One Day After School 8.
One of the unexpected advantages of having books arrive in the mail was that two or more sets of records often arrived in the same case. Sometimes the books were related in some way. Sometimes not. When I requested The Last Battle, which concludes the Narnian series, in the same way Revelations concludes The Bible, It came in a container with another book which though devoid of religious pretenses, was nevertheless full of new kinds of imaginings for me. This was Stowaway to the Mushroom Planet, the middle installment of a three-book series written by Eleanor Cameron for her son, who was interested in space flight. The story was somewhat trivial in terms of plot and theme and much of the science was incorrect but other ideas it contained were quite compelling.
One of these was Hole in Space, later called a time-space warp or wormhole, which instantaneously transported objects, like spaceships, many light years from the point at which they entered the Hole. Only 50,000 miles from earth, such a hole in space existed. On the other side of it a very small planet, only 35 miles across, could easily be reached. This Asteroid harbored a fascinating race of people quite advanced in many respects, in other respects quite simple. Where the physics of the story went awry was in imagining that a planet only 50,000 miles away, (effectively,) was much easier to reach than say the moon. If you can reach a velocity of 25,000 miles per hour, as in this story, it makes little difference whether a planet is 50,000 or a million miles away.
In the first book, Great Flight to The Mushroom Planet, two boys built a spaceship from boat ribs, covered with long sheets of aluminum, painted over with a mysterious compound formulated by an eccentric professor, one of the race of mushroom people. Likewise the ship was fuelled with another miraculous concoction of Professor Tyco Bass. (Not sure about the actual engines, if any.)
The mushroom Planet books also held some cultural hints, such as the clothing worn by men and women alike of the planetoid, simple robes made from the skins of large mushrooms. Why would anyone want to wear leather jackets, jeans and sweatshirts which were so ugly and uncomfortable!? (A bit of a radical question to ask boys of the ‘50s/early ‘60s era.) The reason why this story was important to me though, was that it was the first book length fantasy about space I’d ever read, really my first science fiction book. Inspired by this story, the probes to Venus and Mars and the orbital flights of the Mercury astronauts, my imagination was fired to contemplate building my own rocket, which in turn, set me on a path I’d be following for the next 20 years and more.
I see my tenth year as being very special and a crucial time in my development. So many things happened that year actually, that I’ve decided to treat this chapter and the next as two separate passes through the same time period, visiting different happenings and perceptions. This chapter is perhaps a bit more feminine, a bit more introspective, a bit more future tending. It bridges more easily to later years. Chapter Nine is decidedly more masculine, more physically active, more in touch with the reality of being Nine and feeds more readily into events that occurred directly thereafter. Both chapters have something to say and to combine them in one seems unreasonably complicating. The hurried reader can take in either Chapter Eight or Nine and arrive safely at Ten. Those who wish to fully understand Chapter Twenty-four will profit from reading both.
I left Third Grade a week early in order to go on vacation. It was always my mother’s avowed opinion that schools were happy to excuse students to go on trips since it had been proved that they learned so much more while travelling than sitting in a classroom reading a book. Whether she had interviewed any educators on this point and as to whom may have evaluated this premise, I never learned, nor did I care. I was as happy as anyone to be vacationing once again and Miss Larson didn’t object, merely called me "the little stinker who is leaving us early." This year we were going to Lake Chelan, on the eastern side of the Cascade Mountains.
By now we owned a 16-foot Shasta vacation trailer and the four of us had gotten quite comfortable living in it for days at a time. Lake Chelan is a long, narrow body of water not far from Wenatchee. It’s pretty cold the year around and this was barely June. We swam though and did a bit of fishing, catching several of the bony white fish called Chubs. My only previous success fishing was at a stocked trout farm when I was about four. We stayed in a trailer park that had electrical and water hook-ups as well as public restrooms with showers.
A Canadian girl named Gail, from Princeton British Columbia, befriended me. I forget how me met. We’d walk to the nearby store together sometimes, and sometimes just talked. I told her of my trip up to her country the summer previous. She thought Scottish men were sissified because they wore skirts. She was vacationing with her mother. Gail worked as a checker in a Safeway store in Princeton.
Nighttime was even more interesting than the day because a while after dinner, everyone who wanted to, got together for a sort of chat, sing along and marshmallow roast around a big community campfire. There were a number of couples and some singles as well, from all over.
There was an older couple, Ila and Elis, from Oregon, with whom we corresponded for several years. There were two sisters, June from South and Billie from North Carolina and their husbands. There was a man named Lee Terry, who now worked as a linotype operator for the Seattle Times, but was from Tennessee. He was here with his family but he liked to take me for walks every day, on which we’d talk about pretty much anything. Dad said we’d finally found somebody who liked to talk as much as I did.
Lee and I discussed history, books, movies, the sinking of the Titanic (some more aquatic phobia material for me,) the huge computers of the day, newspaper work and guns. His next door neighbor had a collection of over 400 guns, many of them he’d built himself. They ranged from handguns to a cannon in the back yard. He supposedly had one of Davy Crockett’s rifles. Lee was going to take me to see his neighbor, but though we talked on the phone from time to time over the next year, he and I never met again.
Lee and I talked about the Civil War and the issue of being southern. I’d been discussing the War Between the States with Chris Gray, Mark Smithson and other kids and I’m afraid I tended to talk about Southerners as if they were Germans in World War II. Lee acted (jokingly I think,) as if I’d wounded him by acting surprised when he said he was a Southerner and joke or not I felt embarrassed and sorry, thinking I’d hurt his feelings.
