I Loved To Teach

After our marriage on June 8, 1958, knowing we had teaching jobs in the Indianapolis/Southport area, we spent the summer acclimating ourselves to what was to become our new lives together. We spent a week at a lake cottage in northeastern Indiana, then visited briefly in South Bend with my family, staying with my parents, Earl and Goldie Rhoades. With little knowledge of geography, we then set out for Montana by way of Missouri and Oklahoma, and were a bit surprised to realize in Oklahoma that we were no closer to Montana than we had been in Indiana. We stayed briefly at the Ben Markley home in Joplin with my sister Vivian and hurried on to Oklahoma where Margaret’s brother-in-law, Jack Atkinson was a minister at an EUB church. For the rest of the summer, we stayed with Walter and Leona Goldsmith. Walter was the mayor of Harlem, Montana, where they also farmed the 500 tillable acres of their 1000-acre farm about twenty miles from town, just past Snake Butte.

During our stay, I learned a bit about dry land farming, which is done in strips—every other strip lies fallow every other year. We spent a week in Hell’s Canyon where the EUB’s rented a Methodist camp every summer for a week. I discovered what it was like to sleep in a tent on the COLD ground, knowing there were bears around. We set up our tent in a three-sided outbuilding with the opening flap facing the back wall (to discourage any bear that might come along. The cold came up through the ground rather than from the air around us, so every night we put more blankets under us.

Back in Harlem, we became a fixture at the Sunday evening services where Margaret played the organ boldly to allow me to hone my skills at showing off on the piano. I, at least, had great fun. One night after church, however, Leona said, “They really love your piano playing, don’t they? I, for one, can hardly stand it.”  She’d like those hymns played the way they were in the hymnal.

To prepare for the start of school, we went back to Indianapolis and found a cute little garage cottage just out the back door and across the alley from the Indiana Central College campus church where we had been married. We lived there for nine months until I forgot to pay the rent during finals week—left the check lying on the desk. Mrs. Rumpke waited until Margaret left for school and ‘attacked’ me about the rent. I was stunned and decided that would be the last check I would give her. Margaret and I went house hunting and spent our entire savings on the down payment on a small two-bedroom bungalow on a dead-end street near a park. We then learned about poverty when I couldn’t even afford the gas to go job hunting. Margaret took a job as a cashier at a nearby grocery, and I finally found work lifting bags of potatoes at the farmer’s market. In the month before school started, I lost 25 pounds and began the weight gain and loss that has been the story of my life.  Mrs. Rumpke told me that her next renters moved out in the night owing three months rent and left the little house needing $2000 in repairs—my yearly salary had been $4,090.  (First house—1958-‘59)

We lived in this second house only until I found the teaching job in Carthage, Indiana, where they insisted that we move to Carthage and Margaret had to give up her Indy job. (Second house—summer 1959)  The first year we lived in another garage home on a corner on South Main Street across from the Friends’ Church, though, actually, we lived mostly at school. (This was home number three—1959-‘60)

The long-time second grade teacher, Gladys Smith, took a job in Greenfield, and we rented her adorable two-bedroom bungalow (she informed us that it was a Sears-Roebuck house).  This introduced us to having a fireplace in the living room, a garage, and a full basement. We lived there on North Main Street for a year until the day Lori was born.  (1960-‘61)  While Margaret was in the hospital, brother Shirley’s son Chuck came for about two weeks and helped us move. The neighbor across the corner taught English at nearby Charlottesville but was changing jobs to teach at Knightstown, about the same distance away—about four miles. She insisted I go after the Charlottesville job, and they also wanted Margaret. This house was a dark brick home with a basement but no garage, and we learned that the hardest move is only three or four houses down the street because you think you can carry everything there on your back or in a wagon. We called this the Donaugh house, and we lived there only until I became the minister at the Charlottesville Christian Church (Home number five—1961-‘62) and we moved into their parsonage for two years, during which time I attended seminary and got good enough grades to have my tuition refunded and won an award as the outstanding student of Reformation Christianity. However, I missed teaching, Margaret was pregnant again with John, and I tried to do both jobs until I thought I was going nuts. The parsonage in ‘downtown’ Charlottesville (that may be a misnomer) was our fifth home.  (1962-‘64)

When I resigned as minister, the board members insisted that we stay in the parsonage. “We’ll never find a minister who wants to move here.” However, as soon as school started, they found just such a person, and we had to move. There was a new small factory in nearby Knightstown, and its workers had taken up all the rentals, so we decided to build a three bedroom home in a lovely neighborhood just outside of Greenfield. The contract called for completion in three months, so we moved three houses north and across Highway 40 to the oldest house in town—our first two-story, expecting a short stay. (Home number six—1965-‘66)  Our home took a year to build, however, and at that we moved in without the brick exterior, without the brick fireplace, (the hole in the family room wall was covered with sheets of plywood) and without a yard. But we wanted to finish moving before the school began fall classes; so we moved into our eighth home in Bowman Acres. We lived there about six years, during which Tammy and Danny were added to the family. This home had cost $18,500 to build and sold for $30,000. We also sold what had become our rental in Indianapolis for $1,000 more than we’d paid for it, $10,500.  (Home number eight—1966-‘72)

Our ninth home was the historical Victorian home on N. Main Street across from the Greenfield Post Office and former home of REMC, Rural Electric Membership Corp. We paid $20,000 for that home which had five kitchens and five baths because it was being used as a rental. We lived in three apartments and learned to love large rooms with high ceilings. We kept two apartments as rentals to help pay the utilities bills. For twenty-five years we remodeled and redecorated to our hearts’ content until we retired in 1995 and moved to Lexington, Kentucky. We chose not to sell the 1868 house, in part because Danny and his spouse were living there and because we had hoped, by keeping it in the family, that it might some day become the Greenfield Baha’i Center.  It is interesting to note that Danny is our only child to decide not to remain in the Baha’i Faith.  (Ninth home—1972-‘95)  So we bought a home in Lexington.  (Home number ten—1995-2002)  That home had a lovely yard with three decks, a fish pond, and an in-ground pool to which we added a gas heater. We hired most of the yard work done, although Margaret worked in that yard nearly every day while we babysat and helped run Tammy’s store, Dance Essentials, Inc., into which we invested funds for several years until Tammy and Woody moved to North Carolina in 2000 and for which we found a buyer in 2002, when we also moved to Huntersville, NC, into our eleventh home—a three bedroom ranch with 1 ½ baths on a hilly corner lot. We prided ourselves about the nine crepe myrtles that lined our side yard.  (Home number eleven—2002-‘05)

When we decided in 2005 to help bring Lori and Sean to Huntersville, they sold their home in Blue Springs, Missouri, and we sold our home on the hill. We sold it for $20,000 more that we had paid on the first day the sold sign was up. Our twelfth home, our shared home, has five bedroom and 2 ½ baths in Cedarfield—a stunning neighborhood with large trees and abundant, carefully groomed entrances to every street and two neighborhood swimming pools, a park and a fishing pond.

Our living room (piano room) has two black pianos—our baby grand and Lori’s digital, which we love because it transposes for you, records your playing, and you can practice with headphones and not bother anyone. This room is decorated with an Asian theme.  The family room has become the sitting room, and the introduction of Wii has made the large TV the focal point. Though it has a large sofa, huge chair and ottoman, it is dominated by recliners, afghans, pillows, and books. The dining room, just off the entryway, serves mostly as a mudroom, although it cleans up nicely on holidays to seat more people at the too-large-for-the-room table with armchairs and a very large hutch. Two glass-front bookcases in the entry serve as an extra cabinet for dishes. We have Grandma Goldsmith’s elegant antique china, Margaret’s china, Lori’s china, Tammy’s china and two more casual sets of china along with many fancy pieces of glassware tea service sets and two sets of stemware.

