The Wicked Witch And The Good 6.
John Hay Elementary was built around 1910. It was the only grade school in Seattle which would accept students who needed Braille books and writing material. A nearby school, Coe Elementary, had a
program for kids who could use large print. In our school there were three classrooms devoted to the blind, each with it’s own teacher, trained in Braille.
My class had first and Second Grades in it and we totaled nine students. We were Marty Lancer, Chris Gray, Shannon Hurd, Pandy Pierce, Michelle Gardner, Bonnie Baker, Karen Fredericks, Mary Jane Kemp, and myself. The other classes served 3rd-4th and 5th-6th though students might be moved up or down due to personal need or teacher preference.
I’m being somewhat unfair about assigning the title I have to this chapter. Marge Swanson, my initial First Grade teacher was not wicked. She had a clear vision of what blind persons could be and what she intended her students to become. She was neither afraid nor ashamed to impose that vision on anyone she could, whatever parents thought of it. She wanted us to be strong, smart, independent and to live out our lives according to Mrs. Swanson’s dream for us.
I eventually attained a level of mutual respect with Mrs. Swanson, (I think,) but when I was Six, she was Frightening! She had a loud, booming voice with sufficient upper octave when she wanted us to believe she’d lost her temper, to send icy chills up your spine. "Get that left hand off the table or I’ll cut it off!" This to Karen Fredericks, a slow-learning girl, in first Grade like me, who for some reason was at this moment supposed to be feeling her book with only one hand. I honestly believed Mrs. Swanson was going to make good on the threat! Karen was so exhausted by school that she was allowed to return home at noon, foregoing afternoon classes. I remember crying in the mornings at first, saying that like Karen, I was too exhausted to put in a full day. Mom understood, but kept me at it.
A few weeks into the Fall Mrs. Swanson said the only thing she knew about me was that I was going to be an old man before I made second Grade. I know she did it to motivate me and it worked. I spent the next several years trying to prove just how wrong she’d been. I’d always been touted as a smart kid, one who learned and retained copiously. Mrs. Swanson told Bertha Magnus at a chance meeting, not aware of how close Bertha and Mom were, that David Plassman was a bright enough child but would never amount to anything because his parents keep him wrapped in cotton. To some extent Mrs. S. had a point. I’d only been blind eight months at this time and had a lot of adjusting to do. Stairs were everywhere at school and they were terrifying. I thought I loved everybody in the world, but there were bullies on the playground. I could memorize entire storybooks but discovering what Dick, Jane and Sally were doing on the Braille page was pick and shovel work.
We took a multiple approach to reading. At first Mrs. Swanson showed us particular words on the page and we recognized them more or less as complete units. In the afternoon, we’d write rows of letters, letter-group contractions and punctuation marks on our Braille Writers. We also used word and letter-group flash cards, which we felt, with our fingers. Later we also had spelling lists and tests.
Braille is not a language in and of itself. It is a system for representing the letters of a given language, English for example or French, German, Spanish, Japanese, and thereby the words spelled by that alphabet. The Braille cell or basic unit, is a rectangle, ¼ inch high and 1/6 inch wide, made up of six dots. Dots 1, 2, 3 are numbered from top to bottom on the left. 4, 5, 6 from top to bottom on the right. Find an egg carton, the kind that are six eggs long and two eggs wide, cut the carton across the narrow direction to make yourself an array that is three by two. Position the long direction of this array straight out in front of you so three cups are on the left and three on the right. Now get some eggs and build up the letters.
A is the dot on the upper left. Dot 1. B is that dot and the one below it. Dots 1, 2. C is the two upper dots in the cell. Dots 1, 4. D is dots 1, 4, 5. E is 1, 5. F 1, 2, 4. G 1, 2, 4, 5. H 1, 2, 5. I 2, 4. J 2, 4, 5.
The letters k through t are a through j with a lower left-hand or dot 3 added. The letters u through z and a through e with both lower dots, or 3, 6 added. The letter w was added later since Louis Braille who invented the system was French and w is seldom used in the French Language. At the request of an English friend, Monsieur Braille chose the reverse of r, or dots 2, 4, 5, 6 for w.
There are also letter contractions for words such as and, for, of, the, with and frequently used letter groups such as ing, ar, er, en, in, ence ance and so forth.
The Perkins Braille writer which was in most frequent use in our school and most other braillers, has six keys for the six Braille dots, a space bar, a backspace and a line space.
Arithmetic was handled in a fairly engenious manner via a device called a cubearithm board. This was essentially a hard plastic waffle with square holes and cubes which fit in the holes. Depending on which side of the cube was up and which way the cube was turned, one could represent all ten numbers 0-9 and a bit more. The numbers in Braille are the letters 1 though j with a as 1 and j as 0. Now return to your egg carton and check this out.
The letters d, f, h and j or 4, 6, 8 and 0 are the same group of dots just rotated 90 degrees respectively. In the same w3ay, 2 and c are a quarter turn from one another and 5 and 9 work the same way. The numbers 1 and 7 are unique so they get their own cube sides. but we’ve represented ten numbers on five cube sides. The sixth cube face had a letter o for Operation which could be turned four different ways if desired. We’d set up our problems on the board just as on a piece of paper and we saved a lot of Braille paper, which was quite expensive.
I don’t recall having much trouble with Math in those days. One day Mrs. Swanson declared a contest in which we were to put the numbers 1 to 10 in our cube board. The first person finished would receive two cents while everyone else got one. I beat everyone in both grades and came proudly home with my two pennies. This was I think the first academic success I can recall.
My problems were mostly with reading and writing. My failure to remember what a q was (dots 1, 2, 3, 5, 6) was the cause of Mrs. Swanson decreeing my eminent lengthy tenure in First Grade. I didn’t like Braille particularly. The stories were so boring compared to my talking books, which tended to be at grade levels 3-6 rather than 1-2. It was a long time before reading Braille became particularly rewarding and I probably didn’t try as hard as I might. This may have accounted for Mom’s relative antipathy to talking books at times.
"You pray to God to help me with your Braille!" Mom commanded one night when I was beginning my bedtime prayers. I’d brought home a D Braille assignment that day, which Mom said was Failure! It wasn’t but one was well advised not to argue with her about such things. Pray I did and seemed to be doing notably better in the days that followed but Braille was problematic for me until Fourth Grade.
In spite of the fact that most of us were totally blind, Mrs. Swanson spent a good deal of time trying to help us gain some appreciation of colors. We all had a box of color crayons in our desk, with Braille labels to help us know which color we had. We were also welcome to try our hand at painting with watercolors, (those metal cases that snapped shut!) We each also had a tracing wheel sometimes called a pattern marker with which we could draw or trace pictures in paper, pinned to a lint board. We could color within the raised lines left by the toothed wheel of the marker.
Sometimes she would give us a set of muffin tins, each cup marked with a color name. In the respective cups would be pins with heads colored according to the label on the cup they were in. We’d be presented with a raised line drawing perhaps of a landscape of a figure with Braille letters in various regions, showing which color that region should be. Blue for the sky, or perhaps a person’s shirt. Brown for earth or shoes. green for grass or perhaps a pair of pants or a skirt. We were asked to put appropriate colored pins in the corresponding regions of the drawing.