Lee’s little boy was about Three. One day when we were out walking, he said "Daddy, why don’t you buy me a sungawee boat?" Lee asked for several repetitions, after which I said what I thought had been obvious all along.
"He wants a Submarine boat," I told him. Lee had a good laugh over that one.
Some very nice college men let me join their baseball game one evening. While my parents watched, I made seven home runs and brought my team to victory; so very proud of myself because I knew Dad loved baseball. I was itching to get into another game with my ball-playing prowess but when the opportunity presented, a few days later, I began to realize that the previous triumph had been rigged in my behalf.
I saw my first real log cabin near Lake Chelan. I don’t mean the big modern house which just happens to be made out of logs like Chuck Ogden and his family lived in, but a real old time cabin pioneer style. This structure was locked and boarded up but had evidently been kept in tact as a local landmark. I walked over there one day with Mom and Dad and ran my hands over the notched logs and chinking. Literally touching history.
Transitions in the landscape of my ongoing imaginings were always epochal events. For the past year or so I’d been a steady resident of the Middle Ages. I recall very distinctly as we pulled out of our camping spot, heading west, a sudden return to the 17th and 18th Centuries which had so interested me when making my first acquaintance with Howard Pyle. It was a choice but the sort of choice you make when you buy a particular car or decide next years vacation spot, not a trivial choosing like which shirt to wear or which magazine to select in the Dr.’s office. Now my imagery armor was replaced with pistol and cutlass, my dreamscape war-horse with the heaving deck of a fighting schooner.
We spent the second week of our vacation a day or two at a time in several camping and fishing spots in Western Washington, ending up near Hoods Canal and the property of our friends the Alans and Wards. It would have been strange to have thought it then, but little more than a year remained before our lives and even our family as such would change quite significantly.
As I’d heard Miss Gourder reading about George Washington, so, more recently, I’d heard Mrs. Burg reading to us about Abraham Lincoln. That made me think of those Too Old For You books which had been returned unfinished to the library when I was Five. I had also picked up the name of Thomas Jefferson as a great president of the Young Nation, so one morning on our return from our vacation, I asked Mom to call the librarian and ask for the biographies of Presidents Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln. In due course they arrived and I don’t know that I could have spent time more profitably than in reading and rereading these three books.
George Washington was the sketchiest of them, reading time a little over an hour. But I learned that Washington was not only a warrior but also a cultured and well-mannered gentleman. One chapter showed George at Thirteen, copying down rules of etiquette from a borrowed book, on which to base his life and social behavior. Mrs. Burg had lectured us on good manners, which seemed to grow more complex the older one became. A gentleman remains standing when a lady is standing. A gentleman places a chair for a lady. A gentleman rises when greeting someone and offers his hand to another man. A gentleman also may shake a lady’s hand, but only if she offers it.
There was a good deal more to the biography of Abe Lincoln and now I understood the things that had eluded me before. I reread the Gettysburg address many times. I was fascinated by the clash of the Monitor and the Merrimack. I thrilled at the second verse of the Battle Hymn of the Republic.
In the beauty of the Lilies
Christ was born across the sea
With a glory in his bosom
That Transfigures you and me.
As he died to make men holy
Let us "Die" to make men free
While God is marching on!
At some point the second to last line of this verse was rendered
Let us live to make men free
which to me reflected diminished commitment and was at best lukewarm.
I knew how the book was going to end but kept hoping against hope that somehow a mistake had been made and President Lincoln wouldn’t really be shot, but the bullet came. It is tragically ironic that a scant five months would pass before a much more contemporary crash of gunfire would be heard to make history seemingly repeat itself.
For some reason, I’d saved Thomas Jefferson till last. I hoped to learn more about the Lewis and Clark expedition, which had occurred during his presidency and that was about all I knew about Jefferson. Now I found myself reading one of the most fascinating true stories I’d ever encountered. I do not have the author’s name but probably from my nine-year-old’s perspective, owe as much to him or her as to Mr. Jefferson himself. Tom Jefferson’s story was told in a manner not only engaging and highly informative, but managed to convey Tom’s great love and excitement for learning. I’ve mentioned previously how I’d recently come to view education as a waste of time and perhaps even a feminizing process. Most of the historical figures I’d met so far seemed to have gotten along pretty well without much of it. Even the Narnian books seemed to trivialize and poke fun at school. Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn certainly weren’t much in favor of supervised book learning, though always ready to flaunt what little they had!
Young Tom Jefferson was learning several languages, reading Shakespeare, observing nature and playing the violin when not much older than I was. The politics of the day were rendered in fascinating fashion and the practice of Law as well as the profession of statesmanship took on new depth and relevance.
Somewhere between Law training and the House of Burgesses, I resolved to turn over a new leaf, (perhaps an entire Tree!) Miss Larson did not assign more than two homework subjects to 3rd-graders in any given day but I’d seen some of Mrs. Swanson’s students with four or five books under their arms. I resolved to become a four volume per night student. I further resolved when asked if I liked school, to answer not as before with a curt "No!" but with a more temperate "Not particularly, but it’s hard to accomplish much without it." I still did not relish sixteen or seventeen more years of school and it turned out that my academic eyes were a bit bigger than my scholarly stomach, but changes were made.
Another valuable aspect of Jefferson’s biography was the attention paid to the position and problems of the Southern states in the early days of our nation. Our textbooks and stories had so far, been entirely quite jingoistic, being not only pro-North, but entirely exclusive of anything positive about the South. The only good Rebels I’d met on TV were Shirley Temple and Johnny Yuma.