The yard is large with two maple trees, a cherry blossom tree, a dogwood and three large white crepe myrtles. These are enhanced with lovely bushes which are both in our yard and just across the fence in five neighbors’ yards (those back homes are on a cul-de-sac that wraps around us.

And that’s it—twelve homes that make up a lifetime, during which we did a lot of hosting and entertaining and teaching from 1958 until 2005, when I decided being seventy was a good enough excuse to stop doing substitute teaching, where I was getting all the worst possible assignments—special ed, for which I had no training, classes for which no teacher was yet hired and lesson plans that didn’t teach anything and students often refused to do.  I had most enjoyed the home ec classes until someone out there decided that home ec subs needed more prep than eighteen years of interior decorating and thirty-six years of classroom teaching.

Within days after the Pearl Harbor attack, young men became scarce in the town. That was also during my sixth year of life. Suddenly Shirley and Joe, my two married brothers, and Chuck, a senior at South Bend Central, were gone. When Chuck came home for a furlow before shipping out, I saw him coming down the street in his uniform and rode on his shoulders shouting, “Chuck’s home! Chuck’s home! Mom, look at me! Chuck’s home.” The three men were gone for three years without another furlow. Chuck, being single, arranged for his allotment check to go to Dad, and when there was $500 or so, it became a down-payment on the house on Lincoln Way East, just a half block from the site of Vivian’s accident, much to Chuck’s chagrin when he learned that the money was gone.

I had become the proud owner of a real sailor’s blue wool shirt—must have had a burn hole in it because Mom cut it down to my size (no hole) on her old treadle sewing machine (all anyone had then), and I wore it and wore it until I could no longer get it on.

Chuck never quite forgave Dad for using his money, although I have heard him tell of losing that much in a poker game on board his ship. And when the city claimed the property to run power lines through the place (which they never did), Chuck sold the land across the street near the river for, I believe, $15,000—a pretty good return on his investment, I thought.

I don’t recall the move to Lincoln Way, but I remember that we had a telephone, a four-party line, and our ring was two shorts and a long. Our number was Atlantic 7-6379, later changed to 287-6379 but retaining the same dial positions. The three younger boys continued to attend Franklin School although the neighborhood kids went to Jefferson School across the river. Wartime playground activities became our regular summer routine. Every night we went to Joe Molnar’s neighborhood about three blocks from home and played kick the can until it was too dark to see the people hidden. When Danny outgrew this, I instigated it in my backyard with the Bartell girls, Beverly and Audrey, and Jerry Martin, who lived just past them, three doors down where Miami Street begins. The Bartell’s house was big, but the Martin’s house was a huge brick. Our next-door neighbors were the Bocks who owned Bock’s Boiler Works. Their white house had a rounded cement porch and four two-story pillars. For some reason Auntie lived with them for a few years until their daughter, Mrs. Peterman and her family moved in. She had two girls when they moved in and a baby sometime later. Sharon was a year younger than Audrey, and we made her cry a lot. Our house had a basketball goal attached to the back porch for Danny and a huge tree with large mulberries that stained our clothes and fingers and feet until Dad cut a ring around the trunk and trained the grape vines to grow into a “grape tree.” On the other side of the yard by Peterman’s property was a cherry tree. Dad put a bottomless sandbox under it with an ocean of sand, soon mixed with soil when we dug too deeply. The tree was easy to climb and jump out of, so we invented a tag game for two called Mr. Snoozy, who must lie down and pretend to sleep while the other player climbed the tree. He was the vicious “it” you became if you hesitated before you jumped from the fork or upper limbs of the cherry tree onto the heaped up sand below.

Once when there was a truck with sideboards parked under that tree (yes, we parked in the back yard via an alley between Bartell’s and Peterman’s and another from our backyard to the Martin’s drive just in front of their huge garage), I went too far out on a limb that broke off and dumped me into the bed of that truck, scraping my side against the side boards as I fell. I think we had fewer cherry pies after that. When Jerry’s stepfather died of a heart attack, Jerry moved away. He said his stepfather was reading, seated beside his mother’s chair when he just slumped over and fell to the floor, lifeless. Then we were ready for junior high school, and everyone went to new schools. The Bartell girls were on our party line, and we stopped using the special code numbers it took to ring each other up.

Just under the railroad viaduct to the north was where the Smith family lived. Davy was my age. Tom was Dick’s age and seemed always to be in trouble. They had the only TV in the neighborhood, and occasionally I was invited to watch. They turned out all the lights except one on the TV set that threw light onto the wall behind the screen and was supposed to save your eyes. The picture was small and very snowy. But the fact that you could sit in your own living room and see shadowy figures move around a room in New York never ceased to amaze us. We had only one radio which was constantly capturing our imaginations with wonderful theater pieces. We ran home from school at noon to catch "“Oxydol’s Own Ma Perkins” and after school to “watch” the adventures of Superman and other super heroes on the radio. Saturday’s programs were my favorites—Armstrong’s Theater of Today among others—and Sunday afternoon fare was captivating. “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!” followed by the squeaking door of Inner Sanctum! I have in my collection of LP’s a recording of old radio themes. We used it for background at my last show at Greenfield-Central. The play was The Homecoming, but we retitled it A Walton Christmas. It was great fun and a very challenging show to do. We used contiguous staging, including a snowy mountain on the apron stage right, a barn loft on stage left, a mountain scene which was painted on a cyclorama to be seen through a huge window SR and as background for the scenes that occurred on a wagon SL. The orchestra pit served as downtown and the local church. I regret that I have no pictures and no video. Surely there is one somewhere.

In 1961 Margaret and I, still living in Carthage, Indiana, began teaching at Charlottesville, High School. I taught high school English and speech; Margaret taught first grade in the new part of the same building, down a flight and a half of stairs. A few years later, when Vickie McKeeman was, I think, a senior, her youngest sister, Mickey, was old enough to go into the first grade. The McKeemans’ side yard abutted our yard at the back. We were the third house from the corner, the Christian Church parsonage, on the alley on the Carthage Road in downtown Charlottesville. The McKeeman home was the first home around the corner on the side street.

Max McKeeman came from a family of baseball players, and no doubt had looked forward to having sons to continue the family tradition. However, it was not to be. His only son, in his family of exceptional, beautiful girls, was born with soft bones and lived only a few years, never able to walk or care for himself. When Mickey, their fifth child, was born with soft bones, they hadn’t concentrated on teaching her any independence, although she obviously had a good mind. When the decision came down that the school could not facilitate her wheelchair, Margaret volunteered to teach the disappointed child at her home (and, it turned out, once a week at our home, so close to hers).

Margaret also taught Mickey in the eighth grade after our youngest child, Danny, was born, and June McKeeman became Danny’s baby sitter for several years. The McKeemans loved Danny as we loved Mickey. Margaret soon discovered that Mickey didn’t feed herself, couldn’t hold a spoon or cup. If she was to learn to write, she’d have to figure a way to hold a pencil. Together they figured out a way to place the pencil so that the weight of her hand would leave a light impression on the paper. Before long, Margaret could put her papers up with the others in the room and her printing was among the best of the papers, although not as dark as the others. As an adult, she designed artwork for greeting cards.

