1954-1961Wauwatosa, Wisconsin
3150 N. 106 Street
1954-1961We went to Webster School and got to ride the school bus. The stop was right in front of Leonard Schaeffer’s house. At least the stop I went to. My sisters went the other way on Auer up to 105th street. That was good. We shared different friends. I was in 5th grade when we started. I got beat up a lot and learned to run real fast.
From grade school, we went to the brand new junior high, Longfellow. Then the old high school, and finally the new high school. I had girl friends from Janice to Mary Ann. Really only two. In high school, I had a few others and returned to Mary Ann in my senior year.
My senior year, second semester was in 1962. Different Page
In the middle of my freshman year at UWM, my parents moved to Boston and I moved into the dorm.
This history is most of what I remember growing up. I have added a neighborhood map to help with the visualization. It is how I remember it although the left-right scale is a bit elongated and North is to the right.
Caveat: I have written down what I remember but I do not always have the chronology straight. It is 50 years later and my memory does strange things.
We moved into the house and our first job was to lay the lawn. We all worked at this but it really was easy: we unrolled sod. The sod people had even included a golf ball for people who like to think their lawn came from and abandoned golf course. Fat chance.
Remember also in those days, fences were almost unknown. The closest we had to a fence was out neighbor to the south who had a privet hedge around his yard. This made retrieving baseballs (Whiffle Balls) difficult.
So. Now we have a nice green lawn. Elm trees, two
per front yard, line the street. In our back yard we have a
garden centered at the back of the
yard. My mother really wanted a garden.
Right behind us are the Godwins. You cannot tell from the map but the yards are not split equally. Imagine an alley running down the length of the block. There is an easement for the alley but there is no alley. The entire back is grassed. The alley easement belongs to the 105th street owners giving them an expansive back yard whereas we have a back yard about the size of the front yard. We have the garden. We also have a row of rose bushes along the back of the house. There is a well cap in the middle near the garden.
Well? We did have city sewers. We had power lines coming from the poles running down the alley easement. Same for the telephone line. We had our own water. There was no city water. The cost of the house included a typical well and the contract permitted additional cost if the well were a problem. It was not: we had a good well. These were called Artesian wells. The house had a basement. There was a pump in the basement. This meant the well was shallow. Deep wells require the pump be in the well. Everyone’s water was a little different. We liked our water. At some point in the future, after we left, the area got city water and the wells were closed. This was necessary as the water table then dropped and the water became contaminated.
We really liked this house. It had a green roof and the artificial rock was a sort of grey/salmon color. The two-car garage was on the north side – to the left as you looked at it from the street. That put the driveway on the left. The mailboxes were to the left of the driveway. The Hilty couple and their noisy Pomeranian dog lived next door. We never put two cars in the garage. The space was used for bicycles, lawn mower, junk.
There is what we called a breezeway to the right of the garage and the house to the right of that. These houses had basements with casement windows on each side and the back. The breezeway had a door on each wall. The front and back walls had windows on each side of their doors. There was a sidewalk that went from the drive to the front door and a sidewalk spur from that to the breezeway door. There are rain gutters around the roof. Windows in those days are wood framed. These frames have a separate window frame containing screens and another frame for the winter containing storm windows. One set on the other off -- taking a lot of room in the garage.
There is a small step up from the garage into the breezeway, which has linoleum tile on its floor. I do not remember the pattern. There is another step up from the breezeway into the house. The breezeway is good when you have children and you have a climate with winters and rain. This is where the boots and rubbers and other clothes to be changed get left.
As you entered the house from the breezeway, you entered the dining room. We had the same cherry table that we had had in Ypsilanti. Why not? It is a really nice table with folding sections on front and back. I think that my father’s mother gave it to us as a present. Cherry is really nice wood. There were matching chairs. Since there were five in our family and we all had chairs, I presume we had six chairs. I forget.