A couple of years ago during the uproar over Sally Hemming, much of it from persons who’d never previously looked at the life of Thomas Jefferson for any reason, I wrote the following verse in somewhat lighthearted defense of the man upon whose life in many ways I’ve patterned my own.
School Days
When early told to go to school
I made this tart reply
"If no one else would educate
Then neither more should I."
I’d heard of Boone and Crockett
And young Abe Lincoln who,
Could cipher to the rule of three
But hardly went to school.
I owe the most to Jefferson
For what I now possess.
I read of Tom in college,
At Law, in Burgesses.
How he studied Science, Literature,
Italian, French and Greek;
I vowed to fetch each day from school
A stack four volumes deep!
Not always did it work that way
But a torch was lit, because,
A lettered person I’ve become.
I’m grateful yet today.
And I owe the most to Jefferson,
No matter whom his mistress was.
A new interest had emerged by summer’s end, as had much else, resulting from a conversation with Ruth Johnson. This had to do with Virginia Dare of the ill-fated Roanoke Colony, the first English baby born in North America. When school started again I rushed to a two-volume Braille book which seemed to belong to our classroom. This was History Stories for Primary Children in which I’d read somewhat, from time to time. I’d seen a story called Baby Virginia, but the title didn’t look interesting. I looked again and found this was the same Virginia! I read the sketchy story over many times then found for good measure a story called The Red Velvet Cloak, about Sir Walter Raleigh and one called Discovering a New World about Columbus.
I was now very much interested in the 15th and sixteenth Centuries as well as the later colonial period in America. The whole process of England, France and Spain coming out of the Middle Ages and the eventual establishment of new nations on the American Continents held endless fascination and vicarious adventure for me.
This year Marty and I had Reading and Washington State History with Mrs. McMahon, a lady in her sixties, who seemed to recall a great deal of the local history. She was a kind and soft-spoken lady, tolerant of a certain amount of goofing off, but able to keep order and command effort. She laced our lessons with homey reminiscences of her girlhood or things her mother had done. She had an amusing way of describing women’s dresses and underclothes in the context of pioneer life or the Suffragette Movement. She told us about Amelia Bloomer and embarrassed the boys by using words like panties and underskirt!
She gave us a good chewing out once though because in a patriotic song we had been rehearsing for an upcoming musical presentation, there was the line
Girdle with virtue the armor of might.
I’d been arguing that I shouldn’t have to sing in the production at all because it was, I claimed, "Making a spectacle of yourself in public." At the first mention of this line of the song, a bunch of boys started snickering about girdles. Our teacher lectured us about how a perfectly good word, meaning merely to wrap around, could be taken and made into something vulgar. It’s impossible for me to think about girdles without hearing Mrs. McMahon.
Our Social Studies class began with an introductory chapter about the Middle Ages, culminating in the voyages of Columbus. Then before we knew it we were studying about Captain Gray of the U.S. and Captain Vancouver of Great Britain, both explorers of the Northwest Waters in the late 1700s. Next we studied the Lewis and Clark expedition and thence on to the northwest Natives and the settling of Washington State, originally of course, part of the Oregon Territory. The second half of the year would be devoted to Seattle history beginning with the Denny Party and Asa Mercer. We’d progress through the Great Seattle fire and the Alaska gold rush for which Seattle was a major staging ground and arrive in due course at present day lumbering, fishing, aluminum refining and aircraft manufacturing.
In reading Class I was still somewhat aft of mid ships. Tearful hours of haranguing at home and public indignity at school during the previous year had taken effect though and I was improving steadily. Contact Classes were something to which I now looked forward. Linda Leake (pronounced Lake, but Mrs. McMahon said it Leak,) was in our class again as were a number of boys I meet off and on up through college. Fourth Grade was shaping up to be a more interesting time I thought than third. There were many things I was looking forward to learning.
One afternoon when I’d gotten home from school and finding myself alone, I tried on my mother’s underpants. Having given this warning and since this is if not a first note, at least an early chord in a theme which would play with variations later, I have revealed the nature of the danger before embarking upon the next seven paragraphs.
Dp#1. I’ve given it a great deal of thought and am reasonably sure that the Event took place in the early part of the school year, probably in September. There may not have been anything new about the impulse but new circumstances may have helped furnish the opportunity. I was by myself a bit more often now than before, for perhaps an hour or so in the afternoon. (Certainly not every day but perhaps once or twice a week.) I’d been by myself for short periods from time to time, at least since Second Grade. This wasn’t disturbing at all to me. Merely an opportunity to do a bit of extra talking book reading, (after homework was finished of course.)
DP#2. It seems that Mom was now bowling on an afternoon women’s league. Chris who was now in Kindergarten and who got home long before I was back from school, was picked up for school on bowling days and brought to childcare at the alley.
DP#3. It also seems that I’d been helping Mom with the laundry in small ways. I’d take things for her and throw them in the laundry hamper or in the washing machine out on the back porch. It seemed to be a paradigm in our household that female persons could not get dressed or undressed without leaving one of more items on the bedroom or bathroom floor, bed, dresser, bathtub, hamper or towel bar. Mom seemed to be changing clothes rather rapidly some days, perhaps in order to meet her afternoon obligations. She seems to have been leaving stuff in the bathroom quite a lot, as in the incident I’m about to describe.
DP#4. To complete the picture, or to the extent I can, I’ll mention that I think I’d been lately fantasizing a bit about Gail Forthoffer next door, Robby’s older sister. I liked Gail very much and admired her too but I found myself imagining her getting dressed and undressed. I wasn’t thinking so much about her body but how she would move putting on or removing this or that item, how the clothes would move, what it would be like to be able to observe someone like Gail, as if through a magic mirror or closed-circuit TV. (Yes I suppose, voyeurism in a blind nine-year-old.) These are the trends I can identify which led up to this point. What came next may simply have been the first good opportunity to take the next step.