She never seemed to be depressed, was always upbeat. When a new high school was built, she was finally allowed to be schooled with other kids her age in an electric wheelchair that allowed her a full range of movement. When she had attacks of asthma that put her in the hospital, nearly every member of her class was there to support her. She became a class officer her senior year, I believe she was the treasurer, and at her graduation, which we attended, she was given a standing ovation as her wheelchair crossed the stage.

And she attended college, being as independent as possible. The school in Ohio had underground passages between buildings so that she didn’t have to deal with the weather. I don’t know the name of the college, but it courted people with handicaps. And she insisted on living in a home in the Chicago area for the handicapped. Several friends came from there to Greenfield for her funeral. They told us that she was the heart of their community, her laughter filling the halls. They felt that the ‘soul’ of the place would never be the same without her presence.

At our home in those early years, we sometimes made snickerdoodles so she could roll the dough in cinnamon and sugar and press them into patties. One day, when I went to give her a drink from her glass, she said, “I can do it.” And she used the backs of her hands—one to scoot the glass to the edge of the table onto the back of her other hand and form a vee to keep it under control. Quick as a flash, it was up to her mouth and then back on the table with no help from anyone. It was hard to keep her shoes on, as her feet seemed to have no bones. I pressed them into place on those feet and hoped they would stay.

Once when we went to pick up Danny, they told us that Danny had asked if Mickey had fallen out of a hay mow. They thought this was hilarious and asked him why he had asked. He said, “Well, Tim (Colip—a neighbor) fell out of a hay mow, and he can’t walk.” We were embarrassed until they pulled us into their frames-of-mind.

Mickey had attended a summer camp for the handicapped, and one of those counselors, whom she adored, came to her graduation party. I overheard him say, as he approached her, “Don’t get up!” It was a joke from camp which helped kids to accept and see humor from their condition in life.

Anyway, all in all, it was an honor to have known her and watched her mature into a lovely person who blessed those who got to know her.

My memories of Rhoades’ Garage are somewhat reminders of an innate, I believe, inferiority which had been hidden by an early braggadocio that disappeared when I stopped being the highest soprano in the choir and became the lowest bass. The problem with that was pitch—I sang off key until I took voice lessons. At the same time Danny’s voice became very pleasing and he became the one people wanted to hear. We had always sung together as we washed and dried supper dishes—“Bill Grogan’s goat was feeling fine, ate three red shirts from off the line. Bill took a stick, gave him a whack, and tied him to the railroad track. The whistle blew; the train drew nigh. Bill Grogan’s goat was doomed to die. He gave three groans of awful pain, coughed up the shirts and flagged the train.” Suddenly Danny didn’t want to sing with me anymore. Margaret remembers that we probably had learned that song when we both took piano lessons. It was played with the left hand with repeats in a higher range after each phrase.  One of us would sing the phrase, followed by the repeat all on a single pitch and sung in a mocking manner.  I think we’d take turns and sing it twice.

We also had a ping pong net to string across the kitchen table, paddles and ping pong balls that, once dented, got thrown into the furnace in the basement, where they exploded almost exactly like the dead mice we released from the mouse trap through that heavy door into the flames. Ping pong wasn’t much fun for either of us since Danny was the county table tennis champion (also the paddle tennis champ, the horseshoe champ, the washers champ, the etc. champ). I, with blurred vision, couldn’t really see the ball coming, and returning it when he put ‘English’ on it was simply beyond my wildest hopes.

The station added to my feelings of inferiority. Danny became a fine mechanic while I pumped gas, drank coke and ate peanuts and candy bars. At first, I begged to be trusted to pump the gasoline, as we did in those days when there was no automatic shut off. But Danny did that while I washed the windshield and perhaps got to check the oil.

Then Danny’s responsibilities came to include changing oil and lubricating cars on the rack. So finally, I got to respond to the bell alone and pump gas, but I also had to wash the windshield and check the oil, and if it was low, I went in to a barrel and pumped oil into an oil container with a long snout that unsnapped to allow the oil to flow when I pushed a trigger. This soon became a chore because my mind was dealing with the thought that Danny didn’t ever have to do it anymore.  When I finally was trusted with oil changes and the bell rang to announce a customer at the island, I would then have to stop what I was doing, rush out, etc.

The good thing I remember about the place at Woodlawn was that we got free pop and candy. We would take a coin from the cash register, put it in the slot and slide the bottle around in a labyrinth until it reached the location of release. I would take a big swig—it was really cold—to make room for the peanuts I would then pour in. I still think the salty taste goes well with the cola. By the time I was able to drive, Dad and Chuck had a Mobil Oil Station in downtown South Bend, and though I rarely helped out there, all my gas was free.  In Woodlawn, half a block up the road, there was a grocery store with a parking lot.  One night a week, they’d play luring music like “Bessie, the Heiffer (Queen of all the Cows)” and the folks would gather to see some old movie projected onto the side wall of the store.  Great stuff for a small crossroad with a name, but too small even to be a village.

My school fees for kindergarten in 1940 were one dollar, a lot for us then. I lost the dollar on the way to school, and although I retraced my steps again and again, it was nowhere to be found. There wasn’t another dollar, so I had to take a few pennies at a time throughout the year. Teacher put them in an envelope in her desk drawer that said “Jackie’s pennies” on it.

The youth program at Central Church was thriving, as was the whole church under Dr. Roscoe Wilson. Dr. Bob Jones came for revivals that filled even the wrap-around balcony, and the church had three radio programs: The Christian Youth Hour every Saturday, the early Sunday morning broadcast, and the morning worship service. The youth met for an hour at 4:00 or so on Sunday afternoons, then were served a supper meal before their choir practice and the very musical evening worship service. At the age of three my family had discovered I could sing “like a bird,” and I began to be a regular feature standing on a chair and belting out “Zaccheus Was a Wee Little Man” and such fare with little need for the microphone they put in my hand. And for the Christian Youth Hour they taught me touching songs to sing into the mike. My parents were the youth leaders (a natural since their eldest four children were very active members of youth fellowship, as were Danny and I at a much later date), and the whole gang often came to our house after church where, at age three, I became the resident comedian. We’d have popcorn, and in cold weather, go out on the porch to pull taffy.  It was the perfect set-up for heartbreak when my voice changed. Danny also had a modest manner that far exceeded my conceited swagger. He soon decided to become a preacher.

I had sung with a South Bend Boys’ Choir that met at the YMCA and skinny dipped in the pool, the standard procedure at the “Y” back then. I was not much of a swimmer, nor was I a comfortable nude. I would have preferred to go home. We boys sometimes went to the South Bend Natatorium where bathing suits were used and, I think, girls were allowed.

South Bend was in lake country, and a great outing for a family of boys was a trip to the lake. The city dumped its pollution into the St. Joe River, so we could cross Lincoln Way to stand on the banks and practice cast fishing for bass. What could be caught among the shallows were huge carp, which the black community loved and we were never allowed to bring home. It was a tempting catch because they were caught with “dough balls” made by rolling bits of fresh bread instead of worms. But if one wanted to swim in the river, he had to bike several miles south beyond the introduction of sewage.

Danny and I did this once, and I nearly drowned. The river was shallow pretty far out at that point, and Danny had moved just outside the shallows to a drop-off area without my realizing it. I dog paddled over to him, put my hands on his shoulders, and heard him say, “Let go of me, Jackie! This water is over my head.”

“Oh, sure it is,” I countered as he took me under to prove his point.

I frantically dog paddled toward the shore, scared and spitting water. When I finally got the nerve to stand up, my chest had scraped bottom. We soon left to go home and, as far as I know, neither of us ever went back there.