Mrs. Swanson installed a cuckoo clock in our classroom to help us orient ourselves to the room using the clock’s loud tick-tock. It also provided one more job, which could be assigned for a week at a time. Everybody in class had a job, winding the clock, watering plants, turning on the lights after lunch, walking bank money or notes to the Principal’s office, reading the temperature inside and out.
We didn’t have Braille thermometers that actually worked. Our school budget didn’t run to that sort of expenditure in those days, but Mrs. Swanson made dummy thermometer scales on strips of paper and arranged metal pointers which could be moved up and down. She’d take temperature readings herself each morning and set the scales so the chosen student could read it.
On the first day I was in First Grade, Mrs. Swanson told me to sit next to Shannon and told her to take me with her throughout day, when we weren’t in class. In those days there were girls’ and boys’ entrances and segregated halves of the schoolyard. So on my first day I spent all of my recess time on the girls’ side of the playground. This was not intended as an exercise in humiliation or as any kind of punishment. Shannon, born blind and having two rough and tumble brothers at home, was probably the most capable of the totally blind children. She found her way unerringly and was hardly afraid of anything. She was a second grader and frequently reminded me of that. Shannon started the recess break, running full bore across the playground, with me in very reluctant tow.
When she found what a poor running partner I was, Shannon took me to the girl’s monkey bars and told me to climb them. They seemed much bigger than the ones in kindergarten and I didn’t do well with them either. Exasperated, Shannon took me to where there was a bend in the wall or the school building and said, "You won’t run. You won’t climb bars. We’ll just have to spend recess sitting in the corner." I told her that was okay with me!
I spent a number of days worth of recesses sitting in the corner. There was a safe feeling place in the boys’ porch which I learned early on to find and I sat or stood there, refusing to budge until I had to. One day out of pure curiosity I think, I came out of my corner to find that just a little beyond there were the porch steps. I sat down on the second step from the top because that reminded me of being on a stage coach’s driver’s seat so I sat there and drove the Stage for a couple of recesses.
Soon Mark Johnson, a partially sighted boy in 3rd Grade, who called himself General McArthur, came over to ask if I wanted to play with him and his army group. I said Sure, so Mark told me I’d be on a radar station and I was to sit on the porch and wave my hand up and down to signal in planes. So I did that for the rest of recess that day. Next day Mark said I was going to be a corporal and I could shoot a machinegun, so for a recess or two I stood against a wall, clear away from my porch, making machinegun noises.
That night I went home and told Dad I was a corporal and he said "tell them you’ve got to be a sergeant like your dad." Next day Mark was agreeable and a few days later I was promoted to three-star general, later making four-star. Mark of course, was a five-star general. One day, some time later, Mark asked me if I still wanted to be a general. (Like duh!!)
Not all of my battles were imaginary. Marty Lancer, whom I’d met at Blind Kindergarten, was bossy to begin with and partly because of his parents, was a considerable bully. His family had some money from the import/export business. It was evidently a blow to his parents that Martin Matthew Lancer III. was born blind, (another of the incubator cases.) As we’ll see, my parents took me on all of their major vacations. Marty’s parents went to Mexico and heaven knows where else, but Marty and his baby sister stayed with the grandparents. Marty II. was determined that nobody was going to pick on his son so he gave him boxing lessons at the Y. and taught him some gutter tactics like stabbing with an elbow and stamping on someone’s fingers. Marty used to beat hell out of me every day of the week for a while but at that age, like most bullies Young Marty was essentially a coward and when I learned to fight back he would generally back down. I’m not sure how I did it, but frequently I was beating up on him. I also made friends easily in those days and now that I was moving about the playground more freely I was getting to know a lot of the sighted kids whom I could often win to my side and get Marty ostracized. I used this tactic off and on up through Fourth Grade.
Marty and I weren’t always fighting though. We played together a fair amount, usually sitting together on the low outside windowsill of the building’s daylight basement. We’d discuss TV shows. I still liked westerns, while Marty liked cop shows; talking about cars, boats, accusing each other of wearing rubber pants, Ordinary First Grade stuff like that!
Some of the girls would often come from their side of the schoolgrounds to play with me. Two in particular made a habit of coming over during morning recess and walking me on the girl’s side. One was named Marilyn and I can’t recall what the other’s name was. They’d walk on each side of me, holding both of my hands. "No boys on the girls’ side of the playground!" the teacher in charge of Recess would call.
"There’s going to be one boy on the girl’s side," they’d answer back with what seemed to me was considerable courage. They told me I was a nice boy with good manners. (My dad said I was growing up to be a lover like him.)
Shannon and I shared rides to and from school and were the last two kids in the cab in the afternoon. We fought quite a lot but did a lot of stuff together too. We sang songs and told stories to one another, pure fiction or just slightly embellished. She had a taste for the macabre, witches in a haunted castle throwing children down the stairs to their death, children getting trapped in the school boiler room and being cooked to death, children being given poison pills for swearing. I liked happier endings and generally cast myself in the role of hero-protagonist.
Shannon knew the words to Sink the Bismark and The Battle of New Orleans by Johnny Horton. I taught her the several songs John Slaughter sang in the Disney series, along with Swamp Fox and other TV themes. We argued about all kinds of things such as how many stomachs does a cow have. Mom looked it up for me in my Child Craft encyclopedia and it said four. Shannon advised us to get new Encyclopedias since the answer was two. Someone had told me Jesus was nailed on a tree, not a cross, so Shannon sang me The Old Rugged Cross to prove I was wrong. The song didn’t impress me but I conceded when Dad took Shannon’s side of the argument.
Shannon kissed me once and on another occasion, suggested we might marry some day. Other times we scratched and even bit one another and had a wonderful time!
Pandy, (Pandora) Pierce and Shannon were bossom buddies most of the time and sometimes things went hard with me when they were together. Pandy was a very loud, often obnoxious girl who always seemed desperate for attention. She was also a very bright girl though this was sometimes missed because of her behavior. Pandy had been heard screaming "I hate you!" to her parents and I think we were all somewhat in awe of her. Panky told me much later though that she put up a brave front before her friends but she suffered for it when everyone went home. Probably my best friend was Chris Gray, a second grader and the first Catholic kid I’d known well. Though the theological differences between Catholics and Lutherans are not all that great, they seemed light-years apart in those days and we were all but forbidden to associate with one another. Chris taught me how to spell Hell and what it was, giving a proper home to Marilyn Magnus’ Devil.
Like myself, Chris loved to read talking books and was fascinated with history. We played well together. He was rather more serious than I, but fun. Chris couldn’t eat meat on Friday but other than that, seemed a regular guy. It was he who asked me quite formally, before a deputation of our friends, girls and boys mixed, if I would be their General. This occurred toward the end of my First Grade year and I think I saw myself as a leader of one sort or another for the next seven or eight years.
