ME -- SWAMP RAT -- CHAPTER 17

 CHAPTER 17

 I walked out of East Ward Elementary School on Christmas Break December1947. I entered West Whiteland Elementary School (pictured left) when the holiday break ended in January 1948. 

 I might as well have stepped into a black hole. My mind is totally void of any memories of that school. I can’t describe what my classrooms looked like or name my teachers. I don’t know if my teachers were women or men. I don’t remember the subjects taught or who were my classmates (except one). My knowledge of being in that

building and what transpired there for two years is gone. Even the report cards I received have ceased to exist. I don’t know what my marks were, except for the mystery of my First Grade Card at Downingtown that had the periods I didn’t attend East Ward filled in and my promotion on the back.

Here is the sum total of everything I can tell related to West Whiteland School:

I learned to play soccer there, but I don’t actually remember playing.

 I made one friend in my class, Robert Cuellers. I don’t recall him in class, but I remember visiting at his home at least once. He moved to Downingtown the same month we moved back and we went to East Ward together for the latter grades. It may be for this reason I even remember Bobby t all (pictured left).

My bus stop was on Route 30 at the end of our long lane. It was my first experience riding in a school bus. The only trip I actually recall was one coming home from school. We were on the Lincoln Highway not far from my lane. There was a dog struck by a car and it lay on the centerline with its hindquarters crushed, trying to get up. That is the one image connected to that school I wish I had forgot. I had nightmares about it then and have never been able to erase it from my mind.

I recall much about the house and grounds where I lived. Probably because I spent so much alone time there. I don’t know where father hauled the milk, except he kept the schedule he would follow the rest of my childhood. He would leave early on Monday morning, be home briefly on Wednesday and be gone again until Friday night.

This did not make me unhappy. I got more attention from my mother than ever before, after all, she was isolated too. My mother didn’t know how to drive. When dad left it was she and I until he next appeared. The move to Glenloch forced her to quit her job. She had no other occupation than that of housewife and mother.

 She had never been in this position before except for the first year of her marriage and that was in a small apartment with no kid. All the other years of her life my grandmother had run the house and cooked the meals. Keeping house wasn’t a problem. My mother was used to work after the jobs in the mushroom plant as a teen and the two she held while dad was in the South Pacific. It was cooking that challenged her.

It wasn’t one she conquered, at least not for another forty years when her mother died.

Our meals were simple, both because we couldn’t afford a lot and because mom couldn’t cook. If it wasn’t a sandwich, it was out of a can. Lunches and suppers were quite similar. Typical meals were tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwich, hot dogs and beans, just hot dogs on buns, tuna fish salad sandwiches, chicken noodle soup, beef stew, dried-beef gravy over bread or leftovers from Sunday dinner. But she didn’t cook the Sunday meals, she brought the leftovers home from her parent’s.

When my father arrived home on Friday evenings I would have my little suitcase packed and ready. It was over the hill and through the woods to Grandmother’s house we would go. I would spend Friday and Saturday nights at 424 Washington while my parents had their together time. My parents ate out somewhere on Saturdays and on Sunday the whole clan gathered at grandma’s for a big sit down Sunday dinner cooked by my grandmother.

Mom saw little need to cook a big meal for just the two of us

during the week. She was  not a big eater and I was a fussy one, so why bother. She would fix what I liked. We would sit and eat our meager meals at the kitchen table. Superman was often on the radio while we ate. After eating, I would dry the few dishes as mom washed them and then we would go into the living room.

Mother would listen to her radio programs or read, while I played on the floor if it were wintertime. During the months when the days were long with sun I went outside and played to bedtime. Sometimes we played a board game.  On the rare occasions when dad would be home he would choose the radio shows and I usually went up to my playroom to escape him.

Nellie died before the New Year. Using a carton left from Christmas for a coffin, Everett buried her beyond the garden where the backyard turns to tall grass. Helen cried and couldn’t watch the interment. She had grown up with the dog, but it was her daughter who grieved too deep and long. 

Standing at the sink Helen stole glances toward the kitchen table where the girl sat listlessly poking a fork into chocolate cake. She wished to lift Jenny’s spirit, but knew not how. Asking for help with the dishes was hardly a cure for melancholy. She scrubbed them alone at a loss.

