A Little Sister, Yes Or No? 3.

I’ve related in Chapter 1, how our family took care of a baby boy named Ricky. My mother and sister had fun telling people that we were just like the Nelson Family on Ozie and Harriet. We had David and Ricky. I think he must have been with us about five months and left our family in early summer. Lois was out of school and it was flooding in Disneyland when we got there. This was the summer I turned four and we talked about adopting a boy for about the next year or so. I think finances must have been rather tight. Keeping foster kids was never a moneymaking proposition for us and I don’t remember any other children in our home until the time that Christine came to us.

Our family’s trip to Disneyland was so far, the only time I’ve been to California and it was rather early in my life to be remembered in great detail We rented a red and white vacation trailer for our two-week trip and stopped at various trailer parks along the way.

I remember little of the trip down and back, save that we stayed at a particular court for several days. I befriended an old gentleman whose name was John. I visited him daily and we talked a lot, about what I’m not sure. Probably the rides I was enjoying at D.L. He gave me a pencil and pieces of newspaper on which to write and I practiced my letters and probably drew pictures as well.

Mom was horrified when she found out, that I’d been pestering this poor soul, but John defended me staunchly, saying he appreciated the company. I was allowed to return.

The day we arrived at Disneyland the horses on the beautifully painted merry-go-round appeared to be in water nearly up to their bellies. So we went next door to Knox Berry Farm where we looked at donkeys and of course, purchased jams and jellies. Next day we returned and found Disneyland to be all cleaned up now. We started with the carousel and worked our way through the five sections of the amusement park then in operation. We rode the Stern-wheeler riverboat and we heard a group of costumed girls sing Davy, Davy Crockett. Mom and I went on a ride called Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs, which was memorable only in that it was so scary.

In this ride one sat in a little car, just about room enough for two, and it proceeded at speed along a dark tunnel. From time to time the car spun around and did other crazy things. I guess there were cutout figures of the dwarf characters along the walls of the tunnel but I don’t remember seeing any of them. When the end of the tunnel was reached I recall a scary face with heavy eyebrows, but saw it only for an instant for Mom clamped her hand over my face.

Later she said that there had been an animated skeleton dancing on the door at tunnel’s end and when the door opened, there stood a witch, stirring her cauldron. As we came nearer she stuck her spoon in my mother’s face. The witch was merely another mechanical contraption and no harm was done but we both felt the entire ride was ridiculously grim. There was no sign of Snow White, she of the rose-colored lips and ebony hair.

That, unfortunately, is about all I can remember of Disneyland. We took home with us a grand punch-out book from which one could assemble cunning little cars, figures and the entire witch’s castle from the pasteboard pages. Most of the book though, never got put together. In later years when I said I wished I could go to Disneyland, the response was "You’ve already been there."

Our family was great at vacationing. They never made it back to California with me along, Before this trip was over though, we stopped to visit some of Mom’s relatives who were living in the LA. area. There were several aunts, perhaps sisters of Mom’s mother. There was Aunt Gladys, who made much of me. There was an Uncle Bill who took me in his den and showed me how to make card houses. Another Aunt was named Emmy. Her husband, long deceased by now had been Henry. They had owned a truck farm near Spokane back in the 20s and 30s and Mom had lived there at various times when she was growing up. In later years I liked to tell people my mom’s name was Dorothy and she lived with her Aunt Emmy and Uncle Henry on a little farm in—Washington!

(Heading back north, we stopped in San Francisco, long enough to ride the cablecars. I got a Captain’s hat that said Fisherman’s Wharf on it.

For some reason Dad wasn’t able to take his vacation the next summer or he wasn’t able to make it coincide with Mom’s time off from work. A few weeks after my fifth birthday, Mom took me back to Billings Montana to meet Aunt Margaret, her eldest half-sister. We traveled with Helen Molene from down the street. Helen was a rather syrupy, though kind-hearted woman. Lenard her husband was always very nice every time I’d seen him, though I suspect he was quite henpecked. Their son Roger was snot. Roger and I played together amicably enough at home sometimes but he was spoiled and used to having his own way. One would have to think hard if asked to choose for a two-day travelling companion between him and a skunk. Mostly he hogged the space and the toys. He constantly wanted my plastic garage, (my only movable house structure,) to complete his elaborate farming scenes. Periodically he would stretch out on the back seat leaving me with but a portion of the black floor mat on which to sit. Mom wailed that she was never going to get me clean!

I did have some fun while standing up in the back hump, by placing my foot on whichever of my toys Roger wanted so he couldn’t sneak them over to his side of the car. In those days cars had both in front and in back, a prominent hump which extended about six or eight inches above the floor. This hump housed the transmission. It was considered very acceptable in many families for kids to stand on the hump in back, which allowed them to clear the front seat back sufficiently to see out through the windshield. Must of my travelling was done from this vantage point, or standing on my knees on the back seat, staring through the rear window at where we’d been. My parents called me the Gillahoo bird, a creature who evidently flew with a backward-directed gaze.