But the small lakes were a family concern. Mom would fix a picnic basket and gather blankets. Dad would get fishing poles and lures together. As the older boys’ children began to join us, it just got bigger and better.

Let’s go back to South Street briefly. Another memory was during one of Grandpa Bisel’s visits to South Bend. He stayed with us, even though Aunt Daisy (Mom’s baby sister) and Uncle Charlie Schraw had a nicer house and only three children—Margaret Ellen, who was Vivian’s age; Dale, who was Dick’s age; and Bob, who was Danny’s age and was a rebel who started smoking cigarette butts which he had picked up on the street while in the primary grades. One morning Grandpa Bisel started out to take a walk, saying, “I think I’ll mosey over to Daisy’s house.” Though it was considered too far for me to walk, it was less than a mile. Before long, he was back on the porch swing, repeating over and over, “I’m so cold. I’m sooo cold.”

Mom put him in her bed and put the iron (I hope I remember that correctly—they were crude in those days) as a foot warmer while he died of a heart attack. We traveled to the funeral in Mendon, Ohio, where both my parents had grown up. Both of my Grandmothers had passed away before my memory kicks in.

Grandpa’s wake was held in his house, and I can visualize the open casket in the big room that was not the parlor. I also recall that there was a great climbing tree in the side yard, and chickens were running around the summer kitchen, a small building in the back. I mostly stayed in the tree and observed things from there, but when I discovered that it got me favorable attention, I began to go in from time to time and ask to be lifted up “see Grandpa again.” Those relatives imagined I must have been fond of him, but I have no recollection of any word he ever spoke to me. I just had never seen a corpse before and wanted to be sure I remembered it.

Danny and I slept sunken deeply into a featherbed in the unheated upstairs room. The narrow, twisting, enclosed stairwell was papered with old newspapers; just recently having learned to read, I was fascinated with the old stories related there. There was a thin coating of ice on the water in the pitcher by the bedside each morning.

I know it was here that I saw a chicken or two running around “with their heads twisted off.” This house was across the road from the St. Mary’s River. Mom grew up fishing from the banks on days when there was no food for dinner except vegetables from Grandma’s garden. She’d jerk the pole so hard the fish would come off the hook and go soaring over her head. This procedure eliminated the need for taking the fish off the hook. Shortly after we returned to South Bend we moved to that bigger and nicer home on Lincoln Way East just across from the river and next to the railroad tracks.

Brother Dan remembers playing football in the street on Rush Street. He already displayed athletic prowess at 8 or 9 years. I only vaguely remember the sledding he mentions that began at the top of our garage driveway, continued down Rush Street to South Street, which had enough slope to take the sled all the way to Lincoln Way, a highway two blocks down, right past Bernard Feingold’s house up many steps on the right. I only remember sledding down the hill on the other side of the GTW railroad tracks after moving to Lincoln Way East. We started at the west side of the chain-link fence, down a hill, across a field, and if we were unable to stop, over a ledge and down a fall of about four feet into a creek. Closer to Riley High School where it was called Studebaker Creek, a boy I remember only as Fred dropped off a similar ledge into the creek while riding daredevil on his bike and broke both arms. At first we were told that one cast joined both arms and he couldn’t get dressed or feed himself, but when they simplified it to two separate casts, he was able to return to fifth grade at Franklin Elementary.

On South Street we had had a kitchen cupboard with a porcelain pull-out counter, a tall door on the left that contained a flour bin and sifter, and a large door below that was covered with already chewed gum, which I pried off with a sharp knife a few times and chewed again. It had no flavor and was not too tempting, but it was there, and although we picked up gum wrappers from the gutter, peeled the aluminum layer from the waxed paper and added it to a roll we donated at the corner drug store when it got large enough, we could never afford to buy fresh gum ourselves. I also remember my mother pulling up her dress and wiping my runny nose on her slip at home sometime, so I think we were not very aware of germs. In church she made twin babies out of her handkerchief or ours. At school my handkerchief sometimes got so wet I had to wring it out and continue to use it, if you can imagine that—no tissues in those days, I guess they are rather a waste of money, but we surely use many boxes of them, they’re so sanitary. I remember wiping with a page torn from a Sears-Roebuck catalog at someone’s outhouse, but I do believe we had some kind of toilet paper that was not so rough.  Perhaps we used newsprint.  I remember we had paper drives at school for the war effort and gathered huge piles of bundled newspapers.

I have told the story of Auntie’s arrival in 1938, her insistence that we could give her the largest bedroom with part of the upstairs hall for a kitchen, the three of us boys, Dick, Danny and I, moving into a smaller back bedroom and sleeping in one bed. I remember that there was a small opening in the ceiling of the closet of that room.  It led to the space over the garage where Dick kept some pigeons he had caught using a bicycle basket as a trap.  One day we had ‘chicken’ for dinner that turned out to be pigeon.  I don’t think Dick ever caught on.  I once caught a small mouse in that closet and held it by the tail, watching in awe as it climbed up its tail and nipped me.  Of course I dropped it.  I don’t think I was afraid of it or wanted to step on it.

Shirley had recently married and taken all the model airplanes that had hung from his ceiling. Joe married too, which left Chuck (I don’t know where his room was, he was hardly ever home) and placed Vivian in Shirley’s old room. Sometime during that year everything went haywire for Mom, and she ended up at Logansport Asylum for the Insane, where she was treated with electrical shock. When she came home, I didn’t recognize her gaunt face and hollow eyes. While she was gone, Auntie took over for her—cooking, cleaning and washing clothes, etc. I believe we knew God had sent her to us.  For my third birthday (no one remembers this) she baked me three small cakes with a candle in each.

I once chased the Nelson’s new young puppy when he was jumping up with muddy paws onto sheets hanging on their clothesline a half block up South Street. I don’t know that he intended to bite me, but his tooth snagged my lower lip, and I ran home to Auntie. When the Nelsons showed up and insisted I go to a doctor (not something we usually did), I got two stitches that left a light cross after the wound had healed.  No family member was with me in the doctor’s office, and I don’t think he did much to numb my lip. I didn’t say a word, but a tear rolled down my cheek, and Jeanine Nelson’s mother said, “If that had been one of my kids, you’d have heard the screaming a mile away.” The truth was I was too afraid to cry out.

Next door to the Nelsons on the alley lived a lady named Marie who held an Easter egg hunt in her back yard that I looked forward to each year. Across the street from Marie’s was Mrs. Jones, who gave us candy if we rang her doorbell. Straight across South Street from our house were a brother and sister, Hannah and Jim, I think. Hannah made me peanut butter sandwiches which I usually ate as we sat on her porch swing together. She had a grand piano in her living room and at least once let me lie on the animal fur with a lion’s head and paws which rested under that piano.  If she ever played that piano, I never heard her.

Once Hannah came out to Darlene’s house, next to mine, and made mud pies with us. Then she grabbed my arm firmly and forced me to go to her house where she promised to send me down the laundry chute that was in her kitchen. My mother heard my screams and rescued me before we went inside, but I recall having repeated dreams of sliding down that mysterious chute, sometimes twisting and sometimes falling straight onto a huge pile of clothes. I always awakened frightened. Sister Vivian once told of her repeated dream in which someone was flushing her dolly “down the toilet hole.”

I think it was the next day that Hannah rolled her garbage can into the middle of South Street and sat upon it as she tried to direct traffic. She was then taken off to Logansport for a spell to return subdued.