DP#5. I was in the bathroom and I think Mom had said she was going to the store. I wasn’t sure if she’d left yet. The clothes hamper was right next to the toilet and I noticed a pair of Mom’s quite plain, nylon underpants lying atop it. This wasn’t a first occurrence but I doubt it had happened when I was alone in the house. I think also the occurrence in Lois’s room when I was four resurfaced to renew the curiosity I had about women’s underwear.
DP#6. I called for Mom to ascertain if she’d left yet and receiving no answer, quickly slipped off my shoes, pants and shorts and tried on the briefs. They were of course, ridiculously large and the incident lasted probably a few seconds. It wouldn’t have been all that notable if it had been a unique occurrence but the opportunity presented a number of other times and I was trying on feminine underwear every few days or so. They weren’t always Mom’s. Sometimes they were my little sister’s which were cotton. (There was only a difference of a few pounds in our weights.) It wasn’t all about the slipperiness of the nylon pants Mom wore, not entirely. When I had the measles, right after Christmas that year and was confined to bed, Mom needed to leave for an hour or two sometimes because she’s been kept in all of the previous week with Chris who was suffering from the same malady. During my alone times I wore a pair of panties rescued from the ragbag under my bathrobe and on trips to the bathroom, pretended I was a girl urinating. I had no idea why I was doing this. At school and elsewhere I acted very much like a nine-year-old boy. I’m fairly sure nobody else knew about my activity. I had a dream one night that Mom found out and called me by a girl’s name, but was okay with what I was doing.
DP#7. There was one incident that was most likely coincidental, nevertheless, disquieting. Mother referred to my shorts as panties; a term always reserved in our house for feminine underpants. I objected that I didn’t wear panties. Mother said that I wore exactly the same kind of underwear as my sister, which was nonsense. The weight of the material, the thickness of the waist and leg bands all were different as well as the construction. Chris began chanting "David wears panties!" I yelled some more and Mom told Chris rather disgustedly that she was making her brother upset and she should stop.
Okay, we’re out of the woods, save to say that things relating to maleness and femaleness must have been giving me difficulty. I was in no particular doubt as to what I was. Sometimes I was called a sissy and I realized that some people didn’t think of me as very big, strong, tough, etc. Chris was quite active and quite the tomboy. Dad said a number of times that she and I had the wrong plumbing. I intentionally I think, misunderstood his meaning, thinking he referred to insides generally or loosely, temperament. Things were also changing elsewhere. The dynamics in the cab, which took us to and from school, had altered once more.
A girl named Anne Grant had joined the blind program toward the end of my Third Grade year. Her family had just completed a trip around the world. Anne seemed the typical rich girl; rather arrogant, often condescending, generally assuming she knew and could accomplish more than anyone else. When she arrived at John Hay, Anne was in Fourth Grade, which was appropriate for her age. She was also Five-Six and Weighed 140 pounds. She shared this information freely as the rest of us did our own dimensions.
Mrs. Swanson, who was often accused of favoring students from wealthy families, tutored Anne over the summer and saw to it that she skipped to Sixth Grade.
Now Anne was in my taxi, as was Shannon, and the two girls were best friends from the beginning. During the years I knew Shannon, she tended to crave very close female companionship and tended to exclude others of both sexes when with her special friend. First it was Pandy. Now it was Anne. Later it would be Pandy again. Shannon and Anne sang a good deal and though I hated to admit it, they sounded wonderful together. Anne had a clear, soprano voice and Shannon sang a very credible alto. They did a lot of Peter, Paul and Mary stuff, some gospel tunes, some other contemporary folk selections. I loved listening to them, but to say so would be too much like being Nice.
Anne and Shannon also took turns reading aloud from Braille books. I first heard of the Black Stallion by Walter Farley riding home in the cab. Anne said books like that would be beyond my reading comprehension and suggested a series of books by Carolyn Hayward of which I’d wearied a couple of years before.
I’m sure it was Anne’s superior attitude that rankled me from the beginning, together with Shannon’s puppyish following of everything Anne said. The girls also thought it was funny to spray perfume on me and to put things down my neck. One afternoon I found a bit of apple clear down in my underwear. I think this was all in good fun so far as they were concerned, but I easily became indignant. I rallied the other two boys in the cab to heckle and harass back as much as we could and the driver would tolerate. One morning I told Mom that Shannon and I were no longer friends and surprised myself somewhat that I was crying as I said it.
Chris Gray spent Friday night and much of Saturday with me the weekend of the ’63 World Series. This was about the only time I had overnight company except for Jim, until I was eleven or twelve. Chris and I started off playing in the sandbox Dad had recently built. Chris had been calling himself Lancelot for a while now, which made me King Arthur, at least by implication. He called me Sire. I was pretty much a purist in historical play but Chris wanted guns and toy cars in our medieval game. We slept on the living room floor, watched one of the Yankee-Dodger games with Dad next day and both remembered the experience as a great time.
For Friday night dinner we went to Busey’s restaurant as usual and Chris and I both ordered the Captain’s Seafood Plate. We were speaking French back and forth, laughing, generally having a good time when a woman previously unknown to us, came over, sat down and announced she was Stanley McGovern’s Grandma. We endeavored to be polite because as hinted previously, her grandson was not the most popular guy at school.