Setting plates in a sopping stack upon the side counter, she stared out a kitchen window. She could see across the backyard to the field beyond. The hilltop and the trees along the fencerow were black against a light sky; slim proof winter days were indeed getting longer. The window was steamed up, caught between warm water in the sink and cold evening air. Yesterday’s snow left a bar of soft white upon the outer sill. The storm hit the upper states solid and Everett had called before dinner to say he was stuck up north.

Except from “Ground Dog Day”

Published by Barnes & Noble Read Aloud

Published February 2003

Wilmington, DE

Ann Murphy, Editor

Collected in Currents of the Brandywine and other Creeks

(Note --The excerpt was based on when mom’s dog Nellie died. The real Nellie didn’t die until 1945, before we ever moved to Glenloch, but you bend fiction to the reality that inspired it. “Jenny”, the little girl in the story was based on me. Nellie was buried not at Glenloch, but by my grandfather in the backyard garden at 424 Washington Avenue.)

ME -- SWAMP RAT -- CHAPTER 16

 CHAPTER 16

Lets talk a bit about my dad.

My father’s hero was John Wayne. He never missed a Wayne film and sometimes he took  me with him. I ran into John Wayne on Market Street in Philadelphia once. He was appearing at a premier or promotion of one of his movies. I was walking back to work on my lunch hour just as he stepped out of a limo. I stopped and watched him stride up the sidewalk. He was imposing, tall and broad, with a deep tanned and rugged face. He looked every bit the rough and ready characters he played on the screen. His presence dominated the area. 

My dad (right) bore a physical resemblance to the

actor. Dad wasn’t as tall, but he had the broad shoulders and rugged countenance. He was very handsome in his younger years. He sported a muscular body with defined six-pack abs and large arms. He earned those muscles, molded from building mountain roads in the CCC, working in the steel mill and his World War II service time. He didn’t build them working out in a gym. His hands were hard and rough from heavy use. 

He was disdained by his grandparents for being born, punished for the perceived sins of his mother. They often denigrated him when a child. A mistaken diagnosis of Tuberculosis forced  him from school and landed him in an institution for the contagious.

I wonder how common this type of diagnosis was back in those times when TB was quite a threat. A very similar instance happened to my mother-in-law to be when she was a 17 or 18 years old (pictured at Cottage Green in 1925, my wife’s mother is the one in the center with the turban on her head) She was institutionalized at a sanitarium called Cottage 

Green. I believe Cottage Green was her residence at the Trudeau Sanatorium (formally the Adirondack Cottage Sanitarium) in Saranac Lake, New York.  This was founded in 1885 by Dr. Edward Livingston Trudeau and consisted of a number of cottages for the patients, each with its own name such as Sunshine Cottage AKA as Cooper Cottage or Little Red AKA Jenks Cottage. Cottage Green may have been the Little Green Cottage AKA Reid-Folder Cottage. Like my dad, her TB was discovered to be a false read and she was released. 

My father was sent to one of the many sanatoriums that sprang up in Tucson. Arizona, where it was believe the dry air would help cure the lung of Consumption, as TB was often called in those days. However, at some point, Doctor’s discovered his TB had been a speck of dust on the X-ray plate and released him. He went back home, but he never returned to school. (Right, my dad about the time he dropped out of high school.)

Dad lost his own father while still a teenager and became the soul support of the family earning his wages doing hard labor. He lost his job just before his marriage and was too poor to live with his bride. 

He pleaded with his grandfather, who considered him illegitimate, to rent them a bug-infested apartment. I was taken there after being born, but to rescue me from the bedbugs, mom and dad moved in with mom’s parents. Dad left to fight in a war before any chance for him and I to bond.

 I did not make it easy for him when he came

home. To me he was a stranger, an interloper and he was getting more attention from my mother who I felt belonged to me. Our coexistence was never what it should have been or could have been. I rejected him, feared him and avoided him. Part of this was my resentment and jealousy that he expected to share my mother. Part was the brutish way he often treated me. Added to this was the sense of desertion I felt when he left for the Navy, reinforced by his choice of occupation. after discharge. Our family structure resembled that of a single mother with a part-time boyfriend rather than a cohesive family of father, mother and child. This was not Father Knows Best.