Up the alley across the street by Mrs. Jones’s house was a house that faced the alley—very unusual. The man who lived there had false teeth, which I recall he would thrust out at me in a menacing manner. (Uppers? Lowers? Can’t remember.) But I would run away in fear while he howled with delight. I think he was Jimmy Lydean’s father. Jimmy was Chuck’s age.

I have very few scars on my body. The second one was from an accident about a half mile from home. I was walking barefoot under a railroad viaduct and stepped on the neck of a broken beer bottle on the sidewalk. It cut deeply in two places—on the sole of my right foot and on the instep. I ran the entire six blocks home, leaving a trail of blood, but we didn’t go to the doctor. Mom put salve on it and bound it up with cloth. I told people my mom was a nurse if they asked, and I believed she was. There was an older girl who lived on Rush Street whose mother changed the dressing on it once.  That mother bragged that her daughter could read the newspaper upside down, but what I remember better was that when she took me into a closet and removed my clothes, her mom caught us.  She called me a dirty little boy and forbade me to ever come to her house again.  I didn’t really know what that was all about, but I was glad not to go there.

I had another scar that I didn’t know about until my fifteenth year when I was “helping out” (I wasn’t good at the mechanical stuff) at Rhoades’s Garage in Woodlawn, south and east of South Bend. To keep me busy, they set me to work washing greasy auto parts in white gasoline. When I took my hands out of the grimy liquid, grease residue had settled into scar tissue on the palm of my left hand. Taken aback, I crossed to my dad’s work station and held out my hand. “What happened to this hand?” I asked.

It turned out that I had burned it on one of the burners of a wood-burning cooking stove. About a week later, someone else had been sick enough to call the doctor. (Yes, they came to the house in those days.) They had begun, Dad said, to explain the problem when Doc said, “Well, never mind about that. Let me look at that baby’s hand. Infection had set in and he had come at a good time for me. That scar is still only noticeable if I make the skin on my palm very taut and let the blood show through the thinner, tougher scar tissue.

I recall that the older boys once played a trick on me in the basement. They put water on the floor near the light switch that twisted to be on or off (which is where they got the phrase “turn on” the lights.) When I turned the switch, I got a mild shock that must have been hysterically funny, though not at all to me.

That house had no paint outside and very little grass—mostly dirt paths from chasing each other with rubber-band rifles in cowboy and Indian shootouts and later in “kill the Japs” play. Those bands of rubber were cut from old bicycle and auto inner tubes.  But the house was very nice inside with fine woodwork. Vivian once claimed that a fall down the basement stairs when she was young caused her to switch to write with her left hand—she had wonderful penmanship. Those basement steps curved at the top with several triangles, and I think she was talking about an earlier house.

I remember having frequent guests from church to eat with us in that dining room. I recall night toilet trips, tiptoeing down the steps, sneaking along the hall, which had a large opening into the living room and a closet under the steps, and running as fast as I could through the dining room because, although I suspect I knew it was Dad’s snoring, Danny or Dick had told me they kept a bear in there.

Soon after we moved there, Dad’s boss provided a company car, which we took on rare drives through the country on Sunday afternoons and later drove into Michigan to get bushels of peaches for Mom to can and serve at Sunday dinners.

I believe we got to live in the house without paying rent because my dad was a fixer upper and my mom was fanatically clean. The lace curtains at the front window were often starched and placed on the stretchers she put up in the dining room. The soot from the coal furnace, which required that Dad get up in the middle of the night to stoke the fire, soon darkened the wallpaper Mother had hung; so we got tennis-ball-sized tins of pink stuff that we rubbed up and down the walls, kneading often to get the black stuff evened out in the dough. Crumbs fell to the floor like rolled buggers and had to be swept up. I can still see Mom scrubbing down the painted walls in the kitchen.

We bathed only on Saturday night—in shifts, reusing the water for several bathers. I think Vivian got first water, and probably Mom. Danny and I were put in the tub together. (That stopped soon after we moved to 1064 Lincoln Way East sometime after my sixth birthday, when we were buying the house, and each person got his own water.) Dad probably went last in the same way that his work clothes went into the washing machine last before the water was drained. There was a “wash day” because it was a great hassle to get out the washing machine with its wringers that swung out over the two rinse tubs that were such a chore to fill. I think some of the water had to be boiled on the stove in the earlier days.

Margaret’s mother never stopped using such a contraptions in her basement until we took her to the ‘rest home’ downtown in 1989.  She’d carry wet clothes (the wringer didn’t get them very dry even when things were run through twice) up the stairs to be hung on the lines in the back yard. We were afraid she’d get her arm caught in the wringer like one of our elderly ladies did in Carthage. 

When my mom finally got a washer and dryer to be permanently placed in the kitchen on Lincoln Way under the north windows that opened out onto the property of the Grand Trunk Western Railroad. The trains ran on elevated tracks that crossed the St. Joseph River just east of the viaduct over Lincoln Way. In those early forties days the man who stayed in a little signal house at the top of the hill would knock on our door to ask for cold drinking water, and the train men always waved back at us as they passed—looked for us even. Once I was using the forbidden shortcut along the tracks and was about to be trapped against a chain link fence by a train coming from behind as I watched another train going east.  Suddenly there was a man on top of that eastbound freight frantically waving and pointing with both arms to signal the oncoming train.  With a terrified burst of speed, I dashed the few yards to a corner in the fence and stood shivering behind another of those little guard houses as the train swept by.  I had felt the suction of that train and knew that the man who saved my life was probably one of the men who had waved to me as I played in my yard.

Anyway Mom had insisted on a “suds-saver” on her washer, so she still had to keep her wash tubs hanging on the wall on the back porch off the kitchen because the washer pumped the soapy water into a tub to be “sucked back in” for a second and third wash load. Later when she got a new “water waster”, she put Contact paper on the tops of both the washer and dryer to make them last longer in the same way she used throw rugs, furniture throws and doilies and oilcloth table covers (lace in the dining room, though). She completely washed the patterns off that contact paper.

But let’s go back to South Street for awhile. What Mom did even better than clean was cook and bake. When she made noodles in large oval sheets about two feet wide and six feet long, she placed these sheets on newspapers laid over the dining room chair backs where we could sneak in and pinch off a bit of dough without getting caught. When she baked pies, she made extra dough to roll into small sheets sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon and rolled up and sliced. She called these two-bite-sized goodies cinnamon rolls. I categorize them with the graham cracker “cookies” she made to finish up the icing not needed on her cakes. Soon World War II would make sugar and other commodities rationed and hard-to-come-by.  Saccharine tablets became an absolute necessity.

When we went to Kroger’s on Saturday evenings, we younger kids took turns going back after another of those double basket grocery carts we were filling to the brim—usually three. The produce men and the butchers saw us coming and got out fruit and vegetables that wouldn’t last till Monday and bones that today would go to people’s dogs. Dad imagined that the grocery clerks fought to be the one who ‘got’ to ring him up.  (That amuses me, knowing how he imagined he was quite a ladies’ man.)  We had lots of banana bread and soups. We kids loved the salmon soup with little round bones to chew up or spit out as you pleased, oyster soup (only Dad ate the oysters), potato soup, and vegetable soup. But I can remember running to the neighborhood store two blocks away to buy two loaves of “day-old” bread for a dime so we could have fried bread to dip into a bowl of Carnation canned milk (purchased by the case and used also for drinking) watered down to half and sweetened with saccharine tablets and cinnamon. We dipped the bread into the large bowl of milk so it would get soggy and then slopped it onto our plates. These slices were the entire meal during hard times.  I don’t remember eating much rice or pasta, but lots of Hungarian goulash.