Stan had come from Clinton, Iowa. He’d been around for a while when I was in First Grade and he was in Third. Mrs. Swanson liked him quite a bit because she preferred rough and tumble boys. Stanley was definitely that. I had trouble with him. Stanley returned two years later, still in Third Grade, and picked up pretty much where he’d left off, aggressing against Marty and me.
I don’t think Stanley was particularly vindictive. He just enjoyed playing the heavy and I suspect he felt a good deal left out of things. He was older than the rest of us by two or three years and had never been known for being much of a student.
I don’t know the whole of this story, but Stan was hit by a car at some point. This may have caused his loss of vision and left him with a degree of brain damage as well. In class, Stan had a slow, rather halting way of speaking, sometimes lapsing into a mumble. He was also given to making strange sounds (quite intentionally) which Miss Larson referred to as throat noises or mouth music. Stan drove her Crazy!
Nobody expected much of Stan and he was typically behind the rest of us, even we in the same grade. Privately though we kids wondered who in this situation was the real dummy? When the recess bell rang, Stanley would animate to a remarkable extent. He was full of pranks and TV plots and plans for things he meant to make or build. He and I were actually interested in most of the same things, only we didn’t get along. Chris and I had been dukeing it out with Stanley for most of a year when chance caused us to be in the pathway of his grandmother, who went away not much better informed than she’d arrived.
A few days after Chris’s visit, Stan kicked me in the hip. I don’t remember if it was a kick deliberately aimed in anger or if I’d just gotten in the way of Stan’s Tarzan imitation swinging down off the boy’s porch. It raised a considerable bruise though, which I showed to Mom. She said I’d better tell Miss Larson that if she didn’t do something about That Kid, Mom would go to the juvenile authorities if that’s what it took to make him behave. I relayed this message to my teacher who decreed that since we couldn’t get along together on the playground, we’d better stay in at recess.
You’ll recall from Chapter Seven how I once wet my pants over extra recess time. Stan and I sat there through morning recess. Afterward Miss Larson asked us if we thought we could get along now. We both said we didn’t know. She said we could try it again at lunch, meaning that fairly roomy period of time at lunch hour after you’d eaten or thrown away most of your lunch.
Marty said, "Just tell her you can, so she stops keeping you in!" I took Marty’s advice but lost lunch break first. Without much to do, Miss Larson having gone to where ever teachers go when their pupils are at play, Stan and I started talking. We talked about Miss Larson mainly. The prospect of putting a mouse in her desk or doing other mean things to her. An amazing thing happened. By the time afternoon recess dragged around, Stan and I found we could get along very well indeed because we were buddies now.
Along with me came Marty and John and Chris for the time being. All of a sudden, Stanley was in the middle of a very tight group of friends. No longer did Stan’s slow, almost drawling manner of speech sound sneaking and sinister to me. Now he sounded tough and refreshingly nonconformist. I resolved to non conform just like him!
Shortly after Bruce and Lois married, they announced they were going to have a baby whom if a boy, would be called Hunter, if a girl, Kelly. All through this fall, Shannon, even when not speaking to me, and other girls were anxious for information about Lois’s pregnancy. One evening shortly after Halloween, Lois went into labor and I think Mom spent a good deal of that evening with her at the hospital. Next morning before I got up, I heard the phone ring and Mom talking with Bruce, saying how sorry she was. I got up and asked if Lois had the baby. "Yes," Mom said, "it died." She said the umbilical cord had wrapped around the baby’s neck and strangled her a half-hour before she was born. Bruce said there would be no body or funeral because the baby had been donated to the University Of Washington Medical School.
I sat stunned through breakfast and after word, as she was brushing and combing my hair as she always did, Mom put her head against mine and started crying. I couldn’t hold back the tears either though I tried. It would be a while yet before I learned it was okay for men to cry. Mom said she wouldn’t make me go to school if I didn’t think I could manage it, but she thought going to school would help take my mind off the baby. I decided to go but couldn’t quite keep the sob out of my voice in the cab or at school. Nobody made fun of me.
I was comforted somewhat that perhaps she would help Drs find out why she had died and perhaps help other babies. I cried in my bed for a number of nights before going to sleep and so did Chris. I heard Lois crying too when she visited.
Sometimes in the months that followed Chris and I would talk about how old the baby would have been if she’d lived. It would be many years before we learned the baby had not died at all, but had been given up for adoption. The story about the umbilical cord and the medical school was but a ruse to keep Mom from demanding a funeral.
Our family’s grief was doubled that November because on Friday, the 22nd, President Kennedy was shot. Where were you when President Kennedy was assassinated? I was likely in class. How soon Miss Larson knew, I couldn’t say. She never told Us!
I was out at recess hanging around a stairwell that led down to a basement storage room. The stairwell marked one boundary between girls’ and boys’ territory and was one of my forts. Some girls started dancing around and chanting "President Kennedy’s dead. They shot him in the head." I thought that was a terrible way to talk about the president so I ran after them and smacked a couple. Even when they said that no, the president really had been shot, I didn’t believe them and had actually forgot about the incident by the time I got in the cab that afternoon.
Anne Grant asked me if I’d heard the bad news and the terrible truth began to sink in, though all the way home I kept hoping against hope that somehow a mistake had been made. When I got home though, Mom had seen the events from Dallas on TV and was still watching the ministrations of the priest. This was, I think, the first time I’d heard any sort of Catholic service described.
We had the day off on Monday and I watched as much of the funeral proceedings as I could stand. It went on and on, and though as Mom pointed out, it was history, it was terribly grim history. I recall Andy Williams singing America, his voice breaking. I listened from my bed to the strains of Hail to the Chief and the 21-gun salute fired every hour on the hour.