However onerous the Trip over and eventually back from Billings, the time spent with my newfound relations more than made up for it. Mom told me my Aunt Margaret was going to love me to pieces. I asked if she knew what I looked like and Mom said she’d sent her pictures of me. I think I’d hardly gotten out of the car when Aunt Margaret caught me up in her arms.

Though I didn’t notice it then, Margaret was quite short. Just five feet and fairly wide across the beam as they say. "Short on both ends Maggie" Mom liked to call her when wishing to get her goat; or "Sally Slopsocks" referring to her habit of rolling nylons down till they made roly-poly anklets. Margaret lived with Uncle Jerry, her second husband and their adopted son, also named David and twelve years old at the time. They had a squarish white house with red trim.

Most daytime activity happened in the basement because it was quite hot in Billings and air conditioning hadn’t really come in yet. Uncle Jerry was a cook. I think at the time he was working at the local airport. Jerry was five-eight according to Margaret and he was quite skinny. Mom always referred to him as a shrimp or some such. He was a Texan, who wore red cowboy boots, which left marks on his white picnic table, when he napped there with his feet propped up. Jerry being both a Texan and small seemed to irritate Mom quite a lot. Later I understood more about why she criticized him.

Jerry was never anything but good to me and my times with him and Margaret were happy ones. Dave took me in his room the first evening we were there and we played his wind-up record player with a stack of 45s. He gave me a model pirate ship he’d built. In succeeding days I got to watch him making a cloth-covered airplane model and a rubber band-powered paddle-wheel boat.

Dave slugged me now and again. I don’t remember what for. Probably just for being a bratty little five-year-old. I think I’d never been hit by a big kid before, except by Lois perhaps. Mostly though, Dave played with me, called me Punk, treated me like a little brother. He contrived a silly, but to me, fun game called Two-card Draw. We played this for fake money with Dave protesting "You’re busting me, Bart." I had recently become Bart Maverick, one of the characters on the TV show Maverick, starring James Garner and Jack Kelly. The Maverick brothers were card sharks and lady’s’ men who would fight if they had to, but would much rather disappear out the back door or hide behind a woman’s skirts. Sometimes I’d pull my gun on Dave and make him beg me not to shoot him dead. (Lois would have never put up with That!)

Margaret’s daughter Vivian and her husband Don, Mom’s niece and nephew-in-law, had a son named Steven who was a couple of years younger than Dave. We all played together, buying popsicles from the ice cream man and sunflower seeds from the corner store. I’d never seen these before and though for a long time that sunflower seeds could only be bought in Montana.

Vivian and Don had a big, loppy shepherd called Jiji. I played Dr. with Steve one day, (nothing untoward) I as the Doc, gave him shots with various things found in his top dresser drawer. I found a picture of a man with long hair. Somewhat surprised, I showed it to Steve. "That’s a picture of Jesus." he told me. I’d never before seen a picture preported to be of Jesus, or I think, of a man with long hair.

AT that time watercolors were a passion in my life. I never had a set of my own but both Steve and Dave let me play with there’s I especially recall a picture of a log cabin I did in brown, with a red roof. The open doorway I painted black. I would stare at that dark doorway for long periods of time sitting there on Aunt Margaret’s basement steps, imagining I could see things inside the cabin.

We went sometimes to the local wading pool or to the park, though nowhere was cool enough for Mom. Once we went to the airport to visit Uncle Jerry at work. He gave me a warm cooky as big as the dessert plate which held it.

Aunt Margaret was wonderful to me, curing my mosquito bites with some mysterious potion from a jar in the bathroom. She played bartender in my Maverick games, serving me milk and cake at the kitchen counter. She made stuffed frogs with vests and pants on. Later she made Barbie furniture out of beer cans, cut into strips and scrolled like wrought iron, upholstered with velvet cushions. Aunt Margaret wore long-line bras to which she sewed long garters with which to hold up her stockings when she left the house. There thereby avoided wearing a girdle. She was renowned for keeping emaculate lingerie drawers. Though I never checked this out firsthand, a well known family story had it that her neatness in folding and putting away underclothing had kept her first husband out of federal prison.

I’ve related how my Grandpa Plassman was a moonshiner. So was Margaret’s first husband, named Jay, who evidently beat hell out of her at any opportunity. One day somebody tipped Jay off that the Revenuers were coming. There was no place to go and Jay had quite a number of flat liquor bottles, holding his homemade whiskey. In desperation, Aunt Margaret slid them under the contents of her unmentionables drawers. The cops came in, searching from room to room. Entering the bedroom one cop jerked open Aunt Margaret’s drawers, declared "nothing could be hiding under anything that neat." slammed them shut again. People are more cynical nowadays and consideration for a lady’s privacy nearly obsolete but the ruse worked then.

I said early in Chapter two that I was in love with one of my aunts and this is the aunt in love with whom I was. She’s still alive at this writing and well up in her nineties.