As one would expect, Mrs. Swanson was quite as concerned with our physical and social development as with things academic. She stretched ropes across the playground so we could run safely and unassisted. She played tetherball and dodgeball with us. She got us a contraption called a Balance board, which pivoted on a fat roller beneath a wooden plank. We’d stand on the board, clutch the wire fence and try to keep our balance, as the board seemed to buck us. She even took us on a walk to the nearby grocery store, bought us each a caramel and procured a number of paper sacks. We stuffed the sacks with newspaper when we got back to class and painted them orange with attempts at black faces to make Halloween pumpkin decorations for our room. Once Mrs. Swanson brought a hot plate to school and first and second grades invited third and fourth for breakfast. The hosts contributed breakfast fixings and Mrs. Swanson cooked eggs and pancakes. We ate till lunchtime.
Of course things were also happening at home. Each afternoon when I came home from school Chris, who was weary of playing by herself all day, would grab me, jump up and down and cry Daydee! Daydee! Meanwhile Lucy was closing in with her more pointed assertions that Chris would need to be moved soon. Mom was arguing a lot with somebody named Mrs. Allen. Whether she was a caseworker or someone desirous of adopting Chris or both, I don’t know. Mrs. Allen was saying that a family was available for Chris, which had several children with which she could play, thereby providing a better home environment for her. I’m not sure to what extent my blindness figured in Mrs. Allen’s reasoning. Whatever her rational, her badgering tactics appear now, highly inappropriate. One Sunday morning it was finally the time appointed for Lucy to come and take Chris away. Mom retired to her room with a migraine. I think I retired to mine. I said good-bye to Chris but I’m sure I was instructed not to say very much. Fred Smithson, one of Dad’s friends from work had come over, possibly to give Dad moral support. They had Chris packed by the time Lucy arrived. Lucy attempted to get Chris to the car. Chris refused. She dug in and literally fought. I’m not sure of the actual duration but Mom claimed that Lucy, Dad and Fred struggled for an hour and a half to get one frightened little girl into the car. Finally they got her in and the doors were closed. Lucy drove off. Even with the windows rolled up and the apartment closed we could hear Chris screaming "Mamma! Mamma!" She obviously was not screaming for Lucy.
Lucy got about a block away and evidently couldn’t handle the decibel level any more. She turned around, parked in front of our front door and said, "Well, do you want to keep her?" I think each one of us has gotten angry every time we think of how a little girl was tormented so and to no purpose. I think it was past Chris’s 3rd birthday which is on June 2, before the adoption was finalized.
If I had learned about the process of dying through John Eile’s passing and something of belonging through Chris, I was about to learn about the process of birth, courtesy of my older sister. I’ve mentioned how an unpopular boyfriend had partially occasioned the graduation trip to Hawaii for Lois. I could remember a number of boyfriends Lois had brought home over the years. When I was three or four I used to kiss Joe goodnight like he was an uncle. Richard Tucker had presented me with a beautiful gunset, TV style, which he had won on a tavern punchboard. There was a .4440 Colt revolver and a Winchester carbine. (Since Lois was very mature for her age, she dated young men several years her senior.)
There was a very nice fellow, James Anderson Brooks of Georgia who was in the Navy. He’d never seen snow so we took him up to Snoqualmie Pass to throw snowballs and play with our sled. Jim asked me if I wanted to join the Navy. I told him that I intended to be a lawyer and if I couldn’t do that I’d be a forest ranger. (I liked the idea of the firespotter’s tower high above everyone else,) If I couldn’t do that, I’d join the Navy. Jim was on an aircraft carrier and for several weeks I fantasized about being on one too. Something must’ve gone wrong between Jim and Lois. I never got the sailor’s hat he promised to send me.
Now Ron Lawson was back on the scene. Ron had met Lois at the airport when she came back unexpectedly at the end of summer, 1960. Mom and Dad had been hoping she’d stay on in the Islands and possibly go to school there. She and Ron had corresponded through the summer and now she’d brought home an engagement ring. I think Lois was persuaded to break off the engagement with Ron for a time and she enrolled at The University Of Puget Sound, but by the end of her first term, she was back and preparing to be married.
Lois and Ron had a big church wedding with the Magnuses, the Johnsons and just about all of the rest of our friends present. Mom said I looked handsome in my new black suit. The Handsome Prince in Snow White was referred to simply as The Handsome Prince, as if that were his name. I asked at the time what handsome was, then whether or not I was handsome. Mom hedged, saying I looked all right but didn’t come right out and say I was handsome, until now.
I took pains to remember the wedding service since I might be the captain of a ship someday or the leader of a wagon train and might need to marry people. Soon after the wedding I heard that I was going to be an uncle which was amazing news in itself. Lois had her baby; a girl named Debby on July 11.
Mrs. Swanson had a pottery kiln in her basement so for Christmas that year, she helped us pour little ceramic birds into plaster molds, then she took them home and fired them for us. This made a pretty impressive present for our parents. Our family decided to go to Chuck and Vina’s in Oregon for Christmas weekend. The first time we’d spent the Holiday away from home. We opened up all of our presents on Christmas Eve that year so Christmas day didn’t seem like Christmas at all.
I’d asked Santa for a toolbox and was told that it would be waiting for me at home. I got some impressive other gifts in Oregon, though. One was an alphabet board with magnetic letters from Uncle Tick who was stationed currently with his family in Germany. The board was a way of keeping up with my print a little and feeling a bit less blind. It was also good fun spelling messages back and forth with Mom or Dad. When our daughter was two we bought her a nearly identical board. Rachel and I spelled words on it but more often used letter shapes to make cars, boats, robots and rocketships.
The other great gift I received was from the Martins; parents of Lois’s friend Joanne. This was a gunbelt with holster and the newly marketed Shootin’ Shell western revolver by Matell. Unlike most toy guns with their plugged barrels and dummy cylinders, this gun held six spring-loaded shells with plastic slugs. The hammer striking the base of the shell caused the spring to release and the little plastic bullet came zinging out of the barrel. Together with Greeny Stickum Caps, the overall effect was Formidable! Armed with a shootin’ iron like this I felt at least something of a match for the monsters. I’m sure these were dangerous toys but they were delightful to play with, especially as both Jimmy and I were pretty responsible with things like that.
I did get my toolbox but since it appeared the ready-made variety on the market for kids weren’t quite up to scratch, Santa had somehow gotten Bill Johnson to help him out with this particular project. I found at Ruth and Bill’s house a sizable tacklebox with lid tray, containing hammer, saw and hand drill, together with assorted blades, two drill bits, even nails and hunks of wood.
It’s also worth mentioning that this was the first year the new talking doll, Chatty Cathy was sold. When I was in engineering school I learned that this had been one of the mechanical triumphs of the toy industry. Bonny Baker, a rather quiet girl, serious and studious, got such a doll that Christmas. By now I’d soaked up sufficient machismo from other boys so as not to wish others to know I was very much interested in a girl’s doll. I was however, mad to get my hands on Chatty Cathy because the idea of a doll that talked was so incredibly fascinating! Bonny brought hers to Show and Tell but told us soberly that she’d only let us hear Cathy a few times because she’d wear out with overuse.