To the right of the dining room at the front of the house is the carpeted living room. This is the only room with a carpet. There is a front closet by the front door. If the closet had a back door, you would fall into the basement from the stairs. As it is, you enter the stairs to the basement from the kitchen. The front door is bleached oak with three circular windows in it. The door is to the left of the main picture window overlooking the front yard. There is a window on the near side of the room so that you can see people at the side door (breezeway). The TV is in the front corner. The sofa is on the wall to the left and a comfortable chair is to the right as you enter.
The dining room has windows to the back yard. Just past the dining room is the kitchen with a snack bar separating the two rooms. We have a phone on the snack bar. Spring 4-0593. No area code. The kitchen has a window over the sink looking into the back yard. The stove is on the right as you enter. The refrigerator is the first thing you see when you walk into the kitchen. It is the same refrigerator that we have had for as long as I can remember. The refrigerator has a door that opens to the right. Round corners. There is the freezer box at eye level. Eye level if you are an adult. The freezer box keeps the entire refrigerator cold and collects ice, which must be defrosted periodically. There is a bin at the bottom of the refrigerator that keeps the potatoes. Behind the bin is the compressor and lots of dust.
Just past the range is the door to the basement. After that is the hall. The bathroom is on the left followed by the girls’ room also on the left. At the end of the hall on the right is the door to my room facing the front of the house. The door at the end of the hall and slightly to the right being my parents’ bedroom.
These days houses have at least two bathrooms and probably another bedroom. In those days, this was a pretty nice house. We thought it was a great house.
There is a milk box to the right of the front door of the breezeway. These are sort of neat. They are about 18 inches square with a door leading to the front and another door leading to the inside. They each have a latch to prevent burglars from crawling through. This is not such a problem in those days as it is today. But then there are no milkmen today. There was a green rubber mat on the bottom of the milk box. Under the mat was the door key. Security in spades. My sisters were small enough to crawl through. You could fox the inside door latch.
My father and I built a rec room in the basement. It was a really nice room. We first added a good wall for the length of the house for the front half or maybe a little better than half. In the rear were the laundry and the incinerator. Ahhh. We burned our own trash those days. This was a luxury. It was my chore to maintain the incinerator. I was not good at chores.
With the completion of the rec-room wall, we got a second phone on the garage end of the rec room. The wall was really a nice wall. Half way up was made of finished pine boards, varnished and fitted. At the top of that was a ‘drink rail’. Above the rail was plasterboard with a repeated mural of the Grand Teton Mountain range in Wyoming. We added outlets along the wall. My father was really good at this work. I helped. I learned enough that at a much later date, I made a couple of these for myself. The really hard part was using the star drill to insert the lead anchors in the concrete floor. I learned enough to use masonry drills the next time.
My major contribution was the ceiling: 12” square acoustic tiles. This was a major effort for me. I had to place furring strips for the length of the basement. Then I had to place and staple the squares. These had to be perfectly aligned, row after row. I discovered that the front basement wall was not straight: it bowed outward in the middle. I originally used the wall as a rule and the squares ran into each other after about three rows. I had to remove these rows and do them over. When I was finished I was really proud of my part of the rec room. My father removed that pride in one easy step: he stuffed $40 into my pocket thereby making it his wall and not mine. He stuffed it in my pocket because I refused to accept it any other way.
While installing the ceiling, I added some wiring into the heating vent into my bedroom. From my room, I could ring the doorbell, listen to a microphone above the telephone area of the rec room, or listen to the phone itself. These all worked except that when I connected to the phone line, it generated a hum so that people could know when I was on the line.
I had a radio: a typical RCA AM radio. RCA radios had a plug on the back for auxiliary input. The microphone came through my radio. So did the phone. This was fun for a while but I soon lost interest. I mean, who wants to listen to their sisters when their sisters suspect they are being overheard.
On the long side of the rec room we had a ping-pong table. Chuck Krueger and I got really good at ping-pong. The only problem was the ceiling: it was less than seven feet high. There were no overhead shots. One time Chuck brought Ron Bitner over to play me. I thought I was really great. Chuck bragged about me. I beat Ron 21-0. He said I was good but not great. Chuck told him that I had beat him right-handed and that I was left-handed. I did not make any friends that day. Sad. Ron had a twin sister with a crush on me. I liked her also but I never knew how to show it.