Willis returned from the South Pacific, from Hawaii through the gateway of San Francisco. He took a train  and a bus cross country. Between the two, he bought a bicycle for his son.

When the bus dropped him off, Helen ran to him down the lane and he dropped his duffel at the gate. He swept her up in his arms, swung her about and kissed her hard. 

When he turned to his son he hardly recognized the boy. Frank was a baby when he left, now he was a lad, standing stiffly by in a miniature sailor’s blues. The boy’s hair was long and curly, reaching nearly to his shoulders. He was tall for his age and thin. He blue eyes were large and bright with the same misty quality as his mother.

Frank half-hid behind his mother. When Willis lifted him, he screamed so sudden and loud, his father immediately put him down. 

Willis and Helen walked to the house, he carrying his duffle over one shoulder and pushing a bicycle with the other. Frank trailed behind.

“Now I have to find a job,” said Willis.

“They say you can get your old one back at the mill.”

“No,” he said. “I want something outside where you can breath, something where I can see different places. I thought maybe a salesman, but I’m not good talking with people. And I don’t want something where bosses are watching you all day either. Not sure what that is yet, but I’ll find it.”

Willis looked back at his son. “And we’re going to do a few things together, boy.”

Frank trailed behind with his head down.

Except from “Veteran’s Day” (1970)

Collected in A Decket County Child. (1970)

Does any of this excuse my father’s treatment of me? 

Not really and I fear my dad will look bad in these pages of my childhood. However, my father never abused me physically, never struck me or beat me. He never touched me in any offensive way. He wasn’t much for hugs or pats on the back either. He wounded me many times verbally, embarrassed me in front of others and too often showered attention on other kids more  than he did on me. I am certain I was a great disappointment to him as a son. I didn’t live up to his version of “maleness”.

I never saw or heard my parents fight or argue, except about me. These “discussions” often happened in public places, such as at a pool or amusement park

My dad wanted me to ride the Ferris wheel, for

instance, but I am afraid of heights and didn’t want to. He insisted I swim  and tried to drag me into deep water. I struggled and yelled .My mother said, “Bill, leave the child alone. He’s scared.”

“How’s he gonna get over his fear if you won’t let him,” he said. In the end he said, “Okay, go on, go to your mommy.”

This tug of war played out often at the swimming holes we visited such as Hopewell  Lake (pictured left). Dad was an excellent swimmer, mom not so much. I seldom saw my mother get in the water. I seldom saw my dad get out, unless it was to dive off the board. I loved the water, but I stayed in the shallow end where even if I sat down my head was above the surface. My father thought I should learn to swim. He would swim up behind me underwater and grab me. He would pull or carry me toward the deep water and I would begin screaming.

My mother would yell at him, “Bill, leave the boy alone.”

“It’s time he learnt to swim,” he would say.

“He’s too young,” my mom would claim.

“You’re never too young,” he would reply. Then he would say to me, “I’m gonna throw you off the diving board. You’ll either sink or swim.”

I would scream bloody murder.

“Bill,” my mother would shout.

“Okay, Gertrude, go play in the shallows with the other babies.”

Whenever my dad was peeved with me he called me Gertrude. He didn’t care who heard.

 I don’t hate my father, although I may have at

times during my childhood. I took a different view in later years. I decided my dad’s abrasive approach to child rearing was akin to that man in Johnny Cash’s hit song, “A Boy Named Sue.” His early life was not an easy one. His world was a tough place where only the strong survived. He wanted to make me strong.

My dad changed in his nature as he grew older and I changed in my viewpoint of him. I came to admire him for how he always provided for us no matter what. We had many lean times where we had little, but we always had food, shelter and clothes on our backs. He worked long hours on demanding jobs. He suffered setbacks and injuries, but he never complained. He simply kept on going like the Energizer Bunny. He didn’t stop working until he was 90 and forced to stop. 

 I can’t say he never treated my children the way he treated me and some of his actions were unacceptable and frightened them. Usually he was civil and caring toward his grandchildren, but there were enough issues that he eventually alienated them. My regret is he and I were never able to fully close the chasm between us and there was also a chasm between him and my children as well. In the end I believe he lost more than I did, which is sad. My dad, for all his failings as a father, was basically a good man. 

