CHAPTER 9
Later mom took a job with Lasko Metal Works in West Chester, makers of such things as electric fans. I assume she worked on an assembly line.
When she worked at Newberry’s she could walk to work. Working in West Chester meant taking a Short Line Bus (pictured Short Line Bus, c. 1942). My mother didn’t know how to drive in those days. During the week mom was at work all day. I am sure she was tired when she came home in the evenings. This is why my grandmother did all the housework and looked after me. In some
ways, due to the war, I was a foster child.
I was thinking about it as I wrote and I cannot remember my mother ever reading to me. My grandmother read to me almost everyday. She read me the newspaper comics, especially those in the Sunday papers. There were many more Sunday comics in those times than in today’s newspapers. The Comics came in sections and each section had its lead strip at the top with slightly larger blocking than the others. Dick Tracy was one of the leads as was Li’l Abner and Blondie. Other comics were Steve Canyon, Terry and the Pirates, The Phantom, Mutt & Jeff, Smitty, Katzenjammer Kids, There’ll Do It Every Time, Little Iodine, The
Berrys, The Timid Soul, There Oughta be a Law, Tarzan, The Little King, Henry, Pogo, Little Orphan Annie, Brenda Starr, Prince Valiant, Maggie & Jiggs, Mary Worth and many more. She read them all to me, even the ones I couldn’t fully understand. I learned to read because of this long before I started school and could read quite well by First Grade. In First Grade, I stood and read passages from the Reader, as did all my classmates in turn. “See Spot? See Spot Run? See Jack run after Jane? See Spot bite Jack?” I read with dramatic emphasis and Mrs. Warren told the class, “That’s the way a story should be read.” Having the teacher use you as a good example is not the way to win friends and influence your fellow classmates. Nobody likes the teacher’s pet.
My Grandmother also sat me on her lap every evening and read
from books. She read stories from a book called, A Hive of Busy Bees, by Effie M. Williams. The book was framed around Don and Joyce, two children visiting their grandparents. Each night they were told a story with a moral with such titles as “Bee Kind”, “Bee Loving” and “Bee Prayerful”. It wasn’t much like the children books I read to my own children. It had very few pictures and a lot of words. It didn’t coddle to children. It was a real book.
Another book she read to me many times over was Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses, a volume that might have planted seeds that blossomed in me later.
I loved hearing stories read. I think this spurred me to learn reading so early. I wanted to read for myself so I didn’t have to wait until my grandmother had the time. I remember surprising her one Sunday by reading a comic strip out loud before she began it.
My mother was probably weary after work and let my grandmother do all this reading. Even when my father came home and my mother no longer worked I don’t remember her ever reading to me. Of course by then I was reading quite well and she didn’t need to.
Mother enrolled me in Mrs. Helms’ Kindergarten in September 1945. I had turned four in June, a young age to start any school at that time. There were no Head Start programs and no daycare centers in the 1940s, at least in Downingtown there weren’t. I went to a private kindergarten and not the public one right across the street from our home because East Ward did not except four-year olds, in fact, I don’t think East Ward even had a kindergarten until a year later. This took the burden of watching me all day off my grandmother.
Mrs. Helms’ school was on the Westside of town. One of the other mothers, or perhaps Mrs. Helms herself, picked me up each morning and dropped me off home each afternoon. Neither my mother nor grandmother knew how to drive and my grandfather left very early in the morning for work. In the morning a car would stop in front of 424 Washington and the horn would beep. I’d run out and climb in beside three or four others she was busing each day.
Mrs. Helms’ conducted kindergarten in her home and thus it was not large. The centerpiece of her yard was a huge sandbox. Inside the school/home there was a grand piano. This was the first place I headed having never seen a piano before. I immediately pressed the keys. This convinced Mrs. Helms I had musical talent for some reason. She
informed my mother I must be given piano lessons
My mother did not take her advice because she couldn't afford such a luxury. It was a good thing. Despite the fact that my first published and copyrighted piece was a song, I have no ear for music. I have problems distinguishing notes, can’t carry a tune and can’t tune an instrument without help. I was born with a slight hearing defect. I forget how the doctor explained it to my mother, but nonetheless something inside my ears wasn’t as it should be.
It wasn’t a major flaw, but it makes it difficult for me to catch subtleties in sound. For instance, I could not say the word quarrel. It would come out as corral. The words Calvary and cavalry were always the same when spoken by my mouth. I do play a “one-handed” piano; that is, I can play melodies because I know the notes on the keyboard and can read music. I cannot play anything by ear.
At the end of that year, my mother tried to enroll me in First Grade at East Ward, but they rejected my entry. I was only five years old and first graders had to be six, rules you know. I don’t know why she didn’t place me in Kindergarten there, but instead she sent me back to Mrs. Helms for a second year. I have joked all my life that I failed sandbox and had to repeat kindergarten.
There were a limited number of pupils in her school, no more than ten. The class photograph captured the nature of those times. We pose in a tight group, except for one little girl. Why was Blossom set apart? It was because she was Black. Mrs. Helms was progressive. East Ward Elementary did not allow white and black students in the same room. Even though Mrs. Helms boasted no such segregation it is obvious from the photo a separation existed.
The class photograph was during my second year, I believe. I can’t remember the names of most of the kids. I am the tall boy in wrinkled shorts kneeling on the left. The heavyset boy in the middle and the girl almost directly behind him are Barry Gregg and Helen Burkhart. They went into First Grade at East Ward with me. They were relatives of each other, cousins I believe. The boy kneeling on the right was Tim Mahan, and he was to be one of my earliest friends.
It was during this period of kindergarten that I incurred my first wound that left a scar. During one or other of my years at Mrs. Helms we were taken on a field trip to gather material for a project. Mrs. Helms took us up on a hill across and slightly up from the Downingtown Train Station. The train station was located along the
south side of Lancaster Avenue (Route 30) on the West Side of town. We hiked down that hill to alongside the track beds and scooped up some coal chunks.
Coal was common in those days. We could have easily brought a piece in from home, but I suppose it was more exciting to go out by the tracks and snatch some. We took these back to Mrs. Helms and decorated our little prizes however we wished using poster paint
and lacquer. On the left is my marvelous creation. I still keep it in my office, this 70+ year-old piece of anthracite.
I finally graduated from
kindergarten in 1946. The picture on the right is me in my cardboard cap holding my diploma. That year an event occurred that would have more significance for my life than Mrs. Helms or her piano. The announcement came that at the University of Pennsylvania the first electronic computer had been created. ENIAC was immediately dubbed the “Giant Brain”. Compared to modern desktop computers not so much, but it was giant size, weighing in at a trim 30 tons. Try putting that on your desk.
What they had sitting in that big room at the U. of P. would eventually have something more to do with my talents than Mrs. Helms piano ever had.
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