A second shot had been felt when a news bulletin announced that Lee Harvey Oswald, Kennedy’s suspected killer, had himself been shot. "Oh dear," Mom said, "Now another man will have to die."
It’s been said many times before of course, but I think that all America felt not only saddened, but deeply betrayed by the assassination. There were rumors that the Russians may have had something to do with it, which many people would have been just too happy to believe. Jack Ruby was sort of a hero to me at age Nine. I made secret plans to raise an outlaw band like Tom Sawyers and go break Jack out of prison.
On Tuesday when we confronted Miss Larson as to why she hadn’t told us about the shooting she said without any trace of apology that that she’d decided we didn’t need to be upset unnecessarily. We had plenty of time to talk it over at home, she said plus a day of mourning on Monday. My sister’s kindergarten class was informed. All of the sighted classes had been told. Mrs. Swanson’s class had managed not to remain in the dark. We seven were possibly the only school kids in Seattle able to understand, who were not told. I felt then and feel now that this was downright discriminatory and entirely inappropriate.
One Saturday every month as long as I could remember, Mom and Dad had been going to the pinochle club which has been described elsewhere. Alternate elder supervision was arranged at such times for Chris and I. In the early days Lois had babysat first me, later the two of us. More recently we’d been having various girls from the neighborhood watch us, notably Jan, Randy Alan’s second eldest sister and Claudia, a neighbor girl of the Alans. Both girls were in their teens, kind, warmhearted people with minimal self-esteem. Both were convinced they were terribly fat, ugly, unpopular, stupid and generally clinging to the planet at all through sheer luck and nothing more. They were in fact well liked, and thoughtful. Anyone should have been proud to have them as daughters, sisters or friends.
Chris was quite disturbed about having our parents gone from the house and she didn’t usually like staying over night at friend’s homes. She usually becme ill about a half-hour before Mom and Dad left and took to her bed. She’d generally get bored with her illness in an hour or so and come out to join us.
I’d watch TV with Jan; Claudia or sometimes-another sitter like Gail next door. We’d talk about what I was going to be when I grew up, books we’d read, events in the news, their trouble with boy friends. "I’m so glad you can’t see me Dave," Jan used to say. "I’m so fat and my hair looks Awful! You’d probably get scared and run off, thinking I was a big, fat monster!" A double-decade later I called Jan, now long married and owner of a beauty shop. I told her
"I called up to give you hell. When you used to baby sit me you were always running yourself down, telling me how fat and ugly you were. But to me, you were beautiful and you’re in a lot of trouble with me for picking on a friend of mine."
Jan laughed and said; "Now I tell people I’m allergic to life and I swell up a lot."
About this time I started hearing about a mysterious matter involving girls. One day, Shannon, Bonny and Maryjane, (all Fifth Graders then), disappeared from class while we boys were remanded to our Math books. The girls were seeing a film and the boys waxed exceeding pissed!
Shannon stayed in at Afternoon recess to tell Miss Larson about the film. When in the cab I tried pumping Shannon about what she’d heard, she said it was personal. Shannon whispered to Anne, who made a knowing noise and said "Very personal."
At the dinner table that evening I told disgustedly about these know-it-all girls who’d watched a stupid film and said it was too personal to discuss. Who’d ever heard of a stupid school film being Personal!?
Mom said girls in Fifth Grade saw films about Hygiene or how to take care of their bodies, which were very personal. You can perhaps imagine some of the wild images this revelation conjured up. I’d rather thought that anyone, boy or girl would already know how to take care of their bodies by age Ten. What had the girls been doing up till this point?
I had at that age not even a hint of how babies were made, let alone things like menstruation or even what would be happening to my own body in another three years, except I knew I’d be getting hair. Mom had told me that God only granted babies to women who were married and not all of them. In those days, such a good job of covering up was done in polite neighborhoods that an out and out lie like that had some chance of staying afloat. It took boarding school to wise me up.
At my sister’s school, the Fifth Grade boys were given milk and doughnuts while the girls watched the boring film. Chris' Fifth-grader friend, Esther, a very chubby girl, was fit to be tied because the boys had gotten treats. A few years ago I wrote a darkly humorous (I think) story called While The Boys Were Having Milk And Doughnuts. It takes place at a school for the blind. When girls are absent from class now and then, a solitary male tags along after to hide in the shadows and learn the school nurse is teaching witchcraft!
One mysterious matter Anne and Shannon would discuss with me was the content of Madeleine L’Engle’s fascinating youth novel, A Wrinkle In Time. This is the story of three young people who travel to distant planets to find the scientist father of two of them. They are guided, assisted and transported to their ultimate destinations by three curious old ladies, via a higher dimension, through a process called Tessering. How this might be accomplished began to use up as much daydreaming time with me as previously had pirate ships and rings to Narnia. Tessering was a frequent topic of conversation with us, as was the Fifth Dimension, which we tended to think of as a place rather than another direction which by definition it is if it can be practically said to exist at all.
The idea of the Fifth Dimension is basically that two locations may be a certain distance apart in normal, observable space, but they may be much closer, even touching in some unseen direction. If two creatures lived on distant points of a map in the folds of a skirt, as was used as illustration in Wrinkle, folding the map or the garment could bring the creatures into contact. It we could find places in which space was already folded, and possibly time as well, we might be able to step from earth to a star many light years away, perhaps centuries in the past or future, without any effort at all.
How though to find or make such a wrinkle in time and space? What I really wanted was the general notion of teleportation which can cover anything from transporting oneself or another, instantaneously through mind power, to copying an object atom by atom, sending the information by laser and rebuilding it, animate or not, at some distant location. It was a general plan to dispense with huge, costly rockets and take an "easier" route to the stars.