Bonny pulled the string three or four times and the effect was disappointing. The recording was quite scratchy and Cathy’s voice almost unintelligible. She sounded nothing like the ads on TV. Well, toy guns sounded real in the commercials too. I think a lot of kids began a long slide toward cynicism because of advertising like this. It you couldn’t trust the TV, who then could you trust?
A TV event that happened around March of my First Grade year I think, was the first time I’d seen the Wizard of Oz. Ron, my new brother-in-law said he’d seen the movie in the theatre when he was my age. He said he’d been scared to death! So was I. As the title of this chapter suggests, the Wicked Witch of the West reminded me of Mrs. Swanson. Listening to her gave me the same unpleasant chills I got when my teacher was angry with me. Of course, W.W.W. was balanced by a good witch. This was a pleasant suprise and rather affirming too. For years my dreams had been troubled off and on by vicious, ugly witches who ate children, poisoned people and threw you into a cage or a dungeon. About the time I turned six though, I’d had a dream about a nice witch. I’d met her in the back yard in Occidental. I’d asked her in my dream if I could kiss her then I’d gone to tell my mother how happy I was to have found a good witch.
A bit after Christmas we got news that we were to have a new teacher. By now I’d gotten on more or less an an even keel with Mrs. S. and was disconcerted at having to once again, confront the unfamiliar. The transition, as things turned out, was about as significant as the disparity between the Wicked Witch and Glinda.
I think Mrs. Swanson was generally a good influence for children from overprotective families who must now interact with often-unsympathetic sighted peers. Perhaps I am poorer for not having spent more time with her when I was young. It may also be that I would have turned out to be more of a herd animal than my present whimsical, delightfully individualistic self. Mrs. S. had our best interests at heart and I believe she cared passionately about us. She did however have what we later learned to call Control Issues and a marked tendency to play favorites. Mrs. Swanson aspired to be a psychologist as well as a teacher of the blind and freely admitted that she’d use us as guinea pigs if she felt like it. At some point she marked out three grades of the very special of the Special and said she was going to follow this group all of the way through school. I was not included in this group, for which I’ve always been profoundly grateful.
An opportunity to further this ambition occurred when Mr. Albertson, the teacher for Special Grades Five and Six, resigned his position in order to take a posting elsewhere as vice-principal. A replacement teacher was hired, but she didn’t have enough Braille to teach older students. It was decided that Mrs. Swanson would take Grades Five and Six, along with some chosen Fourthgraders while Miss Gourder, the new teacher would take first and Second. Third and fourth would continue to be taught by Miss Reams. I’ve often wondered how much better my early Braille training would have been had I retained a more thoroughly trained teacher. Miss Gourder, lovely though she was, was not particularly systematic in instructional technique and lacked the sort of drive needed to prod a smart but sometimes lazy student toward excellence. But if I had cried before because I had to go to school, now I cried if because of illness or some other reason, I Couldn’t go to school.
Genevieve Gourder had recently taught kindergarten. She was soft-spoken and painfully kind. While Mrs. Swanson’s technique tended to be to cut a person down until she begs to know how to be better, Miss Gourder’s was to excuse most failings and make us feel we could accomplish anything, backing this up with assignments which were eminently accomplishable.
When Mrs. Swanson left our class she transferred Shannon and Michelle Gardener, both 2nd graders, both bossy, to Miss Ream’s class. The balance of power in our room shifted suddenly and I found myself pretty much on top of things.
Miss Gourder read to us from delightful books about wild animals and families living on farms, about trains, planes and tugboats, from Mrs. Goose and the biography of George Washington. She talked to me about armor and the history of invention and looked up words for me like battlement and pinnacle.
Once when I was saying I’d like to get a little motor and hook it to my pedal tractor, she said, "I think David would make a good scientist. He’s always ready to try something and see if it would work." When I was 34 I looked up Miss Gourder’s number in the Seattle directory and called her up to tell her that I still loved her.
School’s end was a notable experience. Now I understood why the big kids had been around more at some times than others. We’d moved into a house on Beacon Hill about a year previously and I had a new yard to explore.
Ronny Johnson made me an eight-inch curved knife out of copper with a wooden handle. It wouldn’t cut anything but it looked like something a pirate might carry. I named it Jonny Corkscrew, which was what Mr. Smee in Peter Pan called his cutlass. I was rereading Howard Pyle’s Book of Pirates and still dreamed of flying away with Peter and Wendy to NeverNeverland.
I had to make a very difficult decision that summer. Several months previous I’d met Eddie, husband of Ruth’s Niece Lyla. He and I had a long and fascinating discussion about flintlocks, Indians, pirates and sailing ships. Eddie invited me to visit him on Bainbridge Island where he and Lyla and their several kids lived. This was a short ferry ride or a rather long car trip from South Seattle. The opportunity came when the Johnson's’planned a Sunday visit to Eddie and Lyla’s but the Safeway Picnic was on the same day! I agonized most of the evening over which choice to make and at last opted for the visit.
I was very glad that I did. Eddie had made me a powderhorn and buckskin shot pouch with .3006 rifle slugs in the pouch to give it weight and authenticity. Seeing me with my copper knife stuck in my belt, he and one of his sons made me a fringed sheath out of soft boot leather. Eddie carried me on his back all over a park near their home. He told me a story about an early French fur trapper in this region, Pierre LaPorte. Legend had it that he’d disappeared suddenly and left behind some kind of treasure which still lay hidden nearby. We drank homemade rootbeer and examined a rotting sailboat hull, which had been lying on the beach for many years.
Returning to the house, Eddie let me drive his tractor, going at a walking pace with someone strolling alongside to tell me where to steer. The Johnsons filmed the event in case anyone should doubt that I’d driven.
Eddie had originally promised to build me a real musket. He didn’t but about a year later he bought me a replica flintlock pistol which using the explosive power of a paper cap, fired a .32 caliber plastic hollow-back bullet a distance of about 50 feet. I still have it.
Toward the summer’s end I learned to swim to a small degree. Pam Kenny, one of the older girls in our school had a 40-foot in ground pool in her back yard. Her parents invited the other blind students over for lessons and a swimming instructor, Mrs. Armstrong was hired. I could dogpaddle in three lessons.
Second Grade began in a flush of beautiful weather. Miss Gourder reread Mrs. Goose for us; this was a series of stories about the wacky adventures of a lady goose who lived in a sweet little house with flowers by the porch and a bathtub hanging on the wall. Chris Gray had progressed to 3rd Grade as had Pandy, Bonny and Mary Jane. We now had Shelly Heck, Cheryl Nelson, Debby Brewer and Tommy Robertson in 1st Grade, Marty, Karen and myself in second.
Cheryl and I had a very chaste love affair for a while, which consisted mainly of the two of us getting together on the boy’s porch and jumping about in some haphazard manner we referred to as dancing. Cheryl left us about mid year to attend The State School For The Blind and by Valentine’sday I had a crush on Debby Brewer. Why I’m not sure. I don’t believe she hardly ever spoke to me but my niece was also named Debby and I thought they were both sweet girls. Perhaps I liked the name.