Uncle Jerry though was the person who truly made this visit something extraordinary for me. He had a well-equipped workshop and he Built Things. As a kid I always loved cats. There had been a gray one named Sneezy, almost too far back to remember. There had been a dark, gray cat named Smoky who had been with me for several months then disappeared. Now there was Sam, a cream-colored tom who was gentle, good-natured and affectionate. While visiting in Billings I adopted a neighborhood cat and was keen on making it a home. I’ve mentioned how I was fascinated with things on wheels and before long, Uncle Jerry was building me a mobile house for cats.

Dave and I had built the first crude model, nailing a board across part of the open top of an apple box then turning the box on it’s side and securing it to a coaster wagon. My borrowed cat didn’t much admire being hauled around in the thing however and there was no door to keep it from escaping.

Uncle Jerry took matters in hand then and built me a very credible house. It was a box two feet long and about 18 inches high and wide. He put castors on the bottom and drilled square patterns of holes in the front and back ends to let in air. The top had a hinged door in front, which swung upward.

Jerry even contrived a handle which could be fixed to the front of the vehicle so I could more easily pull the vehicle. He painted it bright red, like his boots and said he was going to write Cat house across each side in big, white letters. For some reason Mom objected to this plan and I thought she was Terribly narrow minded!

When we picked up Helen and Roger on our return trip, Roger’s grandpa whom they’d been visiting in Laurel Montana, had somehow gotten wind of how bratty his grandkid had been on the trip out. He told Roger to figure out what was his half of the seat unless he wanted a line drawn right down the middle. The trip back was a little more tolerable but I think if given the chance, I’d have just stayed on in Billings, so long as Mom would be there too.

For years I wanted to move back there and even in a bad dream when I heard Aunt Margaret and Uncle Jerry had somehow died, I declared that I still wanted to live there.

"David followed Jerry around like a little puppy," Mom told anybody who’d listen when we got home. That was true. Jerry was the only grown-up who’d ever listened to a dream I’d had and made it turn real. He did this not only on the trip just described but on subsequent ones as well. My dad said he’d been a carpenter in the army, but seldom built anything except things he wanted. Ruth of course had made many things for me but carpentry wasn’t among her preferred accomplishments generally. Her contrivances though cunning, were more of the paper fish and paper plate picture variety. They were wonderful and creative but nothing in which you could keep a cat!

I took these experiences to heart and when Rachel, my daughter, was little and sometimes when bigger, I tried to build the things she wanted to the extent my skills and pocket book would permit.

As it turned out, you could put a cat in Jerry’s cathouse but you couldn’t keep it in. There was no latch on the door and Sam jumped out as soon as I started to pull his house. Thinking quickly, I got Mike Blodgett and asked him to sit on the trap door so Sam couldn’t get out but Mike was frustratingly heavy and now I couldn’t move the contraption at all. I had that red cathouse till I was ten and we moved to Michigan. I have no idea what happened to it then. At about age seven, in a fit of patriotic zeal I tried to donate it to the army so it could be used to haul ammunition. I formally requested that my uncle Tick, then a Sergeant, should take it with him back to the fort. I was terribly hurt when he drove off without it.

The summer I turned Five I started hearing rumors of something they called School! One morning Ruth and Ronnie began telling me about how, very soon, I would be going to Kindergarten, where I would learn things and have a teacher. I said I didn’t believe that I’d go, thank you. Ruth said everybody had to go. She told me the teacher wouldn’t call me Bart Maverick. She’d call me David and I couldn’t say yup and nope as cowboys did. I’d have to say yes and no.

I wondered aloud if they’d try to make me leave my guns at home and my bubble burst entirely when Ronnie said I couldn’t wear guns at all, except on Cowboy Day. (There really was such a thing in kindergarten in those days, at least in our neighborhood.) By now this teacher person whose name I didn’t know and whom I wouldn’t meet for week or months, was nevertheless presenting a pretty clear picture in my mind. I’d have drawn it too but I didn’t have a crayon in Bitch Color.

I’d even been told by several people that at school I have to take naps. I hated that notion too. I had to take naps at home when I was there in the afternoon. I don’t think I ever slept though. I’d lay there, daydreaming, drawing pictures on the sheet with my finger. Sometimes my night dreams would involve my going to school, which I could imagine realistically, never having been to one except once to Ron’s Junior High Carnival.

In these dreams I’d sometimes be made to take a bath with my clothes on. Sometimes I’d watch children being made to eat hot sauce off a spoon. Sometimes the teacher wore a cape and flew like a witch. Sometimes it was a gruff man with poor communication skills who expected us to do what he said anyhow. (Except for the bathing with clothing on I think I ran into all of these experiences and teachers eventually!!)

I think this was a period of time in which Mother was very interested in rebuilding family relationships. WE had visited, after a considerable hiatus, Margaret in Montana, Chuck in Oregon and the aunts in California. There were others also, closer at hand. Some were already part of my life. Others would soon become important to me.

Frank was a full brother to Margaret and a half-brother to Mom. He lived now in Seattle with Wilma, his wife. They had a grown-up daughter, Betty. Frank was a mechanic who worked for the Kenworth truck manufacturing plant south of Seattle. Like me, Uncle Frank had only one eye.