I’d recently been hearing about seances and hypnosis and sleep suggestion and I had an idea that the mind might have some applicable hidden powers. Perhaps the human mind could somehow, find its way through the folds of space, perhaps pulling the body along with it. Perhaps the mind could create for itself a highly vivid dream which might turn out to be reality, allowing us to gain direct knowledge of the planets and even converse with the inhabitants thereof. It seemed paramount to learn hypnosis as soon as possible and to discover all I could about ESP. This established in me a strong interest in the human mind, dreams and the envelope of mental abilities, which has been with me ever since.
I started challenging orthodoxy in other ways. Once I had believed in fairies. Now I questioned the Nonexistence of ghosts, mind reading and viewing the future, things generally sneered at in this self-satisfied time, as childish nonsense.
Though I was seeking new pathways to space, I wasn’t ready to relinquish the old ones entirely. I took my next imaginary spaceship ride with Miss Pickerel, a rock-collecting spinster lady who’d arrived back at her farm from a trip, only to find her house full of other people’s belongings and a huge pencil shaped structure in her pasture.
Miss Pickerel climbs the ladder to the top of the rocket, entering through the outer and inner hatches, intent on evicting the trespassers who’ve built this thing on her property. Mistaken briefly for the last crewman expected aboard, she finds herself hurtling into space on her way to Mars.
This story had a bit more science and sound mechanics than did the Mushroom Planet books. It is interesting to me that the first two book length space flight stories I read were both by female authors and involved the stowaway motif, in one case intentional, in the other accidental. The next spaceship novel I read was in Sixth Grade, and involved alien abduction. The theme of unintentional space travel seemed in somewise to parallel the theme of unintentional sex so common in female erotica until quite recently.
As to my own fantasies, they were broadening and though some of them would have sounded ludicrous to any adult, at least they were striving to catch up with the 20th century. I’d recently very much enjoyed reading a story about Thomas Edison in Mrs. McMahon’s class. The idea of setting up a chemistry lab like Young Tom, was a captivating one. I had the idea then that anyone with enough chemicals and sufficient patience to mix and remix would inevitably discover something miraculous. It had worked for Charles Goodyear had it not? After many years of trial and error, he had discovered the secret of vulcanizing rubber, making a gooey, easily-melting tree gum into something from which you could make anything from babypants to truck tires.
I first met Thomas Edison in Miss Gourder’s class when she read us a magazine article about the invention of the phonograph in 1877. Edison was also on our Sing A Song of Inventors record. I’d often heard that his greatest invention was the electric light, but for my money, it was the phonograph. I know that I may sound biased. I’ve lived among sighted people who were trying to use alternatives such as kerosene lamps and candles. I know what a wonderful thing electric lighting is, but consider.
The electric light bulb Edison developed, a carbon filament in a glass bulb, from which oxygen had been removed, was the model that worked best in a long procession of very similar devices. To store high fidelity, reproducable sound on an inanimate piece of foil, wax, glass or plastic on the other hand, was a nearly total departure from perceived possibility at the time. Other attempts had been made to reproduce speech and other complex sounds mechanically, but they were generally based on specialized strings, reeds, strikers or frictional components, so orchestrated to deliver approximations of bird song, animal sounds or a semblance of human speech.
The phonograph could reproduce anything and could do something even the telephone could not, send voices Forward in time. History after 1877 would no longer be voiceless, confined to printed pages and musical scores. If Thomas Jefferson helped shape my ideas about education and to a large extent, my feeling about politics, Thomas Edison inspired my resolve to investigate, to create, to innovate.
My other major dream at this point sounds sillier, but was, I suppose a cathartic way of dealing with President Kennedy’s death, which was still smarting more than a year later. I’d been very touched by the courage Mrs. Kennedy had shown during and after the event of late November 1963. I wished I could somehow reach out to her and perhaps help her in some fashion. I even dreamed she visited our house, though I didn’t know who she was until I heard her crying on and on in our kitchen. (Perhaps a bit of crossover with Lois here.)
One day I was talking with my new friend Stan, who was going on about a short-wave radio he had, on which he could talk with people all over the world. I asked him naturally enough, if he could call Mrs. Kennedy. He said Oh yes, he’d spoken with Mrs. Kennedy a number of times. She was a HAM operator and talked on the radio every night. (Well, Betty Ford was a CBer, with the handle Big Mamma or some such. I wanted to believe Stan, so I did!)
There began a long and fascinating exchange, with me telling Stanley what he should tell or ask Jackie, and he bringing back her responses next day.
I sent the message that we were pirates and wished to get the man who’d killed her husband’s assassin out of jail and help her too. It wasn’t really clear what sort of Help Mrs. Kennedy might want or need, but it appeared that she liked imported candies. One just generally needed to show up and stir around a bit in order to find out to be useful. Mrs. Kennedy invited us to come back east and see her. That would involve our running away from home. I said I wanted to go on our family’s vacation to the Midwest this summer, so Jackie said next summer would be fine too.
As I write this I’m sitting here grinning from ear to ear at the thought of a motley crew of grade schoolers, most of them blind, armed with wooden swords and airguns, showing up on Jackie Kennedy’s front porch! It’s very rich.
In time, (like two years later,) Stanley admitted he’d only been joking about the conversations with Mrs. Kennedy. It turned out his short-wave radio was merely an A.M/F.M. table radio with no transmitter of any kind. But the Hundreds of hours I spent planning the expedition to D.C. then later, when Jackie moved, on to New York City! I played out myriad details of how we’d get there, what we’d bring, what we’d find when we got there. Jackie really should have gotten her HAM license, if only to commend the loyalty of such staunch supporters as we!