In October a boy named John Zimmerman joined us from Coe School where he’d begun Second Grade using large print. John’s eyes had worsened though and it was decided he needed Braille. Marty and I had started the year as pals pretty much and we harassed John somewhat when he first arrived. John had a big mouth and was always setting himself above everyone else. He had a wonderful imagination though and generally knew how to make people like him. Once when John was complaining to a teacher about a boy who’d been bothering us she asked for a description then, not getting much out of John she said "Just a regular-looking boy right? Two eyes, one nose, two legs, two arms."
Sounding very serious John said, "No, he only had one arm." There were no amputees at our school.
"Well," the teacher cracked up "we should be able to pick him right out!"
In no time John and I were best School Friends. Jimmy Magnus was still my best friend anywhere but John and I were inseparable in class or out. We were like pint-sized Mafiosi, hogging all of the good jobs and most of the show and tell time. The best jobs were Chairman, Messenger and Messenger’s Helper. The chairman got to ring the little bell when students got too noisy in our before and after class circles. He or she also got to hand out the other jobs. The messenger got to go to the office, usually to deliver bank money, which meant time out of class and a chance to lollygag along the way. The messenger’s helper went along to provide moral support I guess, or perhaps to allow new students to participate. John and I felt these jobs suited us especially well and that we should have them more or less permanently.
Here’s how it worked. Say I was Chairman. I’d chosen John as messenger and he’d chosen me for his helper. Next Monday I’d choose John as Chairman and he’d choose me as messenger. Occasionally poor Miss Gourder who thought that everyone was basically good, tried gently to intervene by choosing someone else, usually a Firstgrader, to be Chair. Since most of the First Graders were girls though and girls usually liked me, it wasn’t long before I was chosen again and our regime would be back in power.
In theory everyone had a modest amount of time each week to tell about interesting experiences (or even boring ones) and generally-speaking it was expected that something to show would be included too. John dispensed with the Show part entirely and with the schedule part of the Tell. Each morning he had something "short" to relate which grew a lot longer once he got underway. "And what stories they were!"
One day John had built a submarine out of a garbage can and had taken his mom on a ride under the ocean. Another day he’d built an electric eye so as to know when his dad got home. Another day he’d have gone to a museum where they had real caveman stuff which seemed to resemble the Flintstones TV show much more than anything Archeology has ever provided. Later I detected a number of John’s storylines in cartoon shows such as Felix The Cat and Rocky And Bullwinkle, but the stories got me fixated on making new inventions and wishing to mix up chemicals, just to see what would happen.
One day in the middle of a particularly tall recitation Miss Gourder exploded "Oh John, can’t you ever tell anything besides a pack of lies!?"
John and I would set out each Tuesday morning heading for the Principal’s office and stroll leisurely there and back, discussing the Important matters of the day and oblivious to the fact that school was going on all around us. Afterward we’d repair to the basement where the lavatory was, whether we needed it or not, do whatever was necessary, take a long time washing and drying our hands, maybe take the opportunity to lob a few wet paper towels at each other before trudging slowly back up toward class, stopping to get a good, long drink out of the fountain before making our appearance. At recess we could pee, stick our hands under the faucet, dry on our coats and be out of there in about 20 seconds flat! John told me years later that at age seven, he had the idea that things just stopped happening when he was gone from a place, such as class, if he wasn’t there to experience them, so he never saw much point in hurrying back once he’d left.
Miss Gourder was interested in science and history as well as in animals and nature generally. She brought in the first pussywillows of the season, flowers from her garden and curiosities from the beach. She played the piano that we had in our classroom and taught us songs. She taught us a simplified version of the minuet, at which Cheryl and I became rather good. She got records for us about inventors, Thomas Edison, James Watt, Elias Howe, the Wright brothers, Marconi; and heroes, Columbus, Lewis and Clark, Betsy Ross, Black Jack Persching.
Once I asked what a powder puff was. The term had been used in a poem we’d read about Soft Things. She showed me her compact and the powder puff inside, playfully powdering my nose. When I protested she quickly cleaned me off.
Mainly by bugging the teacher I think, I’d gotten into the Second Grade reading book before the end of First Grade. Marty had gotten there before me. We all had individualized reading lessons. Second Grade had followed logically from First. I was doing fine in my math, just addition and subtraction. I seemed to be reading okay too though my delivery was slow. Anything that had to do with straightforward memorization I ate up with a spoon. Still, we seemed to be missing a lot of stuff I’d overheard the Second graders doing the year previous.
In addition to our regular studies we had French a once-a-week class in which Grades 1-4 met in a large circle. Madame Mizrahe, a lady recently moved from Paris taught us, first individual words such as greetings. Later we worked from lesson plans composed by Madame and Brailled by Mrs. Swanson, days of the week, foods, articles of clothing, parts of the body. The lessons tended to drag because we tended to go at the pace of the slowest members. After nearly four years of this I thought I should know some French but when I studied the subject again in Ninth Grade, my prior experience did not profit me much. I’ve never been very good at foreign languages.
I learned a number of other valuable lessons in second Grade. One was to get in touch with my perceptions of patriotism, loyalty and freedom. Miss Gourder read us the life of George Washington, which I found to be very inspiring. We learned patriotic songs and we’d been saluting the flag since the first day of First Grade. I also read The Horse and His Boy, one Of C. S. Lewis’ Narnian books. Narnia was a land of humans, talking animals and tree spirits, somewhat reminiscent of a very Jolly Old England. It was located on the northern border of a very evil empire, probably meant to represent the Persian or Turkish Hegemonies.
The story was of Shasta, a boy rescued by a bad-tempered fisherman who lived in the dreary Calermaine Empire. Hearing that he is about to be sold to a nobleman who has lodged there for the night, Shasta pours out his troubles to the knight’s war-horse and finds the horse can talk! Bree is from Narnia in the North, where most horses can talk and are seldom ridden except during time of war.
They fall in with a rather self-centered but noble girl, daughter of a lord and her (surprise) talking Filly. Together they journey to the north, have some encounters with Aslan, all-powerful lion whose domain Narnia is, and finally reach the lands of freedom. Shasta learns of his own noble origin.
From then on I thought of freedom as something very precious to be defended when necessary by heroic warriors, making incredible sacrifices. I was now spending a lot of my time imagining I was a soldier fighting in World War II as my father had. I was still apt to slip back into historical times though. I didn’t know much about the military. Dad wouldn’t talk about it much. I talked with Jimmy, Ron Johnson, Mark Smithson and gleaned the amount of army and Navy lore common to boys at that time.
Ron Lawson was always kind to me. I gather he wasn’t particularly nice to Chris. Mom talked about that a lot in front of Chris, which tended to fuel Chris’s own hostility. I’m not sure why Mom didn’t like Ron initially. He had Feminine hands according to her and he followed her into her bedroom when she was going to get the baby. This offended her. Other than that, I’m not sure. One day Ron gave me a boxful of guns a collection that he’d been gathering since he was my age or less. There were several of the sorts of guns I had played with before, but many I'd never encountered. There were two army .45 replicas; one Ron had built from a kit. There was a double-barreled Revolutionary War Era flintlock pistol, a Colt .44 cap and ball revolver, a single-shot derringer, a gun with a compass in the handle, one with changeable barrels. Twenty-three pistols in all!