 I believe my father changed for the better when

he shattered his arm. He was 59 years old at the time it happened. He was changing a tire on his truck when the locking rim blew off. He threw his arm up and it glanced off him and sailed several yards back into a woods.

 “If’n I hadn’t got my arm up it’d prob’ly took my head off,” he said. As it was, it blew his arm bones to pieces.

He was ambulanced to Coatesville Hospital. This was the first time in his life he was ever in a hospital. The doctor put his bones back in place with a number of steel pins. The operation left a thick scar from shoulder to forearm as the only reminder. He was lucky.

 It was at that instance he realized he wasn’t John Wayne. He was absolutely right about one thing. The rim would have killed him if he had not diverted it with his arm. For the first time in his life he understood he was mortal. He became a much different person after that. I consider him today a great man, but a weak father. Despite what he became and how I feel now, I can’t change the past and can only write how I saw my dad through my own eyes.

ME -- SWAMP RAT -- CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 15

Christmas seemed to mean moving time and  We moved to another house during Christmas week of 1947. This is not That House pictured left. This is Loch Aerie also known as Glen Loch or The Lockwood mansion. It sits alongside The Lincoln Highway twenty-five miles west of Philadelphia. This places it about seven miles east of Downingtown.

Addison Hutton, the architect who designed Swarthmore and Bryn Mawr Colleges and Lehigh University, designed this ornate castle of a home. Charles Miller, who had designed Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park, landscaped the original grounds. This was at one time the estate of William E. Lockwood, owner of W. E. & E. Dunbar Lockwood. His company manufactured envelopes, tags, boxes and so forth. Mr. Lockwood commissioned its construction in 1865. It was one of the largest estate in Pennsylvania at 684 acres. It was so large four railway stations  were within its boundaries.

Our new home was somewhat humbler, standing about a mile or two east of Glen Aerie on what was still once part of the Glen Loch estate. This was The House my father received as part compensation for hauling milk and being a World War II returning veteran.

It was a bit less imposing than Glen Aerie.

Mr. Charles Miller must have overlooked this little patch when he lay out the landscape for Mr. Lockwood.

What I show of That House is all I have to show. I pieced this image together from two separate photographs. It is impossible to obtain a better photograph today. The house and land disappeared beneath a Corporate Campus Parking Lot. Today the Lincoln Highway is almost a continuous series of malls and corporate commons. In 1947 this area was country with little around.

The land the house occupied was then mostly swamp. The marsh began on the east side of our lane just off the Lincoln Highway. This boggy area came almost up to the house, leaving a  small front yard as it curved about and around to one side then continued southward to the woods beyond.

To the west of the long driveway from highway to house was a large fenced pasture. Cows roamed about this field in the warmer months of the year, from wench  they came I do not know. There was a tiny creek that split the pasture into halves. It ran west to east like a deep scar. Watercress grew in abundance along its banks and the water was full of small crawfish.

We had a bit of a backyard and a vegetable garden my mother planted. My father built a rabbit hutch on stilts to house Snowball, my pet white rabbit. On the other side of the garden the flat country turned into a long sloping hill upon which was a cornfield. There was a fencerow to the west of the cornfield and then another field going up the hill. To the east was forest. The Mainline of the Pennsylvania Railroad ran straight through a cutout just over the crest of the hill, which was a fact I didn’t at first.

The driveway came level to our home where it split into a second short lane that curved west to another house a bit further behind ours. Some people came and occupied that house for a month one summer, but I never saw them again

 Our house had a split personality. One side was cinder block and

the other stucco. Scaffolding remained standing along the east side of the house. Whoever began stuccoing left off half finished. There were steps and a short porch on the front and a larger porch on the back. The picture here is of the back.

The inside of the house was much nicer than the exterior. There was an eat-in kitchen to the rear and a dining room to the front on the west side. A large living room was on the east side. There was a staircase between dining and living rooms to the upstairs. There were four good-sized bedrooms on the upper floor. My parents had the front bedroom on the east side and I had the rear. The front west bedroom was for storage. The remaining one was my playroom.