Like bananas, talking books often came in bunches. Through some esoteric formula never disclosed to mortals, Mrs. Finceth, the Braille and talking book librarian, would select one name here, another there, and send these persons book batches of often mysterious composition. Some batches were repeats, some uninteresting, or in my opinion, downright silly. Some were golden. One afternoon, toward the end of Fourth Grade, I came home to find three strapped talking book boxes behind Dad’s easy chair, where Mom usually left newly arrived records. This was one of the afternoons Mom and Chris were not home yet.
Kneeling there on the living room floor, I unbuckled each box, reading the Braille label on the first record of each book. One box held Cottage AT Bantry Bay and Francy on the Run, stories about children of the O’Sullivan Family, by a woman named Van Stockam. Another box held Island of the Blue Dolphin, about a Native girl named Karina, who spent 17 years of her life marooned on an Island off the California Coast. The third held The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and the Marvelous Land of Oz by L. Frank Baum.
I’ve described back in Chapter Six, how I first met the wizard and Co. on TV. In succeeding months, Chris continued to ask, "When are we going to watch the Name of the Fuzz on TV again?" It took a while but eventually I figured out she was asking about The Wizard of Oz! It was a tradition with our family for a number of years to watch Wizard each winter or spring. What you watch with your family on TV though, isn’t necessarily what you want to spend your personal time reading while hibernating in your bedroom!
I’d thought myself pretty much at the edge of too old for Wizard and Dorothy and suspected I’d never read the first book. As to the second book, Land of Oz, I had no idea what it might be about, so I gave it a spin to see how it felt. Nearly forty years later I still love the Oz books.
The marvelous Land of Oz begins with Tip, a young boy who lives with Old Maumbi, a very disagreeable woman, who aspires to be a witch. Maumbi makes frequent visits to wizards and sorceresses in order to trade spells and potions, leaving Tip by himself at home. During one such absence, Tip decides to make a wooden man with a pumpkin head, in order to frighten Maumbi.
On her return home, Maumbi brings Jack Pumpkinhead to life, in order to test a newly acquired magical powder. Next she tells Tip she is going to turn him into a marble statue. Since Tip’s future as a yard ornament looks rather bleak, he runs away, taking Jack with him.
There follow a series of funny, fun and maddening adventures, involving a sawhorse, The Scarecrow and Tin Woodsman, a highly magnified, thoroughly educated wogglebug, young feminists, girl soldiers, an animated flying machine called The Gump, Old Maumbi, and Glinda the Good. A very fun read with an unexpected ending. Without giving away too much, I hope, I can say that for reasons associated with the plot, one of the males we’ve met in the story must, at the behest of Glinda, become female. The transformation seemed quite unnecessary to me, also for reasons inherent in the story, but it’s done anyway.
This is certainly the first story I’d ever read in which even by magical means, a person of one sex had become the other. The notion was shocking though fascinating to me. It must’ve shocked a lot of other people too for Baum’s second Oz book was taken off library shelves for quite a while after it’s first appearance. Even today, very few people with whom I speak about Oz know of this particular book.
Having completed the second Oz book, I backtracked and read Wizard. The story was recognizable from the movie but not by any means the same entirely. In the book, Dorothy really goes to Oz while the movie has it turn out to be a dream. In the book, Glinda is Queen of the South. Another woman is the Witch of the North. The movie collapses the two characters into one. The Wizard is a bit more creative in the book, even appearing once as a woman.
Besides the Wizard’s crossdressing episode and the out and out change of sex in Land, I encountered about this time, two other incidents in which boy characters dress as girls. In a less known book called the Secret World of Og, a seven-year-old boy is caught pilfering candy and is coerced by his sisters to play at dress-up with them. In the later Vanstockam book, Young Francy O’Sullivan runs away from a Dublin hospital and has an amazing set of adventures leading him across the Irish countryside and to some isles of the North Sea. On one such island, Francy encounters a boy of Six or Seven, who is wearing a skirt and petticoats. Francy learns that this is because of the Little People who are prone to snatch young boys if they can find them. In order to protect their sons therefore, mothers keep them in dresses until the age of Eight. Both books were by female authors! In the case of the Francy book though, the customs reported were quite authentic and I believe are still practiced in some places.
Though I was trying very hard not to be, it seemed I was now becoming more and more acceptable to teachers and at home as well. I’d gone in less than nine months from being a very poor reader to a nearly excellent one. This started to dawn on me when one summer Saturday morning, the mailman handed me a larger than usual box, containing a Braille volume. It was a shortened version of Howard Pyle’s Robinhood, excerpted but not abridged and replete with the same dense prose of the original. Slightly taken aback, I opened the volume and started Reading! The lines raced by, the language flowed. There was the same warm thrill of excitement I felt while listening to Alexander Scourby’s voice reading the adventures in and out of Sherwood. I had finally learned to read at my interest level.
Soon I was rather flaunting my ability to read Braille. I read to my sister in the back of our station wagon on evening drives, hid a book under my covers at night, sat out in the front yard with a volume on my lap. I’d continue to enjoy the friendly voices of talking book readers for many years. I still read a lot of talking books, now recorded on four-track cassette tapes. Nothing replaces though, the flexibility, independence, quietness, fragrance and evocative mental stimulation of a book with pages. I’d truly learned the love of reading in all the formats available to me and one, who loves to read and does so often, cannot help but be educated.