Of 516 E. South Street, South Bend, Indiana, I have many memories—too many details to share, really. I could draw a floor plan of that house, although we moved sometime around my seventh birthday after four years of residency. I think it had been Vivian who had the room we gave up to ‘Auntie’ the day she came by asking if we would rent her a room. Mother sent her away suggesting that she try the two houses nearby where they took in roomers. Auntie was a survivor of the Great Depression who had been married to a wealthy businessman in Henderson, Kentucky. She had become a widow when her husband had learned that his business partner had absconded with everything, and he committed suicide. Don’t know where I learned that. She had a daughter, Ethel, who came from Louisville to see her occasionally. Ethel’s husband never came along. Auntie’s son Jim lived in South Bend and had a tense wife and two step-children. They rarely came to see her. She often spoke of a brother—always Brother James (to differentiate from her son, I guess, although I didn’t figure that out at the time.)

Auntie had just reached the age of sixty-five and could stop being a door-to-door saleslady. I just bet she could have sold anything. This must have been a fairly common practice in those days of a greater trust in people. Margaret’s mother (my well-educated mother-in-law who had taught chemistry) had sold encyclopedias door-to-door. My brothers Chuck and Dick sold Fuller Brushes.) After Florence Horton had looked at those other two houses, she was back, saying, “No, I’m sure this is the place!” Either she was psychic or God had sent her. I believe we lived in that house rent-free with an agreement that Dad would ask for nothing and keep the house “up.” And that he did. That man, a mechanic by trade by this time, could fix anything.  He had found depression work as a carpenter, a plumber and a painter and was the best auto bumper and painter until severe occupational rheumatism flared up.  He said he once repaired two cars that had been badly damaged while on an auto transport, and those cars had sold as new when he was finished.

I can’t imagine what Auntie did for a bathroom—the house had only one. I suspect she used a chamber pot and emptied it when no one was around and made-do with sponge baths. She made a kitchenette out of the upstairs landing over the entryway by hanging a curtain on a wire. In the winter, she had a window box that served as a refrigerator. We had an icebox in the pantry at the back of the house leading to a one-car garage.

There was a wrap-around front porch with a door in front and another door facing the front from the dining room (around the corner.) The house faced north. The living room, a hall and a straight-shot staircase went all the way across the front of the house. Behind that, at the end of the hall, was the large dining room with a huge table and chairs. The “master” bedroom door was on the west wall to the right. Under the staircase was a closet. The south doorway from the dining room led to a large kitchen, behind which was the garage. On the east wall of this kitchen were two doors—one leading to the bathroom, a second opening into the large pantry with its open set of stairs to the basement.

When Vivian was sixteen, she had been struck by a sliding coal truck (driven by “Bill,” who seemed to be enamored of her). She had to stay in the master bedroom for a bit due to her broken leg. The older boys teased her mercilessly about Bill. It had been an icy day, and we thought her heavy winter “leggings” had saved her from having two broken legs. She said an optometrist near the corner of Lincoln Way East and Miami Street came over and asked her to try to stand up. It was a nasty break, and she thought he had to be an idiot. It was a bit strange that when Dad bought a home for $500 down, it was next to the Grand Trunk Western Railroad tracks about one-half block from that intersection. The New York Central Railroad tracks (many more tracks) were just a city block down on angling Miami Street. Behind these houses between these two elevated railroads was a large space we children referred to as ‘the valley,” which was a great place for kids to play and hoboes to hang out between train hops. Each house had its personal ‘dump’ with a few rats and a few treasures. One house had gooseberry bushes which we raided once the berries were ripe. Another had delicious green grapes of which the owners seemed unaware.  One owner also owned General Outdoor Advertising and sometimes had tin sheets in his dump.  These made great sleds in the summertime down the grassy slope of NYC railroad.  Both railroads had tunnels for the little oily creek to run through.  GTW’s double tunnels were open on both ends and made a great escape when we neighborhood boys set afire the valley’s closed-up triangle between the creek and the joining of the two railroads, heading into Grand Central station.  The much larger NYC tunnel was guarded by a huge grate that kept us out of the city’s gas company (hence the oil spots in the water).

But back on South Street about seven blocks away, we had had a large radio in the living room, of which we were very proud—a gift from Carl Gadbury, Dad’s boss for many years. That radio brought in far away places like Japan. We sat on the floor in front of that radio and “watched” Chuck’s boxing matches with the Golden Gloves, while Mom cried. I wonder if he ever knew that. He was my early hero. He later told me Dad had enrolled him in the boxing when his older brother Joe began picking on him. He said that he waited through his early training until he had several winning matches under his belt before he taught Joe a little respect for the kid brother. I only saw Joe as a gentle person, but that was after the three oldest boys had been through a war experience and we had moved to Lincoln Way East.

The player piano, which sat across the northwest corner of the living room had stacks and stacks of piano rolls behind it. When the youth group from the church came over to pop popcorn and pull taffy, someone would pump, and everyone would stand around and sing the words as they scrolled by. Dad had wanted badly for someone to learn to play that piano, and I was the one with the good ear, so….  That piano was also a Gadbury gift, as was the icebox that looked like a refrigerator, which is what Carl had bought when he gave us his icebox.

Every few days the iceman would come through the front door (never locked). I suppose he had permission not to knock because he would call out, “Ice man!” and drip his way to the icebox in the pantry. The ice money was placed on top of the icebox.  In the front window, a square sign divided into four triangles by long diagonals told how many pounds we wanted that day by the number that was right-side-up. I don’t have a face for the iceman—just tongs, an ice pick and melting ice. Brother-in-law Ben Markley once showed me his father’s collection of ice tongs, collected by that junk dealer genius who started his habit of gathering them when the iceman became obsolete. They were strung on a wire from one side of a barn to the other. Ben once gave me two of them when I needed one for a play, and recently, I used one of them to suspend a heavy chandelier in our two-story front entryway while I attached the wiring and chain. It was the perfect tool for the job, opening into a big C with handles.

The kitchen was large and except for the bathroom and the pantry beside it, took up the back of the house. There were three exits from the pantry. One led to the kitchen, no door; one was an opening to the twisting basement stairs, and one led to the garage, two steps down—no one had two cars in those days. I remember there being a sumac tree outside the bathroom window. It had great switches for spanking bad boys if we were outside and the “boy paddle” was not handy. Mom usually used the boy paddle. Dad used his belt or his razor strop, and I bet he got that idea from his father—Dad was the only boy in a family of girls. This tree must be where I got the idea of making John go out and get a switch to swat his legs with (Vivian had said it would only sting and wouldn’t hurt him while it made a big impression on a little boy.  I tried it for awhile before figuring out that spanking was not at all effective with John.  Send him to his room angry and he’d soon be rearranging furniture and calling for us with a proud gleam in his eyes.)

On the west side of the house there was a door from the kitchen to the outside, where Darlene Jankowski lived next door on South Street while her grandparents lived next door on Rush Street. She was a year younger than I and as pretty as Shirley Temple with her deep dimples and her head covered in curls. I can see her in my mind as she stood when she was angry with me and yelled, “Jackie’s MOTHER!!”