There was no one in eyesight to the western horizon. Our nearest neighbors were a quarter mile up Lincoln Highway to the east. There was a line of row houses, perhaps three or four. We knew two of the families there, the Holmes and the Benders. The Holmes has a son, Tommy, who was several years older than me. The Benders had a daughter named Dottie who was also my senior and who in the near future would be my babysitter and in the distant future , as an adult would be a friend of my wife and I. Both of these were a bit too old to be playmates or companions to me in 1947.

 

    

The same year we moved to Glenlock I did acquired a babysitter. Not at all  sure why. Her name was Alice Downing, the youngest of my Aunt Clara’s brood, but the closest to my age. She was ten years older, making her 16 at the time. She and I had bonded on visits to my aunts and played 

games and such together. The two pictures are she and I at Glenlock. I am wearing my father’s sailor hat from World War II.The picture on the left is her in 2012. I have discovered she now resides in Ventura Hills, California, probably living with her daughter. I heaven’t heard from her since 2019, which is when we last exchanged Christmas

Cards. She is the last of the so-called Downing girls. she would be close to 90 now. 

The Hines Trucking Company was set back a ways from the highway directly across the street from these homes. I suspect Joe Bender (pictured right) may have been the friend who suggested the job to my dad.  Mr. Bender was a mechanic for Hines and Dottie’s father.

A little further up Route 30 was the Autocar Motor Company, a manufacture of trucks (taken over by White Motor Co. in 1953). There were several Cape Cod style homes running atop an embankment east of the Autocar factory. These were company houses. There was one family I knew who lived there, but more about them later.

On the other side of the Autocar company’s Cape Cods was the Church Farm School, which took up acreage on both sides of the highway.

This was a boarding school for boys operated by the Episcopal Church. The farm buildings and land were north of the highway  and the dormitories were to the south. Boys my age boarded there, but the school was off-limits to me. The Church School restricted their students to the school grounds and outsiders to the outside.

This house in the swamp was compensation to my father for driving milk tankers for Hines. Supposedly this was because my dad was a returning Vet, but I suspect it was cheaper than paying him more than the $50 a month he received in wages.

In Downingtown I lived on a street full of children my age and directly across from my grade school. Here I lived in virtual isolation from the world. My mother did not drive and my father was gone most of the week. I went to school on a bus. This was a situation that would have a profound effect on my personality and development. 

ME - DOWNINGTOWN THE FIRST TIME - CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 14 (1947)

 My mother’s notes say dad received his honorable discharge from the Navy in January 1946. According to her, he got an emergency leave in November 1945 because his mother was dying of cancer. She died January 19, 1946. This indicates they gave him a leave of two to three months, and then simply converted it to an early discharge about the time she died. This is certainly a possibility. My father entered the Navy in March 1943. The enlistment length at that time during World War II was “for the duration of the war, plus six months”. World War II ended on August 15, 1945. This would place the expected discharge date in March 1946. The Navy may have felt with the war over and the circumstances of his mother’s death there was no need to force him back for another two months.

 Mother’s notes also say dad got the job in Glenloch driving milk tankers
after he left the military. This does not fit my timeline. Dad’s discharged coming in 1947 would have fit better, but I know for a fact it was in January 6, 1946, because I have his discharge papers and that is the date they all contain. 

I also know for a fact that it wasn’t until September of 1947, when I was a couple of months past my sixth birthday that I began to attend East Ward Elementary School. 

 This leaves me with a year I can’t fill. Other than his discharge records, I have no other paperwork listing my dad between January 1946 and September

1947. There exist only a few photographs within this period that would prove my dad was there in 1946. These were all obviously taken on the same day, for everyone is wearing the same clothes in each pose. The setting is the same as well, in the backyard of 424 Washington Avenue. Besides my direct family, the

only others shown are the Lukens, Bill, Mary, their son Bobby and a friend of their’s named Peg. I remember the Lukens. Bill Lukens served with my dad in the South Pacific and they remained  friends in civilian life. I remember them visiting us at our home and we visiting them, and I remember playing with Bobby, their son, on those occasions; however, I don’t remember the specific event in the photographs.  I guess they were taken in the Spring of 1946; therefore, this may have been a get-together right after Bill Lukens got his Navy discharge. Still, there is no data in my memory bank about my dad being home during my Kindergarten years. My first memory of dad being back in my life was that milk  tanker job and the consequences of both on my life after December 1947.