The phone was a party line. Parties came and went. Our party for a while was a girl that we did not like very much. Using the phone after school became a contest. It did not improve our relationship.
You have to understand how phones work. The connection is on the red and green wires. This is for voice. For a party line, the yellow line is used for ground. Usually the black and yellow were tied off together. The cable has 4 wires: twisted two-pair if you really want to know. On a multi-party line, the ring determines for whom the call is intended. We were beyond that. We had a two-party line. On this type of line, the ring voltage came in on the red or the green and left through the yellow ground. One party had their phone wired straight. That is, wall-red to phone-red and wall-green to phone-green. The other parties phone was wired wall-red to phone-green and vice-versa. When the ring signal came in on the wall-red, one phone rang. When the ring-signal came in on the wall-green, the other party rang. One day I reversed our downstairs phone wires so that it rang on the party line. This way we could aggravate the girl. This was funny until one day we were upstairs and the downstairs phone rang. Mother ran downstairs to answer it and we rolled over laughing. When she came back up we asked her why she went downstairs to answer the phone rather than picking up the kitchen phone. She answered: “because that was the phone that was ringing”. I fixed the wiring fast. My father would never appreciate the joke. I had enough of a problem choking on my food one night at dinner when he asked my what the cable was that ran into the ceiling on the phone side of the room. I wonder what the next owners ever thought of the wiring into the bedroom register.
My bedroom was in the front between my parent’s room and the stairway to the basement. When we moved into the Wauwatosa house, I got a pine bedroom set and no longer had the green metal bed. My new bed was at the house front parallel to the stair wall. To the left was my bookcase (the one the neighbor made in Buffalo).
For quite a while I had tropical fish. I had two aquariums. The larger had my fish. Typical tropical fish: neons, angels, cats, etc. The smaller had my Siamese Fighting Fish (Beta Splendens). I was never successful breeding them although I tried. I had a good friend who raised fish and he got beautiful specimens for me. I had problems, money problems. I could only afford one air pump. I hooked an air line to the second tank from the first. This worked fine until one day, the water pressure from the higher tank overwhelmed the air pressure and siphoned water into the lower tank, One tank was on my dresser and the other on the bookcase. This was a disaster. The lower tank overflowed onto the floor, onto my acoustic ceiling in the basement and onto the ping-pong table. I cleaned it all up. I learned a little about physics that week.
You can find the people under friends or later in this page. I went to the school bus stop at Auer and Knoll Boulevard. My sisters went to the stop at Auer and 105th. My friends were generally to the west whereas my sisters’ friends were generally to the east.
If you look at a current map, you will see that 108th Street is no longer US 41. There is a freeway further west now that houses that highway. Next to Schaeffer’s stores on the corner, is the Shell station. By the time we left, there was another gas station across the street. Last I saw there was also a McDonald’s next to that. In general, the entire west side of 108th street has been developed since we left. The east side in our area is not because there are homes north of the stores and south of Burleigh is the Country Club.
When we moved into the neighborhood, there was a family grocery on the south end of Schaeffer’s stores. Remember there were no Circle K or 7-11 stores in those days. Shoot. There were no McDonald’s in those days. Schaeffer’s stores had a problem. 108th street was a three-lane highway. There was little parking for these stores and those passing through would pass the stores before they knew they existed. Most of the store traffic came from the neighborhood through the rear entrance.
Three-lane highways in those days used the middle lane for passing – in either direction. Obviously as cars became more numerous and faster, this type of highway became suicidal and therefore eliminated. I also remember from my early driving lessons that a flashing blue light on a vehicle meant that it was an emergency vehicle traveling the wrong way on the street. This was most likely a utility vehicle (power company). I learned that this was a Wisconsin thing. State laws were not so consistent in the 50’s. It took me years to figure out that those reflectors on the highways that now and then have an oddball blue one meant that that reflector was across from a fire hydrant. Well. Not quite. A kid had to tell me. This is beside the point since road reflectors are 40 years in the future from this narrative.