For Christmas Ron gave me a cedar toychest with western scenes painted on it and a padlock. He handed me the keys and said, "Your Christmas present is inside." I got the chest open and there was a capfiring Thompson submachinegun inside, suitably wrapped of course. (Quite noisy.)
It wasn’t long before Mom was saying that Ron had given me a lockable box so I could lord it over Chris. To my knowledge I didn’t do that but it wasn’t as if I’d never done anything of that kind. Shortly thereafter, Mom found an urgent and immediate need for my padlock, which was never replaced.
That Christmas I also got a sleeping bag, which actually dwarfed the walky-talky set I’d asked Santa to bring. They turned out to be just tin can telephones with wire between dressed up to look like army field phones. I also got a crystal set radio with which I had hours of fun, the plug in my ear, the grounding clip hooked to a metal component of our wallphone.
Mom was very concerned about Chris being left out of things. Chris was very insecure but she was so combative sometimes that it was difficult for people to sympathize with her. I wasn’t supposed to make a big deal about being the eldest or to call her Little Sister. Since the time I started school, we had the same bedtime. If there was a conflict over a TV show, Mom tended to defer to Chris. (I realize that Chris was dealing with a lot of issues too. She was trying to work though a lot of problems which came to us along with her and which she did not make.) Still, it was easy for me to get into trouble over things I didn’t know were wrong. An example is a time when Chris had a fight with a neighborhood girl. A bit later, the other girl said hello to me. I answered civilly. Next thing I knew I was in Mom’s bedroom, being screamed at for not being loyal. I hadn’t know that word and said so. "You’ll sure learn in one hell of a hurry what loyal is!" Mother said. The lesson took. After that I mixed in when anyone got rough with Chris and she did the same for me. We’ve had our differences over the years, though none recently, but I’ll still mop the deck with somebody who hurts my sister.
Two events happened in Second Grade which were in each their own way, world encompassing. The first was the Seattle World Fair, entitled Century Twenty-one. It opened in May of ’62. We’d first heard about it a year previously from our Principal, Mr. Ryan in one of our infrequent sit-on-the-lunch room floor school assemblies. Off and on in the months that followed, we got news reports and wild rumors concerning the things we’d see at The Fair. We brought addresses of out-of-town relatives to school so we could write them letters and invite them to come to Seattle. I’ll have a lot more to say about Century Twenty-one in the next chapter.
The other major event to my way of thinking and awaited nearly as long, was the flight of John Glenn in late February. I’d heard about the other two American Manned launches and at first didn’t know what was so special about this one. I didn’t even know the difference between an orbital or suborbital flight, (circling the planet at orbital speed as opposed to an up and down or more likely, up over and down trajectory like a missile or an artillery shell.) The flights of Alan Shepherd and Gus Grisholm were of the suborbital variety. John Glenn of course, made three complete circuits of the earth.
The flight of John Glenn revised my notion of spacecraft. Mark Smithson had been reading a book on UFOs, which everybody called flying saucers in those days. Saucer-shaped craft had been spotted by a pilot near the Mount Rainier in Washington State back in 1947. Mark gave me a standard description of what a flying saucer TV style looked like, I.E. a disc with a dome on top and some sort of drive unit underneath. I’d been taking imaginary flights in my own flying saucer for some time when Col. Glenn made his three orbits. I assumed he would be flying some sort of saucer as well. We blind kids were gathered up near the nurse’s office with the sighted kindergarten and First Grade to watch the reentry and splashdown phase of the space mission. John Glenn remarked "That was a real fireball" when radio contact had been restored with his capsule after his fiery entry into the atmosphere. I thought he was saying that his craft was spherical and didn’t realize he referred to the superhot flare of incandescent gases caused by his ship’s passage through the thin upper atmosphere. It was q while yet before I understood what a real spacecraft looked like.
In our classroom we had a wooden erector set called Screw Blocks. These included several lengths of boards, about one-by-two, smoothed and varnished, with holes drilled through the ends and at other points. There were also square and oblong blocks with holes drilled in two different directions so we could build up three-dimensional structures using boards and blocks with wooden nuts and bolts. I’d once earned an accolade from Mrs. Swansonby building a cannon so students who’d never seen a cannon could feel what one looked like.
The screwblocks were for occupying free time when studies were finished or for indoor, rainyday recess. We’d recently been building pirate ships. Now we were building Friendship Seven.
The flight of John Glenn was notable, at least to me, in another way, for on this day a process, which had been developing since the first week of First Grade, finally hit a crisis point. Though I’d been doing quite well socially, at school, the time spent getting to and from school had been often quite unpleasant. Besides the kids in our cab who were of about my age, there were also three students who were in Grades Four, Seven and Nine. Gordon Dewittey the son of a minister had been harassing me since we’d first met. I don’t know why he did this. He didn’t seem to pick on the other kids so much, but it seemed every chance he got he said or did something ugly to me. I think perhaps he felt some sort of competition from me. I talked back to Gordon when other kids generally did not. I tried to compete with his windy stories about his athletic prowess, bank balance and whatever else Sixth and Seventh Grade boys brag about.
"Shut up you snot mouth," he said to me on one of the first days of our acquaintance. I don’t believe I’d been talking to him and I don’t think I’d ever been spoken to in that manner. One did not say Shut Up in my home. Gordon hit me, shoved me, insulted me constantly, and got the other kids to chant with him about me. He taught everyone in the cab a particular clap intended to indicate how unpopular I was and everyone joined in, even the retarded children, because Gordon was the biggest and most feared kid in the cab. "Alright," he jeered "why don’t you teach all your guys a clap, David?" Forgetting it was Saint Patrick’s day, my Irish mother sent me to school in a red jacket with no green on whatever. Gordon seized the opportunity to pinch me, Hard.
Once during a Ranking Session I tried to join in with the other kids by calling myself names. Gordon just laughed at me the more. I feel shame everytime I think of that but I never tried it again.
Now as the Commentator Paul Harvey says Here is the rest of the story. —Gordon was black. So was Bruce, so was Roseanne. I’d seen one Negro man when I was about four, while riding a city bus with Mom. I noticed a man with chocolate-colored skin sitting next to a white woman. I assumed they were married, which in 1958 would have been less likely than now. If I thought anything else it probably was that the man looked interesting. I liked dark colors and always chose chocolate candy and cookies over lighter kinds. I probably stared. Mom whispered to me urgently that people like that were called Negroes and it was impolite to stare at them.
When I came to school in First Grade, Bruce, who was two years older than me, became my buddy for quite a while. He gave me rides on his back, even taking me off school grounds where we weren’t supposed to go and he was my guest at the school breakfast. I told my mom how much I liked this big kid named Bruce and wondered how I could get a haircut that would feel like his.