However this raises a question.

Where the heck was my father the next year and a half?

In June of 1947 I turned six.

 East Ward Elementary School (pictured) allowed me to enter First Grade that September. My First teacher was Mrs. Mary L. Warren. She was a tall woman with broad shoulders, who sported heavy shoes and a stern face. She took no brook with misbehavior or inattention. She stalked about the classroom and if she thought you a slacker or caught you talking, chewing gum or goofing off, would grab your hair and yank.

I never had my hair pulled by her. I knew my alphabet and could read well in advance of coming to First Grade and I was never a discipline problem. My final grades for the two marking periods I was in her class were 4 As, 2 Bs and an S. The S was Satisfactory in Health. The As were in Reading, Spelling (surprisingly), Arithmetic and Art; the Bs for Penmanship and Music.

I was absent two and a half days in the first

marking period. I don’t know why. I had two of the dreaded children’s diseases in those early years, Chicken Pox and a Mump, but I can’t place a date on when. Yes, I did say Mump rather than mumps. I only had it on one side. Either disease would have kept me out of school more than a couple days. The school nurse probably sent me home for a virus, which would account for the half day. 

Although I never suffered a hair pulling by Mrs. Warren, I observed a number who did in my time there. It wasn’t a gentle tug either. It was a real yank that got the victim’s full attention. Her physical punishments were not limited to hair abuse. My friend Ronald Tipton fell pray to her corrective measures. Ronald (pictured right) was not yet my friend. He was just another face in the crowd even if he was tall enough his face showed above the rest of us.

Ronald had a problem then. He stuttered. When he stuttered, Mrs. Warren would come up behind him and slap the back of his head.

“See D…D…Dick r…r…”

Whamp!

Now through all the years Ronald and I were friends I didn’t hear him stutter. The Mrs. Warren slap cure must have worked.

The approach to education was different in the 1940s from today. Educators forced my  wife to write with her right hand because she was left-handed. Unlike the cure for Ronald’s stutter, this cure didn’t take.

There is a mystery concerning my First Grade report card. I did not return to East Ward Elementary after the 1946 Christmas Break. Despite this, my Downingtown Public School First Grade Report Card contains marks for the last two marking periods and the final exam. These are in a different handwriting than the first periods. The attendance record for the second half of the school year is blank, yet my mother signed as my parent for all these periods on the back of the card. The back of the card also says, “The pupil is hereby promoted to Grade 2”. M. Wallace, Principal approved the report card. Mrs. Yost was the East Ward Principal.

I assume that when I transferred to my new school for the remainder of the year, my Report Card transferred too. It appears that the West Whiteland school used my Downingtown Report rather than issue a new one. I don’t know the reasons for the attendance left blank.

If this last half on the Report is correct, my marks dropped with the transfer. I maintained straight As in Reading, but everything else slid to Bs. Spelling and Music are no longer even  subjects.

And here the mysteries collide. What was my dad doing in 1946 after the service and why is my Downingtown East Ward Report Card complete?

These are the facts I know.

My father did come home from the war early in the year 1946. I was not happy about it. I resented his arrival back on the scene. I had my mother to myself and now he came home and stole her away from me. I was jealous and angry with that. I resented his presence and we were at odds the rest of my childhood. It was partly my fault and partly his. 

My dad did get a job driving Milk Tankers at a company in Glenloch, Pennsylvania called Hines. This is my dad’s account:

“When I got outta the Navy I didn’t want to go back to what I use to do. I wanted something different where I had some freedom to get about. I had a friend workin’ at Hines out in Glenloch told me they were hirin’. He said, ‘Don’t tell Old Man Hines you know mechanics or you’ll never get out of the garage.’  So I told Old Man Hines I was a trucker and he hired me at $50 a month plus the house.” 

Yes, plus the house.

The photo of me on the pony was taken in 1947 obviously ar 424 Washington Avenue. I recognize the background.I lived in Glenloch at that time, so this must have been a weekend I stayed at my grandparents. A man came around with the pony and the chaps and cowboy hat. He must have traveled from state to state. When I worked at Wilmington Trust several of us brought in our photos on that pony wearing the very same outfits.

When this photo was taken I was living in a different place, in the gift house and in a swamp.