This is our immediate neighborhood. You can find it on any mapping software program. But we need the big picture here. In Milwaukee, there are 10 city blocks in a mile. Therefore, we are around 10 miles west of Milwaukee and 3 miles north of the city center. The next arterial street south is North Avenue, followed by Wisconsin Avenue and then Bluemound. To the north the next arterials are: Capitol, Hampton, and the Silver Spring. To the west, the next arterial is 124th Street. That is the end of the world when we moved here. The Briggs and Stratton plant is on the northeast corner of Burleigh and 124th Street. Briggs and Stratton make most of the lawn mower engines at this time. I hated them. They start so hard and, if you flooded them, you had to wait for them to dry out before trying again. Honda changed all that. To the east, the next arterial is 92nd Street, then 76th, followed by Sherman (approximately 43rd Street).
There are some zingers in here. The Menominee River runs from the northwest to the southeast and not in a straight line. The river crosses Burleigh at about 100th Street. It crosses Highway 100 just north of Keefe. You can think of it as a quarter circle bounding our neighborhood on the east and north sides. South of Burleigh it goes almost south for a few miles and then wonders east again as it passes through the downtown Wauwatosa. From Highway 100 to downtown on the east side of the river is the Menominee River Parkway. This is an arterial but it meanders a bit. There is a big green college campus on the south side of Burleigh from the parkway to 92nd Street. This is Mount Mary College. A Catholic girls school. We shall get there. Between the parkway and the river is park. Green, grass, trees, picnic tables, park. From Keefe to Burleigh on the west side is undeveloped. It is trees, and undergrowth and paths and hiding places. Sometimes we would see bow hunters in here. I think they should not have been here. Keefe would have been a semi-arterial if the river not cut it off. Our quadrant neighborhood was square streets with the exception of Knoll Boulevard, which would have been 107th by us but wondered around to cross 106th about 3 blocks north. From Auer to where it rounded east, there was a grass boulevard in the middle. Just as it turned, another road split off and went up the hill and then back down to Keefe where it ended facing the woods. The Menominee River Woods just ‘the woods’ to us.
I hope you have the picture here. It was a nice neighborhood. All single-story, ranch-type homes of limestone, lannon stone, or artificial rock, with little setback from the street. No sidewalks. No curbs. Mailboxes were on posts by the street. Our house was artificial rock with salmon and green speckles in it. The entire neighborhood was less than five years old except for the homes along Highway 100 -- they were not too much older. In fact, the neighborhood was under construction for most of the time we lived there. Ours was the last home on our block to be built. It cost $22,500. The original price was $21,500 but I think some extras raised the price. Down by the river were two-story homes and east of 105th street there were other builders with varying styles of Homes.
The Desoto was quickly replaced with a 1955 green and white Super 88 Oldsmobile from Renner Oldsmobile at 68th and Milwaukee. Like our other cars, it was a 4-door sedan. In those days, you ordered a car from the factory built to your specifications. New at this time was a choice of models that included ‘hardtop convertible’. My father considered these unsafe so we did not get one. A hardtop was different from a sedan. On a hardtop, when you rolled the windows down, there was no frame around the top of the door: like a convertible. Also remember there were no seat belts. My father worked for General Motors. You did not drive the competition.
So, now you know where our world was in respect to downtown, Milwaukee. You know the size of our world and I hope can picture this 1950’s yuppie community. South of Burleigh was the Bluemound Country Club which was a private golf course as opposed to the public, county park, Curry. We never ventured onto Bluemound. We spent a lot of time in Curry. South of Bluemound Country Club was what should have been Center Street. Center did not cross the Parkway. South of that became Mayfair Shopping Center. At the time, the biggest shopping center in the Milwaukee area. You really must picture the geometry here because this is where it all happened.
My father takes up hunting and fishing. He decides I should do this also. Back on Pewaukee Lake I had enough of fishing. I mean, the concept of trying to outwit a hungry fish and losing makes me feel really more stupid than I have been brought up to believe that I am. Trying to outwit rabbits, squirrels, pheasants, and foxes is not much better. I get a 16-guage, single-shot shotgun. My father has a 12-gauge that his friends refer to as a blunderbuss. I think my father enjoys this. I enjoy the walking outdoors but not the hunting. Obviously we start hunting not in 1954 but a few years later.