Al Black’s post on Facebook this a.m. took my mind back to Music Man, a delightfully successful show that I do not have a video of, having loaned it to someone who didn’t return it.  After a show l directed in Winchester, Kentucky, in 1999 or 2000, for which I had also designed the costumes and scenery, I had been able to have the able assistance of a former chorus teacher and her husband, a former band director who enlisted the aid of former students to make up a pit band.  Some of these men were working as professional musicians, but were willing to give up the time for a long-time friend.  After the last performance, I asked Betty if they had gotten their paychecks yet.  “Oh, we don’t accept pay for this—we did it for Winchester, “she replied.  I said that when Winchester filled all 400 seats in the former Leed’s movie theater, I’d think about donating time.  She continued thus:  “You know that folks go on and on about your scenery, Jack, but I don’t think that’s your greatest talent.”  (Before I arrived on the scene, that theater group, formed, I heard, in 1990, had never thought a scene change was possible on the small stage that had no wing space and required renting the gymnastics studio next door to get from backstage to the lobby area for entrances from that area.

In its heyday, black patrons had been seated only in the balcony, reached from the third floor and descending from there with half the seating on that level.  In Oliver’s “Who Will Buy?”, we had the soloists walking down all aisles offering their wares and giving out a few roses in the process.  They had ended up onstage where our talented young Oliver was on his own small balcony, reaching down to take a rose for his loving nurse.  We ran through that next-door studio in every show because entrance space was so limited, and much of the backstage area was for making up and for quick costume changes. (Other changes were done next door.)  There seemed to be no room for extra scenery.  But I had amazed audiences with what seemed to be scenery appearing from nowhere.  Anyway, the music director had continued.

“I am sure that your greatest talent is casting.  When we held casting calls, I disagreed with nearly all your choices, but I was smart enough to keep my mouth shut and let you choose.”

At Greenfield-Central when I was casting Music Man a parent looked at the cast list and turned to ask me with some disdain, “Rodney Coe again?  I replied that no one said to the basketball coach, “Must you always use the best player in every game?”  A director who doesn’t cast the most fitting actor in each role is a fool.  I have directed a few shows where I had no say in casting and had to deal with characters who were miscast.  This is torture for a director and not a good thing for the actor either.  Rodney went to University of Indianapolis for two years and established himself in that venue before transferring to Ball State, where Letterman’s money had made that school a force in the arts and where he got wonderful roles from his first audition on.  When he auditioned the summer of his transfer for a professional theater group near Chicago, there was only one male position available in the troupe.  With, I think I remember this correctly, 400 auditions from Chicago and 200 from Indianapolis, Rodney was selected.  I went on Google a few years ago and looked to see what he was doing.  There it was!  He was mentioned in Variety for his performance as Professor Hill in Minneapolis.

But I always dreaded casting because everyone involved casts a show their own way and doubts that you have done justice to his cast list.

In Greenfield, I had discussing the scenery plans with the professional artist, Sandy Hall, who was my able art-teacher assistant.  She made wonderful backdrops and always made certain that every kid who volunteered to work on scenery got his signature all over that beautiful work.  Anyway, she had recently seen Music Man performed at a college in Michigan in which all the  scenes took place in a large gazebo.  She thought maybe we should employ that device.  I replied  that I had once seen that done and had thought I’d never get away from that darn gazebo.  “When I get to the scene with the gazebo, I want to knock them dead with the beauty of it.”  (That scene became the most beautiful set I ever designed followed closely by the set for Life with Father a few years before when I had felt my job was being threatened.  If I had pictures of that scene, I would post it with this blog.  If anyone has the video or photos and wants to contact me on Facebook—please do so.

Also, some of the most delightful memories of that show include the opening number, on board a train bound for Iowa.  We had chairs set up on the thrust stage which was an elevator so that it could make an orchestra pit.  The men started the number with the elevator at its low level and rising.  As it reached one step below the mainstage level, the curtain was opening on chorus members in front of a drop of Main Street of River City, Iowa.  Neat, no?

Another delight was the picture of “American Gothic” framed with the pool table frame that had just passed through and which featuring a pitchfork.  Still another was “Pick a Little, Talk a Little” with those wonderful ladies in wonderful costumes that showed off their ‘attitudes’.  And the purest delight was when one of the girls, Audra Murphy, was held as if she were a fish in a fountain, and for the special feature, she was holding a big mouthful of water which came out in a magnificently long-lasting stream at just the right moment. 

I could go on and on about Deanna, Rodney, a super job by Greg, little Jeff and little Catherine, Angie, and every minor character.  The mayor was doing his best job ever, and the quartet absolutely made the show.  That quartet was the reason I had never done the show before and have never done it since.  You don’t do Music Man unless you have a terrific quartet, and it helps to have a tenor like Greg Irwin and a music director/choreographer like Gail Noland Powell, both of whom have perfect pitch.

For a long time since I finished writing about my life as a teacher, I have promised myself that I would set out to tell about the homes and home life from my childhood on. My family at the time of my birth had consisted of five boys and one girl. I believe my parents desperately wanted me to be female. Sorry, guys—it was not to be.  After my grandfather had lost his five farms—one for each of his children—my mother brought in the last crops on the home place that he was in the process of deeding to his only son while Dad went to Indiana to find work.  The eight of them then weathered the depression in the small town called Roseland, east of South Bend, Indiana. Danny was then only eighteen months old. Brother Chuck once told me I could keep track of the ages of my siblings by figuring them two years apart. Whenever there was a four-year gap, a baby had been stillborn. Goldie Forest Bisel Rhoades was carrying her tenth child, but I knew only that I was the last of seven, and the only time I ever heard mention of the “lost ones” was when my mother talked of heaven and how she would then get her “babies” back. I think she thought they would still be babies.

My life began formally on September 4, 1935, in Roseland, Indiana. I have no memory of Roseland, except that my siblings had happy memories of that place. My siblings were, starting with the oldest down, Shirley Earl, (someone named Shirley had been the best friend of my father, Earl McKinley Rhoades), Joseph Clarence (named for my two grandfathers, Joseph Bisel and Clarence Rhoades), Charles Lymon (who knows where they got that name—mother’s sister Daisy had married Charlie Schraw, who lived in South Bend), Vivian Louise, Homer Richard (who legally changed his name to Richard Homer as an adult and went by ‘Dusty’—he also listed my mother as Goldie Florence on his military records.) Florence Horton lived in an upstairs bedroom from 1938 on, and we called her Auntie. Perhaps that’s how he got confused. Mother was Goldie Forest Bisel before she married Dad one Christmas Day in, I think, 1917 when he was 24 and she was 16. Then there was Danny Dean who was eighteen months older than I but far more mature than I from an early age onward. When Mother’s ‘time’ arrived (euphemism), the doctor hadn’t, so Father and brother Shirley delivered me. Soon after, the doctor did pull in and was appalled when he realized that the fourteen-year-old had been present at my birth. I once heard my dad say that it was ridiculous the way Doc had carried on. After all, Shirley had often skillfully helped him deliver calves, etc.

When we left Roseland for South Bend proper, we moved into a large home in the five hundred block of East South Street—probably 513. We moved from there when Danny set the basement on fire and hid in the coal bin—don’t know any details, nor does he, I think, but the house suffered minor damage, and Danny was unharmed.

My first memory was of moving from that smaller frame dwelling around the corner on Rush Street back to the corner house across South Street, where I lived until age 7—516 E. South Street. The Rush Street house had little yard, as it sat on a hill near the street, just as the next house did—lots of steps from the front porch to the street. Two sets of about five steps each led up to a narrow porch across the front of the house. We didn’t live there long, but were established by then at Central United Brethren Church, within walking distance, “In the Heart of the City with the City at Heart.” I remember learning to skip on the way to church one Sunday. My mother seemed young at heart then, before her first “nervous breakdown.” Dad was forty and Mom was thirty-four at the time of my birth. My first memory was of the day we were moving from around the corner on Rush Street back to the southwest corner of South and Rush.