He’d gotten a metal sliver in his eye some years previously but for some reason, probably having to do with money, he never got a prosthesis. Also like me, Frank was skinny and wore suspenders. Besides being a mechanic, Frank was skilled with the vacuum-tube electronics of the time and used to fix our TV. I got to watch him one time, working on our set, with the back entirely off. I had the idea that there must be little figures inside the TV that perhaps were clothed differently for different shows and they moved around like puppets in order to act out the things we saw in front. I looked very hard and saw something in there that looked, at least to me, like a little boy, made of metal. Perhaps there was only one puppet but it moved around very rapidly?

Uncle Frank was generous enough and very informative if you could get him to open up. He always spoke in a loud, fairly gruff manner, every third statement or so containing the words "Well Jesus Christ!" He thought every storekeeper in the country was out to cheat Frank Sylvester Armstrong, personally. Frank always hated to see you leave his house without eating something, if there was something there to eat. He’d say "If you go away hungry, it’s your own damned fault!"

Wilma was quiet, even with other women. She giggled a lot. She and Frank had lived together common-law for a number of years. In their early days, I gathered, they separated fairly often. Wilma told once about how Frank, who was a junkman par excellence, had a washing machine of which he was inordinately proud. "Whenever he’d decide to leave," Aunt Wilma recalled, "he’d load all his junk up on his truck and there’d be that washing machine up on top. He just wasn’t going to leave it there so I could use it."

Even when we were teenagers my little sister and I could get them going at it hammer and tongs by innocently inquiring which side of the border they’d slept on during their last trip to Canada. Frank insisted vociferously and profanely that they’d slept on the Canadian side. Wilma held out staunchly for the American. Before the latest renewal of this quarrel would be over Frank would shout, "I’ll box your ears!" I don’t think he ever hit Wilma though.

Frank was proud fit to bust when the first man to walk on the moon turned out to be an Armstrong. He and Aunt Margaret had two full sisters and a brother. Aunt Toots, (Alice Maybelle), I never met. Al, who had done time in prison, lived down in Dallas Texas all the years I was growing up and I never met him either.

Aunt Winnie, (for Winnie the breadwinner, since she’d worked since age 13,) was as profane and ornery as Frank and funnier than a rubber crutch! She lived her whole life in Spokane and was married for many years to a man named Carl Emerson. Uncle Carl was an inventor, an artist, played the guitar and sang. I’m told he loved kids and I believe this but I only met him once. Uncle Carl was also a very unfortunate sort of drunk, who saw snakes while drinking but was unable to be sober because that hurt too much. Toward the end, he was very ill with the cancer as well. Aunt Winnie, (real name Louise,) had to sit him down in a chair, demanding that he keep reading to her out of any book that was at hand and keeping the broom and other weapons out of reach.

Carl died when I was five and though I didn’t attend the funeral it was explained to me what had happened and I believe he was the first person I’d known who had passed away.

From another branch of Mom’s family, we got acquainted with Aunt Katherine and Uncle Lyle, with their kids, Billy and Susie. The last time Mom’s father had gotten married is was to Clare Green, who had been married twice before. I believe they were married for about two years before they divorced. which occurred around 1932. Clara remarried a man named Seat. She was Grandma Seat to all of us and though unrelated to me on two counts, I.E. divorce and adoption, she was my Grandma.

Grandma had two girls and a boy, from her second marriage. The youngest daughter, Katherine, had been living with her second husband and two children in West Seattle for quite a while I think. I’m not sure why there seemed to have been a hiatus during which she and Mom weren’t in touch. I do recall quite clearly the evening we drove over to meet the Bestoms, passing by a carnival, which I very much wanted to visit.

Katherine had a loud, rather querulous voice, not unlike Roseanne Barr, and the same gruff manner. She could however be touching kind when she felt someone was in need of help or sympathy.

Lyle was a big, hearty man who had followed the construction trades most of his life. He also wore red suspenders, but not because he was skinny. "No," Mother said, "Lyle’s fat!" He used to toss me in the air over his head, which is surprising, since I didn’t generally go in for physical horseplay. He called me Chum and Mate and made amazing paper airplanes for me.

Susie, like Marilyn Magnus will figure more in my story a bit later on. Like her brother, she was troubled and was the butt of some rather horrifying stories in our family.

Billy was a fun-loving but rather delinquent kid. He broke my arm, quite accidentally, by jumping too hard on the opposite end of a glider swing on which I was sitting, causing me to flip up in the air and come down on my left elbow. (I fell in love with the pretty nurse at Dr. Riley’s office and even asked my parents’ permission to kiss her good bye on my last visit. I lost my nerve though and never consummated.) I’m sure felt dreadful about hurting me and was otherwise quite kind to me, even giving me a quarter out of his own money to buy myself a present. (I bought a wind-up metal boat, painted orange, which I had for years.)

In order to save the rest of Society from Billy’s bumptuousness, he had to be sent into the Navy. When he completed his hitch, having lived through a few administrative punishments I gather, Bill settled down with his wife and several children to work near Portland Oregon at a paper mill.