One time we are out hunting foxes with my father’s friend, Doctor Blanchard. I manage to shoot at a pheasant up hill. This is bad. Doctor Blanchard is coming up the hill on the other side. He gets pelted with shotgun pellets on the other side of the hill. Rule: Never shoot a shotgun into the sky unless the ground is level. Doctor Blanchard is not hurt but worried. This is fall in Wisconsin. He smokes. I am in the back seat. He lights up. I open the window. He stops smoking and puts on his jacket. I close the window. He get warm. He takes off the jacket. He warms up, lights another cigarette and the cycle repeats. My father tells me when we get home tha the almost laughed about the cycle. I did not think it was funny.
We went up to Doctor Bell’s cabin near Eagle River. This was deer hunting season. I really enjoyed walking in the woods. I stayed with my father most of the time. Doctor Bell loaned me his Winchester 30-30: the cowboy rifle. Relatively a 30-30 is a varmint rifle and a bit weak for deer. My father has a Remington 30-06. This is relatively overpowered for squirrels. At the end of the day my father starts popping squirrels on the way home. He has worked hard to sight his rifle precisely. He can get a squirrel sitting at the top of a tree. I try it. I hit the squirrel and it falls out of the tree. Ooops. It is still alive and very angry. It runs right at me. I can not shoot the rifle into the ground without endangering the whole group. We manage to kill it on the ground. The poor squirrel has been de-furred: the entire underside of the squirrel is bald. I came close but no banana.
The next day was worse. My father and I sat on a log. Wearing bright red. Sitting three feet apart. We see an otter playing on the lake in front of us. It runs off. We hear a rifle shot and the slug hits the log between the two of us. We dive behind the log and pep over the top. We do not see anyone but a few more bullets hit the log. The first one may have been aimed at the otter but only if the shooter is drunk. We wait for a pause in the bullets and high-tail it back over the hill. When we meet Doctor Bell, I go back to camp. This is the end of hunting for me on this trip. I have decided that being shot at ruins my day.
My father shot a deer. His friends did not but they call him “doe slayer” for the rest of the trip. We had a permit for a doe.
We do this again the next year. My father and I and Doctor Bell and someone else go deer hunting at his cabin in Eagle River. We hunt in pairs but my father lets me walk around because he likes to wait for a deer and I enjoy walking in the woods.
Suddenly I hear them yell and a deer comes bounding over the hill right at me. I shoot from the hip as it is sudden and I am afraid he will run over me. I dive under a log as he jumps over the log. I shoot after it. The 30-30 is empty. I missed at a distance of 3 feet. Not quite. There is blood in the snow. The others come up and are all laughing. They think it is funny that I missed a deer because I thought it would run over me. Because I injured it, I take off after it: you do not leave an injured animal. After a few miles, I give up. The deer will die. I still feel bad about this. We try again the next day.
I am a couple of hundred yards up the road over the hill from the rest of the party. I see another hunter and he shoots at me. I mean, he just stops, aims, shots, and hits the tree right next to me. I duck behind the tree as he fires a few more shoots into the tree. I yell. I mean like this guy is about 200 feet from me and is shooting at me. The tree is smaller than me. I shoot back. I aim at the branch above his head and it drops down on him. He yells and comes running at me. I keep my rifle aimed at him as my father and the others top the hill. I know about hunters found dead in the woods in the Spring. I do not want to be one of them. The others aim their rifles at the man as they approach. He claims that there had been a deer between us and he was shooting at it. Fat chance. The first shot would have bolted the deer into the next county. Sorry, but being shot at ruins my day. We already did this. This incident ends my hunting career forever.