I only know one story about the house on Rush Street. Vivian, age eleven or so, had agreed to spend the night with a girl who lived around the corner on the next street over. When she awoke in the night and realized there were bedbugs, she slipped out and came home. Mom made her (I only heard her tell this once long, long ago) undress on the porch and slip on a robe while she burned the clothes she had been wearing. Mom was pure inside and out. Her house was clean. Bedbugs were a horror.

Anyway I was not yet three when we moved from that house, of which I have no other memory. Danny was pulling a load of small things on a wagon, and I was carrying a pillow or two. I couldn’t keep up, and he wouldn’t wait for me, so I sat on the steps of the house two doors down and cried until help came along. Flash—that’s the whole memory.

Years ago when I was directing plays, costuming them and building and decorating sets, I filled my spare week-end hours while Margaret was working by visiting various thrift stores. The workers in these places soon knew me as the man who always found beautiful things and great bargains. One place in Franklin, IN, was called Wesley’s Closet. Methodists ran it, and the boss lady was a relative of a rather famous black coach, Ray Crowe, at an all-black Indianapolis school called Crispus Attucks. His team, starring Oscar Robertson, was the first team anywhere to go undefeated, including the Indiana State Championship.  Whenever I dropped in there (not often after I left Southwestern High School which was close to Franklin) Mrs. Crowe got very excited. She kept my name written on a shelf under the cash register, and I would see her look carefully for it. Then she’d call out, “Girls, John is here. Please unlock the other building for him.” And, as it was not my money I was spending, I would look, find, and buy. They had a special closet that was just for things they just knew I’d want. And they had ladies’ hats upstairs. For The Homecoming, I needed old-fashioned winter coats for all the Walton children, and I found wonderful things in that old house that had probably been their original store, but supervision there was difficult, so they kept it locked and not for the general public.

In other places I found old lamps and lampshades, wrought iron, pictures of all sorts. I sometimes spotted something across the room and dashed to buy, for instance, a long black cape lined with red satin. Another time, I spotted a red, Chinese fabric sports coat passing on a rack of things they were just putting out (it was for me to wear in a play, and I wanted it to ‘splash’. When I showed it to the cast, the comments varied from, “I hope they didn’t charge you for that” to “My husband would wear that coat. Would you sell it?” He was a very dashing African-American who loved deep sea diving, among other things. Once the Salvation Army store in Lexington, KY, was having a winter coat sale—all coats were $2. I was looking for two identical trench coats to make into a greatcoat for Mr. Bumble in Oliver. I found one there and got the other one down the street where they were having a $2-a-bag sale, and I figured it was free when I pressed down the other stuff to make room for it. But for myself I found a black trench coat that I wore the other day to the home of a wealthy psychiatrist who is my friend. He commented at the door, “That is a really nice coat.” Actually, I know his clothing is all tailored, but that coat is very well made, and trench coats don’t go out of style.

At rehearsal that night in 2002, as I was taking off my ‘new’ trenchcoat, one of the middle-school boys said that if he had a coat like that he could be a —- something from a current movie, maybe Men in Black. Anyway, I went back and got him one. It wasn’t black, but he was thrilled. And what could you get for a 13-year-old boy for $2 that would make him so happy.

What started this conversation was that, at devotions this morning they talked about carbon footprints, and I was led to tell the lady next to me about my shoes.

They were dark brown Florscheim dress shoes, nearly new in perfect condition. They cost me $7.99 at Value Village (Kidney Foundation) in Mooresville a couple of weeks ago. They were ½ size too large, but with two pairs of socks, they fit fine. I had to have them. What I didn’t tell her (I think I am always very well dressed at the lowest possible price) was that my Perry Ellis shirt (probably the most expensive dress shirt I have ever owned) in a sort of grayish feather-like weave had cost me $2 at Salvation Army on ½-price Wednesday. The striking silk tie with colors that suited that shirt so well that it brought several compliments had cost only fifty cents that same day. The shirt was starched and pressed and my pants had deep creases put in by dry cleaners (which I never feel I can afford.)

Value Village has two colors of tags on the display wall to tell you which tags are half-price and which are 75% off. I really only look at the latter, so my dry-cleaned pants that had been $3.50 cost me only 87 cents. They are black with a subtle bit of color hidden it, probably had been a suit, but it fit like a glove, and I could tell (from years of practice fitting clothes to actors and actresses) that the length was not 27” as someone had marked on the tag, but about 29”—just right for me. I’m not sure where I got my black designer stockings with a small brown figure in a stripe up either side of each sock, probably $1.

That was supposed to give you a laugh, or at least make you smile. My expensive leather jacket, which I removed at the door, was a gift from a friend who just knew it was my size. She had ‘come into it’ when a dear friend passed away, and it still had the tags on it. Incidentally, I took about fifty shirts to Goodwill two weeks ago, and we decided to go in for a look around. Margaret has a Pfaff sewing machine ($499 two years ago, and it won’t sew a straight seam—took it back once, they said they fixed it for $35, but the problem remains) so she uses a Singer she’s had for about 30 years that sews fine but the light has stopped working, and her eyes need that light to thread the needle. Anyway, it was a Tuesday, and I remembered that Tuesdays used to be Senior-25%-off day.  It wasn’t posted, but they said it still was.

They had a Singer machine, treadle missing, for $29.99, and another with the treadle for a little more. The treadle fit the newer machine, so we borrowed it, and her ‘super’ little sewer that has since sewed up a storm cost about $24. And it helped someone get employment!

We found a pair of valances for our piano room that are finely made by a decorator and fit our oriental décor in that room. We chose oriental because the two pianos (one is digital, one is a baby grand) are black and the two oriental pictures are a dash of color. The pair of valances are lined with a deep red fabric and cost only $12 at Habitat for Humanity. Yesterday we bought a very nice black GE refrigerator—our ‘new’ stainless Frigidaire has a broken bottom door rack—we have already replace two racks. We’ll move it to the garage and give the one there back to Habitat, where we got it for $100 or so about a year ago. The way the space is organized and the slightly larger size of the new one makes it seem an ideal solution at $325.

If you have a Habitat store in your town, you should check it out. We go once or twice a week for something to do—they have a great selection of books, and their vinyl records are only a quarter. The books are less than the book sales at the library. Magazines are a dime, and we often find current ones. But the thing about the good furniture, etc., is that you have to be there when it comes in, because it won’t be there tomorrow. Our store in Cornelius raised the most money of any Habitat store in the nation and built many homes both here and in Guadamala. Among other things, Margaret finds new fabric on the bolt for making table cloths and pillow cases, etc

Salvation Army has the best prices on pictures and a fine array of lightly-used furniture. Our kitchen table and leather chairs were lovely with only a few marks I easily removed with a furniture pencil, being careful to use just the right color.

My advice would be this: don’t buy it if it isn’t something you would buy at a regular store. If you are buying for costuming, don’t be stingy. Buy several options, and look at garments as if they were fabric. Buy large things, too—they are simple to resize once you learn the tricks. If it has ‘style’, buy it to add to your collection. I once did the play Leading Lady mostly because I had found so many 1930’s looking ladies’ things and I wanted a chance to show them off.

Look things over carefully—often things still have the original price tags on them. And try not to ‘brag’ about your finds. People like to think all your stuff is new. At school I’d sometimes see something unique that a student had ‘borrowed’ and worn to school. I’d tell them, “That looks great on you. See that you return it when you take it off.”

Do I sound as if I think life is a game? Well, a lot of things can be made into a game, and life becomes more pleasant when you can enjoy the routine stuff.