Mom and Dad also had a group of friends, primarily connected with Safeway. We went to Safeway Summer picnics and to employee Christmas parties. Mom and Dad played once a month with a pinnacle club, six couples meeting in one another’s homes turn and turn about, for beer, eats, cards, some off-colored witticisms and fun prizes for best and worst players. This was the social life we had when Christine came to us.

One morning I was sitting on the couch when the phone rang and Mom answered it. The call was from the Lutheran Welfare. Mom talked for a few minutes then turned to me. "They’ve got a little girl," she said. "She’d be with us for a little while. Is it okay if we take her?"

"Yes," I said. I wasn’t used to being consulted on matters of this gravity, but I’d been waiting for a little brother and I don’t think we’d been approached recently with any baby offers at all. "I was the one who told Mom and Dad they could have you!" I’d tell Chris when we were older and would get to hassling one another.

We went to the office to assume our role of temporary family. Chris was wearing a pink dress, standing quietly in the middle of the room. "This must be our Miss Christine," Mom said.

Chris had been in seven foster homes by the time she was 15 months of age. In the last place she’d been, she was the ninth child. She was very insecure and had learned to fight for everything she had. Chris threw things rather a lot, didn’t like being touched and like me, was afraid to go to bed alone.

Chris’s nationalities were given as Spanish and Lithuanian. Her fictitious name was Gillis. Her mother’s name was Lucy Zitcus. Lucy had fled with her family from their country of origin, I believe to escape the Communists. They had already survived Hitler’s onslaught. "Chris’s dad was Mexican but had given his nationality as Spanish since according to him, that was a better thing to call yourself in those days. Chris found Frank, her dad after she grew to adulthood.

Lucy was Catholic and Chris was born at the Catholic hospital in Spokane. Her mother turned her over to the Catholic foster agency early on. Lucy didn’t want the responsibility of a child, perhaps did not feel able to assume it, but she wouldn’t relinquish control either. When an agency started putting on pressure for her to give Chris up for adoption, Lucy’d pull her out of the present foster home and take her somewhere else. Eventually, they reached Seattle and the Lutheran Welfare.

Lucy was like a youthful, kindly aunt who visited often, brought both of us gifts, even went on picnics with the family. I was initially told to call her Mrs. Gillis but later was required to call her Lucy. I was told that under no circumstances should I tell Chris who her real mother was. Later, much later actually, steps were taken to end contact with Lucy.

When she was about ten, Chris asked who that lady named Lucy had been. Having promised not to reveal Chris’s origins to her I said that Lucy had been a nice lady who liked to give us presents. There after all, had been others who fit exactly this description. Still I felt badly about concealing this information from my sister and I decided that when she was of age, I’d reveal the truth to her, regardless of what Mother thought about it. As it occurred, Chris found out before I had opportunity to tell her.

It must have been in Early September of 1959 when we got Chris. It was more than a year and much heartache later before her case was finally resolved. I don’t think she ever fully recovered from what she’d gone through and what would come next.

I moved easily enough into the role of big brother. Chris was learning to talk and was very active. She called me Daydee and missed me when I was away at school. I haven’t generally associated my beginning kindergarten with Chris’s arrival in our home but the events must have been nearly simultaneous.

In spite of my making my mind up not to like school, I was delighted by the large classroom, shelves of art supplies, and the little chair just my size. Mom and I went over to meet Mrs. Walker, the teacher to whom I’d been assigned, and I thought she was great too.

"When you come back tomorrow," Mrs. Walker said, "We’ll have fun with all of these things." I thought there was no time like the present and argued for moving up the schedule a day or so, but no, I must agonize through another 24 hours until tomorrow afternoon.

The kindergarten classes were held in the basement of a church, probably about six blocks from home. It seemed an awfully long way to me. Pammy Kensler and I walked to and from school together everyday. At first we seemed to be always in trouble for being late. This was partly because of me dawdling and partly because of us stopping to pinch apples from a convenient tree. This was Pam’s idea. I had no idea we were stealing until Dad and Lois caught us at it one afternoon when we were late getting home and I had one of those adults bending over to give the law to the youngster sort of lectures. I said "Pammy, that’s stealing. That’s naughty!"

Ever the cool one, Pam responded. "Oh, they don’t care about their apples."

I guess it was since the first reverberations of the Baby Boom that Kindergartens had been split into two shifts to accommodate the growing number of kids. Pam and I went afternoons; returning home before Lois arrived on the school bus. We didn’t eat lunch or have snacks at school except on special occasions and we did not have to endure the dreaded naps!

There were four tables in our classroom and another Table 5, which was out in the hall, definitely not preferred seating. To my great disappointment, Pam and I didn’t sit together. I’d assumed this would be a Team Effort. Though I was talkative enough at home, I don’t remember bonding with anyone else at school. There was one girl who always looked very serious and perhaps a little stern. I thought she looked like a little mother. One boy was extremely quiet and always sat very still. I spoke to him once just to see if he had a voice or not.