The C&NW tracks almost paralleled highway 100 about a quarter mile to the west. They crossed under Bluemound at Highway 100 with a job in the road causing highway 100 south of Bluemound to be 110th Street. The tracks crossed Capitol at about 116th Street and then Hampton at 124th Street. At Capital the tracks expand into the major west side freight yards for the C&NW. I spent many happy hours down at the tracks and in the yards. No. I had nothing to do with the fire that burned down the roundhouse. That was before I ever got close to Butler. Oh. Butler was the city west of 124th at Hampton that was the base for the yards. Crossing the tracks on Hampton took you over a set of very ugly bridges. We all thought of Butler as dirty but mostly that attitude was left over from the steam engine days. The last steam engines went through shortly after we moved to Wauwatosa. By the way, the C&NW trains go on the opposite side of the tracks from other trains in the country. I wouldn’t know, I just always watch my back.
The Milwaukee road tracks sort of followed Bluemound Road from downtown. Here is sort of a conundrum. Freight tracks are clean. Passenger tracks, like the Milwaukee Road, are dirty. The difference? Freight just generates loose dirt, rust, and grease. Passenger train toilets emptied onto the tracks. Not any more. But it did then. The tracks not only smelled but you could see the shit and the toilet papers. Disgusting. We did not go there. As you can see, the intersection of Bluemound and Highway 100 was also the intersection of the Milwaukee Road and the C&NW. Several bridges. Jogs in the road. Traffic delays. It got stranger when they built the freeway from Milwaukee to Madison next to Bluemound Road.
Wow. So much geography. That was pretty much it when we moved in. Open fields on the west side of Highway 100 from at least North avenue to Capitol except for Curry Golf Course from the river to Capitol. On the West side of the tracks from Center to Capitol was a rapidly developing warehouse district. Penney’s Catalog warehouse sprung up there. There were a couple of railroad sidings along here and a dirt road from Burleigh north for a city block or so. There was a typical C&NW railroad semaphore right here as the tracks gently curved to the west as I mentioned above.
Typical? The C&NW semaphores were steel towers crossing over the tracks with a green-yellow-red signal for each direction. Some railroads only have posts. C&NW had steel structures with ladders up the sides and a walkway along the top. We did not go up there. We did have use for the signal lantern on the siding switch just north of the semaphore tower. My favorite song in those days was “The Wayward Wind” by Gogi Grant. If you remember the song, you know why.
From Burleigh on the east side of the tracks to the semaphore was a dirt track. There was no siding here but the access dirt track meant that the railroad could leave freight here for a while to be picked up later. I never knew how and when but there were occasionally hundreds of ceramic tube tiles left here. They would last for some months and then just as mysteriously disappear. These tiles are sort of a yellow-brown-orange. Two different sized: a 1x2 tube with the tubes about 4 inches square. There was a 3x2 making it three times as big. The tubes were about five feet long. When delivered, they were stacked about four feet high with grape stake slats between the layers. Grape stakes are about 1/4th inch by 1 inch by 5 feet long.
When a shipment of these came in, we would go up to the tracks and reorganize the stacks. We would make a covered fort with a tunnel to it. The open end of the tunnel ended in another fort, which had no roof. Its walls on the railroad side had vertical tubes. The open fort had a single entrance on the field side. We removed the grape-stake slats and put them into the tubes on the train side. When we were finished, the total combination of forts and walls were approximately the same size as the original stacks. Unless you were close, you did not see our entrance on the field side. The other three sides were walls of tiles. From inside our fort, we could see out. From inside, we could close the tube into the fort and be self-contained. This seemed like a good idea until the bad guys tried to destroy the walls.
At the intersection with Burleigh, the tracks took a bend to the west. We already described that the tracks at Capital were heading west of north. This meant that trains coming north into the yards had their engines hidden just after they passed the fort: the engineers could not see us.
We would hide in our fort, the open fort -- until a train came. We had the closed fort stocked with water and comic books. Sometimes fruit. When a train came, we would bombard it with the sticks. This damaged nothing except the sticks. When the train was gone, we would collect the usable sticks and return them to the tiles. This was an interesting lesson in aerodynamics. The train creates a backdraft around it making it somewhat difficult to hit with one of the slats. You could hit the train. Hitting where you aimed was the problem. Occasionally a police car would sneak up on us while we were occupied with sticks. In this case, we would duck into our covered cave and be quiet. The cops never found us. Once the bad guys did. They figured we were still inside – unlike the cops who had thought we had escaped into the field. The bad guys then would start smashing tiles until they got to us. They never got that far but they came close enough once to scare us. They damaged enough tiles that we worried that if the authorities caught us, they would blame the damage on us. We never knew where the bad guys came from or where they went. They were not from our neighborhood. That meant that they either came from west of Highway 100 and north of Center or north of Capital: Butler. Either was a substantial distance from home. Sometimes even the girls came to the fort. Janice and Candy. I think even Jeanne came once or twice but this was not really her domain.