One day Mom saw a picture in the paper of some kids at John Hay, (we were always being photoed for some reason or other) and she said "David, do you realize that Bruce Woods is a Negro boy?" I must’ve disliked something in her tone because I returned rather sharply
"No, what’s wrong with that?" Mom said there was nothing wrong. She was just surprised.
Next day I got in the cab and said "Bruce, I found out that you’re a Negro." I don’t know what Bruce responded, possibly nothing at all. Gordon said, "I’m a Negro too." Nothing more than that, merely a matter of simple interest to me.
Roseanne was a couple of years older than Gordon and being a Real Big Girl she naturally enough talked funny and put on a lot of airs. It never occurred to me that she was Negro as well until the day things came to a head. It wouldn’t have mattered in any case. Our driver, Mr. Sopher, corrected Shannon and I for saying things like Cool and Keen, while Gordon and Roseanne got away with that and more. I thought perhaps it was an age thing. Well, perhaps it was.
This had all been going on for about a year and a half when late in February ’62 after watching the flight of Friendship Seven, I got into the cab to go home. I don’t know what it was about that day in particular. I don’t even recall most of what happened. Shannon Hurd had brought a holly leaf from the bush out in front of the school. Holly can be quite lethal and once in a while one kid would threaten another with a thorny leaf. Shannon began by announcing that she had the leaf. Then as squabbles got started, as they always did, she would offer a thorn or two to the favored combatant. I even got one. Fights escalated. Insults flew. Somebody said something to me and I said something back. Pandy Pierce who was very aggressive anyway and very volatile, took offense at what I’d said, thinking it aimed at her, and replied nastily. "I wasn’t talking to you, you pignosed nigger" is what I shouted back at Pandy. Gordon hadn’t been involved up to this moment, nor had Bruce or Roseanne. I don’t know why I said what I did. I’d doubtless heard the word Nigger before and likely knew what it meant but it seemed like just a nasty insult. I didn’t know that many at seven. Why I should call Pandy a Nigger and a pignosed one at that may have had something to do with my subconscious, but I’d never talked that way to anyone before. It seemed purely the inspiration of a very angry moment.
Next thing I knew Gordon had grabbed the holly leaf from Shannon and was yelling at me while scratching my hands and face. The fight settled down once I’d apologized to Gordon and to Roseanne. Gordon had demanded I do so and he had every right to. Tommy Robertson, who was quite mouthy, was also apologizing to everyone, though I don’t remember what he’d done. The cab ride ended amicably enough.
I was still bubbling over about John Glenn when I got home and Mom had been watching too. My new talking book machine had also arrived that day and Mom was playing a music record on it. It had speed 16-2/3 as well as the usual long-playing speed of 33-1/3.
Leaning over to show me the record player, Mom looked at my cheek and neck and said, "What are these scratches?" I told her I’d had a fight with Gordon. It wasn’t as if this was the first time and nobody’d done anything before, but I guess visual evidence made the difference. Mom called Gordon’s mother. Gordon had evidently been sufficiently upset by the incident that he’d also told his mother what I’d done.
There followed a quarter hour or so with me standing in front of Mom’s chair, her sitting, smoking, while I was grilled as to whether I’d called Gordon a bad name. I said several times that I had not. Under sustained bombardment I finally confessed that I’d said the word but to Pandy, not to Gordon. In her doctrinaire fashion Mom said that was ridiculous. There would be no reason to call Pandy such a thing so therefore I’d said it to Gordon. She sent me to my room T.Y.F.G.H.!! I understood that though I hadn’t intended to insult Gordon I’d done a hurtful thing and had been very wrong.
Father did get home presently and talked things over with me. He said, "I’m not going to spank you this time, but I don’t ever want to hear about you calling another person a name like that again." Dad said I should tell Gordon that I was sorry. I told him I already had. Mom told me I should avoid talking to Gordon so there would be no more trouble. I did so.
After two or three days of me not addressing a single word to Gordon he asked me if somebody had told me I shouldn’t talk to him anymore. I said sheepishly that my parents thought that after what I’d said the other day I shouldn’t speak to him. Gordon said he wasn’t mad at me any more. I told him very sincerely that I was sorry for what I’d done. He patted me and said we were going to be good buddies now. I think we were.
Gordon told me quite candidly that he’d gotten spanked for what he’d done to me and I knew his dad used a belt. (Mine didn’t need to.) I imagine that he also got a considerable talking-to, possibly on the topic of responsibility, because things in our cab changed a good deal, just about overnight.
Gordon must have been taking Seventh-Grade Civics at the time because he organized us all into a parliamentary group, which elected officers by placing hands on the front seat’s backrest to be counted. We asked permission of the Chairman or the President, (elected weekly) when we wished to talk. Gordon gave half a stick of Juicyfruit gum to everybody a couple times a week just because, and extra gum for improvements in behavior or if the group felt someone was deserving of a reward for some particular reason. He made it all fun too. Our sedan cab had invariably been deafening inside once eight or more kids of varying sizes had been packed in. Fights were common, Screaming, arguing, bickering incessant. Gordon made that go away!
If things were cooling down to and from school, they were heating up in the classroom and on the playground. Marty and I were doing a lot of fighting again. Probably that had to do with John and I excluding Marty from our fun. John used to egg us on sometimes so he’d have a fight to watch. Mom got wind that Marty and I were having trouble between us and ordered me not to play with him anymore. She told me further to go to the principal’s office and report Marty if he aggressed against me which he did sometimes. Miss Gourder, trying to handle the situation herself and sure everyone could be friends, didn’t want me to go the principal. Mom went to Mr. Ryan herself, making threats and screamed at me, pulling my hair, because I’d obeyed the teacher instead of her. After one fairly minor scuffle, Miss Gourder allowed me to go to the principal’s office, so honor was finally satisfied all around.
When we were about to break for Easter vacation, Miss Gourder presented each of us with a very generous chocolate bunny, then asked Marty and I to come up and join her on the piano bench which was her place during our day’s end circles. She said "You are two very nice boys and I love you both. Now I want you to wish each other as old friends, a happy Easter vacation." Marty and I wished each other well through clenched teeth and no, we didn’t become pals just then, but a couple of weeks before school ended we were constantly together, even peeing in the same urinal and it’s hard for young boys to get much chummier than That! I don’t recall though, that my friendship with John suffered because of it.
In spite of some hard things I’ve said, I was very privileged to know both Mrs. Swanson and Miss Gourder. They were both remarkable women, each in her own way. It’s hard to say which of them taught me the most. I’d needed some of Mrs. Swanson’s hardening and now, nearing 3rd Grade I needed Miss Gourder’s gentle influences. Hard, confusing times were on the horizon, some events and processes I don’t like to think about. Today I hope that I’m strong as well as gentle. It’s really difficult to be one without the other. I think women generally understand this better than most men.