He did, but I got only "Hi" out of him.

Once when we were playing Farmer In The Dell, I was chosen to be the farmer. I think that was the only time I can recall being singled out in a group at this age. When it came time for me to choose a wife, I pointed to the serious girl who was wearing a white scarf that day. When she chose a child though, and the child chose a nurse and thence on to dog, cat, rat and cheese, the attention on the farmer dwindled.

I liked Mrs. Walker very much. She only seemed to own two dresses for everyday use. One was a deep blue and the other one was a sort of gray and white speckled pattern. She also had a long, black dress which I thought looked very nice, but she wore it only on Halloween. When Beaver Cleaver’s teacher, Miss Landers came to dinner during one episode of Leave It To Beaver, I thought it would be a wonderful idea to invite Mrs. Walker to our house. My parents told me that was all right for Beaver because his teacher had come alone. My teacher was married and had a family. I didn’t quite see what this had to do with anything, but the ways of parents are often incomprehensible.

I don’t remember learning much about reading, writing or numbers in kindergarten. We were required to write our first names on our crayon boxes. We were drilled in recognition of colors, shapes and elementary construction skills, mostly in paper.

We were studying Indians during the first half of the year. Though I’d have much rather been studying cowboys or pioneers, most things about the old days intrigued me. I dutifully made my paper canoe, teepee and headdress and listened to the stories Mrs. Walker read. One day another teacher came by with a box of driftwood. She told us that when Indians wanted to make music they had gone down to the beach and found sticks just like these and banged them together. Though this seemed a simplistic approach to music making we all took sticks and banged away happily in time to the phonograph record of preported Indian tunes.

For Halloween Mom made me a clown suit out of a white sheet, decorated with ruffled and big red patches. Lois, who did stage make-up at school, made up my face for me. Mother had threatened me on this or that infraction as being the only kid in school without a costume but I think I was one of the few who had. Several of the girls had black dresses like the teachers and pointed witch’s hats. A lot of kids had on masks or face paint.

I don’t recall that we did a lot at our party except to build a pumpkin mural out of black and orange bits of paper and fishing in a fishing pond. When I’d tried several times without catching anything, Pammy slipped a plastic fish on my line to make me feel better.

That night I disappointed Lois by deciding to be a cowboy again for trick-or-treat instead of being a clown. Clowning just didn’t seem to be in my line. Clowns didn’t seem all that adventurous or swashbuckling to me. This is doubtless unfair to them, but you might say I was a product of my environment.

At Thanksgiving time we took a short break from Indian lore to making table-scraper and tray sets by cutting paper plates in half, coloring the edges and drawing pictures on the inner faces. The Pilgrims, we were told, used scrapers and trays like these to clean their tables after a meal. I guess this was to save the crumbs but I wasn’t sure for what purpose the crumbs were wanted.

At some point during the first semester we were all given a chance to request which child beside whom we would like to sit. I chose Pam and she chose another girl. I think the three of us ended up together along with the quiet boy. When I was in college the first time around, we heard in an intro to psyche class, a brief discussion on Sociometrics, which is the quantitative study of choice in-group relationships. The Prof. said that in the ‘50s it was all the rage to study relationships among classfuls of kids by posing the study as an opportunity for seat reassignments. I don’t know if this was going on here or not, but this was still the ‘50s. In any case we got our new assignments.

I mustn’t have liked kindergarten all that much on balance because I tried to get Pammy to go home with me sometimes at recess. I don’t recall being a behavior problem in class though. Free Time was the best part of the schoolday. We had perhaps a half-hour to do whatever we wanted, unless of course, the teacher decided we wanted to do something else.

My passion was for paper and scissors and paste and drawing utensils. I also liked playdough and modeling clay and I longed to paint with a big brush and pots of paint. Beads, shoe-tying cards and other put together then take apart toys didn’t hold much attraction for me. Puzzles were intriguing but I didn’t have much knack for them.

Generally there didn’t seem to be much point in putting together something that you couldn’t take home and which somebody else would just pull to pieces again. I therefore spent every moment I could, drawing components on white or colored paper, scissoring the shapes out and joining them together with that sassafras-flavored paste that everyone loved to eat whether they admitted it or not. I never had paste or glue at home because it was too messy. Ruth sometimes made me up flour and water paste for a special project but the adhesive of choice at home or while visiting was Scotch Tape. I believe half the households in America during this time were held together with strips and loops of Scotch Tape!

One of my first creations at school was a hat made of varicolored strips of construction paper. This was a mere whimsy suggested by the material Mrs. Walker had given me that day. Later I started making a long succession of badges. Jimmy Magnus had a toy police shield which said Gman on it. I couldn’t remember how to spell that so I’d make a big G then add whatever letters after it that occurred to me. Typically I’d draw a star, circle or other shape, color it black of some other color, write on it with something that contrasted, then cut the badge from the paper. At home it could be safely pinned to shirt or sweater.

