was making way for the masculine but had hardly vanished and was still strong. In those days, before school’s onset, I had some powerful teachers.