In Second Grade I was still being taken for walks by older girls, meaning girls who were Ten or Eleven. Now we were travelling to Neverneverland or to Sleeping Beauty’s castle or Red Riding Hood’s wood. When my two companions and I came upon a sleeping princess, I was required to kiss her awake and there always seemed to be two princesses lost in dreamland. I carried a stick with which to fence with and drive off pirates, robbers, giants and wolves. It was like being with Jimmy. I must’ve known that we never truly left the playground, but for a short space of time I felt that we really were in whatever magical land we’d chosen for that day’s adventure. Miss Gourder listened patiently to my stories while at home they were denigrated as Dumb Make-believe.
Toward spring we heard that Dad was going on day shift and would be with us in the evenings now. This was exciting news. My perception of my dad had recently changed in a somewhat subtle but mysterious way. I’d always seen my mother in the role of companion and protector, especially after my accident. I tended to seek her out in preference to any other adult when I had a problem or question. I liked Dad well enough and wasn’t afraid of him, but Mom knew how the house was supposed to be run and what the rules were. Change tended to unsettle me.
I don’t know why I remember, but it was on a Saturday morning. I was laying in the top bunk of our maple bedroom set, with Chris in the bed below me, when it occurred to me in a flash that I really liked my Dad. This sounds rather silly I suppose but the memory is very clear and the event was a sort of demarcation in my thinking about things and people. Dad and I had always gone to the barbershop together. I didn’t even like Mom getting near to the barber’s. That was male territory. I’d known that instinctively since I was three. Dad and I had made pilgrimages to the dump together to sacrifice to the god Planned Obsolescence. Sometimes we took walks, usually short ones. We watched TV together, but otherwise, Dad and I didn’t do all that much together. Now I was spending more time talking with Dad, asking him questions, finding out what he did when he was my age. I don’t know if Mom reacted to this change in the family dynamics or if some things that happened soon after were merely coincidental, but the home was in flux.
My niece, Debby was born in July after my First Grade year. She was pulling herself up on her playpen netting by Halloween and running through the house by New Year. She was a greatly loved baby and we spoiled her rotten!
Deb. was also accident-prone. One day she managed to drink fingernail polish remover, which sent us to the Emergency Room. Another time she got ahold of the oven brush and got caustic cleaner on her face. Still another time she climbed up on a chairback, fell and drove two newly emerged front teeth back up into the gum. She overcame every barrier we erected against her, but somehow survived anyway.
Now Mom’s suspicions about Ron Lawson were beginning to be vindicated. One day in our livingroom, while Uncle Tick was visiting, Lois wanted to see a magazine page Ron was reading. She reached over to pull the magazine a bit closer. Vexed at being disturbed, Ron bit her hand. Dad and Uncle Tick both jumped to their feet; happy to clean Ron’s clock for him, but Lois slapped her husband, defusing the situation for the moment.
A few weeks later, on a visit with Mom and just Deb. along, Lois passed out in our livingroom. Mom and she talked at length and it came out that Ron had recently poured scalding coffee on Lois’s head for saying something he objected to about a friend of his. Ron had evidently been abusing her in other ways as well.
Lois initiated divorce proceedings and she and Deb. moved in with us and were in our home for most of a year. Chris and I moved with our bunkbed into Mom and Dad’s room, while Lois and Deb. had our room. Lois got a car and a job as a clerk at Boeing. That put Chris and I into the three-parent thing again, but we got to see more of Debby.
One afternoon toward the end of Second Grade, I came home in the cab as usual. It must’ve been hot and I’d been sweating, never too difficult on a plastic seat with five other kids. My pants were damp and Mom asked me playfully why this was so. I said I guessed I’d sweated. Mom said, still playfully, that I’d wet my pants and needed to have a diaper on. There were baby things all over the place and Lois who was also on hand said, "Okay, here’s a diaper," and tossed one to Mom.
Mom started wrestling with me, putting the diaper on over my jeans and tying it in place. I tore it off and threw the diaper. The game was over soon enough, but the incident stuck in my craw. I brought the incident up in conversation a couple days later and let my mom know she hadn’t really put a diaper on me. She said she had. I told her I had my pants on, so what she did hadn’t counted. She said she could easily have taken my pants off if she’d wanted to. I asked her why she hadn’t then. She said she didn’t want me to start crying. (We recall that I was "weepy’.)
Then Mom said "Do you want me to put a diaper on you?" I said no. In Chapter 1 I mentioned a similar incident, basically a joke carried too far. The topic came up rather a lot. If a diaper were lying on the end of my bed because Lois had left it there, Mom would say it was probably for me to use. If I put on a bandana like an Indian breechclout, (over my street clothes,) Mom asked if I wanted her to put a diaper on me. Humor often comes out of pain. This is almost a platitude. Mom had at least one painful experience in this particular area herself when she was about Eight. I was about that age when I first heard about it. Perhaps this sheds some light on her rather peculiar behavior.
Mom was living with her half brothers and sisters, Grandpa Armstrong and at least one baby. Her sister Margaret as eldest female functioned in somewhat of a mother role. Mom suffered then as later, with what she termed weak kidneys and needed frequently to leave class rather suddenly in order to urinate.
One day the teacher failed to see Mom’s waving hand as she attempted to be excused. Mom wet herself and it ran down the aisle of the classroom. Mom came home in disgrace and I don’t know if anything happened immediately.
Next morning, Aunt Margaret gave Mom her bath as usual, in a galvanized tub in the middle of the kitchen floor, with water heated on the stove. After she was bathed, Margaret laid Mom up on the table and put one of the toddler’s linen diapers on her. She then called the household together and everyone shamed Mom, saying she was a baby for wetting her pants and needing to wear a diaper. Margaret then put Mom’s underpants over the diaper then made her get dressed and go to school.
Mom said she tried to stay by herself at recess, terrified that someone might see up her dress or somehow detect what she had on. Eventually though she couldn’t wait any longer to go to the bathroom. In the lavatory she tried to unpin the diaper but couldn’t manage and she wet it. In desperation Mom sent a girl to find the teacher who took in the situation, unpinned Mom and discarded the diaper. She sent Mom with a note to Aunt Margaret. Mom never found out exactly what was in that note but it evidently let Aunt Margaret know what the teacher thought of anyone who would do such a thing to a child. When Mom was grown, Margaret apologized to her for this incident, saying she’d always been ashamed of herself for doing it.
Mom told Chris and I following one repetition of the story, that she would never do such a thing to a child of hers. But still, the experience, even if only in jest, kept circling back to revisit me.
I don’t think this teasing happened so much with Chris and Lois has never mentioned it. For most mothers it’s hard to see kids growing up. Though Mom was always talking about how she had to push me to be more independent, this usually had to do with things like swimming or walking barefoot in the summer or turning summersaults on the lawn. It seldom extended to matters of personal freedom or age-related privilege. Perhaps for all of her pushing and coaching she perceived that I’d grow up and away too fast, becoming too much like Normal Boys. I don’t know.
It’s true that children or for that matter, adults don’t grow up at a uniform rate or always up or forward. Everyone’s had the experience of feeling very grown up, and then have something happen, which makes you feel suddenly childish and unprepared again. I’ll likely never know the answer to the riddle. Mom would not be likely to remember events such as these.