I had ordered a Bret and Bart Maverick belt from an ad on the TV show. I think Mom had to buy a box of Alcoa Wrap aluminum foil so she could write the order of the label or something, then include one dollar. This was the first thing I’d ever ordered and it seemed to take months to arrive. When it finally did arrive I think I’d nearly given up on it ever getting there. The belt had the Maverick brothers’ initials all over it. Everyone in that family seemed to have first names starting with B, Bret, Bart, Beau and so forth. The buckle was oblong and ornate and in back there was a secret snap pouch for concealing money, keys, and small handguns. I was very, very proud and stood up to show off my belt at show-and-tell.

Now I figured that badges should have Maverick initials on them. Bart had been Sheriff during one of the episodes. Now I started turning out a line of B.M. Sheriff badges. Mom got tired of me bringing home so many badges and she told me to stop but my hands seemed to make them automatically whenever I got near paper and scissors.

Mrs. Walker told me to stop working with paper and paste all of the time and try something else. She didn’t take away the privilege entirely though. I even began coordinating home projects with Free Time at school.

Because of a TV show I’d been seeing for about the past year, I’d become very interested in Jim Bowie who wore a knife instead of a gun. According to the pilot episode, he’d been confronted by a she-bear and his rifle had refused to fire. "I don’t want to shoot you, mother. I just want to warn you." He had gone then to the smith, James Black, who had made for him the amazing, deadly knife, front the steel of a meteorite.

I never formally became Jim Bowie, but I made a number of knife models. The first was a sharp stick, perhaps four or five inches long which I secreted to school in my pocket and there fitted with a pasted on, brown colored paper handle. I wore my Bowie Knife in a spare holster on my Maverick belt and practiced quick-draw throws in the livingroom. Lois saw what I was doing and surprisingly, showed me how to hold my knife between thumb and forefinger for a proper throw.

One of my earliest and most long-sustained ambitions in kindergarten was to paint with brush and easel. I had that opportunity twice I believe. On occasion we were also allowed to paint with our own watercolor sets. Just cards with colored paint pills glued on, but wonderful all the same. I say Our Watercolor sets because Mrs. Walker told us that if we took very good care of them all year, we could keep them for our own. One of my greatest sorrows over not finishing kindergarten was that I never got my paint set.

Before Christmas, Mrs. Walker had shown us how to use chalk with crayons to turn black into gray and red into pink. Most youngsters didn’t have 89 colors in their crayon boxes in those days and this was a useful trick. I tried it at home with other bolors, turning out pastel blues, greens, and yellows. There was also the trick of using buttermilk with colored, I think, to turn out pretty shades of the original colors.

One day we made butter in a little glass butter churn with everybody taking a turn at pumping the silver dasher. We each took a little bit of butter home of a card to have with dinner.

AT home, Chris was growing, learning to talk, harassing Sam the cat and generally it seemed, settling down for a long stay. I wondered if she ever suspected she wouldn’t be with us very long.

While I had tended to fear men, Chris distrusted and actively disliked most women. She liked roughhousing with Dad and other males who came into our house. She seemed to enter easily enough into playgroups in our neighborhood or elsewhere. She and Mary Magnus became friends.

Fairly early on Chris became potty trained, wearing a pair of my shorts with plastic pants over them just in case. Very soon she was more active generally, than I was. She seemed to seek me out though when feeling scared or insecure. Once she tried to put a stuffed bunny on the toilet and dropped him in. Chris came running through the livingroom with the soggy rabbit and threw it in my lap. She seemed so very frightened that I got her up in the rocking chair and rocked her. She fell asleep on my shoulder and Mom took a picture of the three of us, Chris, me and the wet bunny.

Somewhere along the line, Chris developed the disconcerting habit of walking up to to strangers, usually male, and asking, "You know what I got?" Where upon she’d whip up her dress in front as high as it would go. Mom frequently commented on the shocked looks we were getting from recipients of this bit of display and she’d quickly intervene to explain that Chris had a mole on her tummy, of which she was inordinately proud. I talked to Chris a few weeks ago and she confirmed that the mole is still there.

Lucy continued to visit. So did the workers from the Lutheran Welfare. Chris and I were sharing a room in two cribs, mine with one side pushed down and a stool set next to it so I could climb out. I complained that Chris talked every morning and woke me up too early. She and I shared a room for six years. During that time we did a lot of talking, mostly at night when we were supposed to be asleep.

Dad’s parents, Grandma and Grandpa Plassman came to visit us sometime that fall. I went along to meet them at the train depot. They’d been in Chicago for several hours while changing trains. This was the first time Grandpa had been that far west. He’d heard about John Dillinger and the other notorious gangsters in Chicago’s history and assumed the place was still crawling with robbers and killers. Grandpa became so nervous in the Chicago depot that he pooped his pants, a fact that became known to Lois, much to her dismay when she began to press the pants at Grandpa’s request, before they’d been laundered.

I called them Mom and Dad because that’s what my parents called them. Grandpa chewed licorice-flavored Beechnut tobacco which he clandestinely shared with me in small amounts. He also whittled. Sometimes I got him to sharpen sticks or do other minor crafting jobs for me. Grandpa also helped me make a sort of camperlike structure on my red wagon, using scrap lumber and the table Stacy Blodgett had built.

Grandma baked us several dozen German coffeecakes which went into our freezer. She asked me to make her something in school so she could take it back to Ohio with her. I brought her the school newspaper which Mrs. Walker printed in a crude, ditto-like process which involved gelatin and hand pressing against a prepared master.

We took Grandma and Grandpa on a tour of the Rainier Brewery in Tukwila, (another south Seattle suburb.) Eyeing the huge stainless steel brewing vats, Dad said, "I wonder what would happen if one of those things broke open?"

Mom replied, "You’d die happy."

I actually heard the conductor cry "All aboard!" as we saw my grandparents off. I don’t know how long they stayed. Probably not more than a week or two. Grandpa was still working then. I would see them again two and a half years later.

I thought Walt Disney looked like God, or Maybe God looked like him. I guess that since the closest one seemed to get to God was the pastor at church, I thought God would probably be a stern, black-suited guy perhaps with a white handkerchief in his pocket. That’s how Mr. Disney looked to me. Besides, he was always talking about things that one should learn and understand.

The Disney Show aired on Friday for a number of years in those early days and Walt Disney would come out at the beginning of each show, tell you a bit about the program you were about to see. He’d give some historical background if necessary. I always thought he sounded rather stern and generally reminded me of a minister.

There was as well, another special connection between God and Jesus and the Disney Show. I only recall meeting Pastor Rieche once in person, when he came to our house to have a few words with Dad and leave some books to read, when Dad was ill. As with most pastors generally I imagine, kids just didn’t bother Pastor Rieche. You kept quiet and let the older folks do the talking. I don’t say that he himself demanded such deference but that’s just the way in which clergy tended to be treated in those days.

Pastor Rieche had however, instituted a practice in our congregation at Glendale Lutheran, of setting aside one Sunday each month as Children’s Sunday. Messages were simplified somewhat for younger ears and he would to some extent, talk directly and specifically to the children in the audience. On one such Sunday, Pastor Rieche posed a question concerning a certain man who had lived his entire life helping others and doing kind deeds. Even so, some people hated him and even had him put to death in spite of his goodness. "Can any of you young people tell me who this good and wonderful man might be?" Pastor Rieche asked.

A little boy in the back of the sanctuary waved his hand excitedly in the air and shouted "Davy Crockett!"

Davy Crockett indeed! and after him, Daniel Boone and Zorro and Alfego Bakka, and Francis Marion The Swamp Fox and and on and on. A procession of heroes marching across the Disney screen. I think I first gained my love of history at the hands of Walt Disney and his cadre of researchers, producers, screenwriters, actors. My favorite story was that of Texas John Slaughter who went out into the Arizona desert with his young sidekick, Ashley Carstairs to round up mustangs.

In later episodes John with his new wife Viola and John’s kids from a previous marriage, (he had been widowed,) settled down to raise thoroughbred horseflesh in the midst of Comanche country. Of course there was much warfare between the ex-Texas Ranger, his ranch hands and the entire Indian Nation.

I told my dad that when I grew up I was going to get my kids first then get married. (I’d missed the fact that he’d been married before.) "You are hunh?" Dad replied.

Since nobody had really told me very much about God, I went on Picturing Walt when trying to imagine the person who’d made the whole World. I’d heard that God was up in the sky, so I started imagining him as being rather like superman but stationary. Then I thought, that would be uncomfortable just lying there all the time. So then I imagined a house for God and eventually surrounded it with land and trees and gardens.

Perhaps Heaven was like a big island up in the sky. This may have suggested a rowboat as means of crossing back and forth.

Sometime after Uncle Carl died, and I’d be assured that he’d gone to Heaven, I had a dream that I’d died also and gone to Heaven to meet God. As the saying goes, I was unhappy there because I didn’t know anybody. I’d only met Uncle Carl once after all, so I asked God if I could please go home. He said that he could take me home again but he’d rather keep me there with him. In a very non Lutheran display I kept pestering God to take me home. Finally he relented and said we needed to find a rowboat big enough to hold both of us.

Finally we found one that was large enough and God brought me home, somehow dropping me off in the carport of our house. I opened the front door and dinner was making. I heard the pressure-cooker close by in the kitchen. Noone seemed to have noticed that I had been gone.

For many years I thought that dream had been telling me that I thought myself of little importance and that it wouldn’t have mattered very much to anyone that I had died. In time though, I realized that if God could put me back into the World, and could give me back my former life, then God, (and by now my image had altered a good deal,) could surely also have taken away the grief and pain that my passing would have caused those who loved me. Now there was no need for comment when I stepped into our living room and back into the life that had been restored to me.

After all, I felt no sadness when I returned. Why should anyone else? I don’t know why we have dreams that take 30 years to unravel and perhaps this is merely the difference in how we tell stories to ourselves, as we grow older. For a decade and a half though, this newly interpreted childish fancy has seemed like one of the most profound dreams I’ve ever had.