Scott Jordan figured out one time that throwing golf balls at the train was not healthy. One bounced off of the incoming train at a speed much greater than he threw it and it hit him in the stomach. Golf balls were readily available,
We all learned, even Scott Towle, to jump freights. Scotty just needed slower trains. Skip learned to run until he found us. Sometimes a mile away. I never let him out of sight but then I had good eyes in those days.
It took a while but the train yards finally seduced me. At first they were too far away and then I was afraid of the hobos and then I was afraid of the bad guys. I always thought that Scott Jordan and Dennis Hughes knew who the bad guys were as Scott and Dennis were more into malicious things than Chuck, Scotty Towle, and myself. In any case, the initial draw for me to the yards was the challenge of all of those train cars and the sheds. There were sheds along and into the yards. The first shed was near the Curry pond woods. These sheds had relic telephones. If I had been smarter, we would have stolen the entire phone. These were the wood frame phones with the attached, black mouthpiece and the earpiece on a cord. Only seen in the movies now. What intrigued me was that each phone had a generator. You have to be at least as old as me to appreciate these generators. They were composed of a hand crank to a coil surrounded by 4 or 5 large steel, u-shaped magnets. We ultimately took about four of these. I took about four of these. I kept one at home. Chuck had at least one. I think the two Scotts each had one. I always thought of them as all mine but if I had more than one at home, my father would ask questions. Questions to which I had no answers. No good answers. Since the others had them also, my having one would not arouse too many questions. The railroad replaced these antiquated phones with Electro-Voice microphone/speakers.
The roundhouse was burned down the first time I saw it. I wish that I had seen it before it burned. It must have been beautiful.
Right by our semaphore by Burleigh is a siding that goes to the warehouse to the west. There is a lantern at this siding. Lanterns are kerosene-lit and refilled periodically. The lights are green in two directions and red in the other two. The idea is that the engineer seeing the red side knows that the siding switch is in the wrong direction and it is time to panic. The switch is always green unless the warehouse is getting a new load of freight cars. No. We do not play games with the colors: that could kill people.
The lantern top flips open to reveal a glass chimney to protect the flame. The chimney is about 3 inches tall and an inch in diameter. We steal it. I buy some screen. Window screen is steel in these days – not nylon like today. I cut the screen into the shape of a ‘+’. I fold the sides down leaving a cube with one side open. The cube is about one-inch square and fits tightly into the glass chimney. We go back to the switch and again take out the new chimney that the railroad people have nicely supplied. This time we put our screen-fitted chimney in its place. I also steal a bunch of my father’s shotgun shells and a roll of electrical tape.
We wrap the tape around the barrel of a shotgun shell and wait for the train. As the train comes around the curve at Burleigh, I step up the lantern post (it has a step) and slip the tape-wrapped shell into the lantern leaving the top open. Just as the train passes the lantern, the shell primer explodes from the lantern flame, propels the shell into the air about 3 feet and then the rest of the shell explodes into a big orange torch straight up. The look of terror on the engineers face sets us laughing for an hour. This is great fun. We wait a week for them to clean up the lantern: the black smoke has sort messed it up but nothing is damaged. We take our new chimney and fit it with another screen square. We do this several times with some variants. For example, If we tape the top over as well as the sides we have a whole new thing. The train comes around the corner and instead of an exploding orange torch, the engineer watcher the orange flame erupt from just above the lantern to about the height of the semaphore, very slowly and very bright and then just turn off. Same reaction from the engineer: pure fright. Same reaction from us: we die laughing. When my mother tells me that my father knows that his shells are missing, we give up the game. I can still to this day see the engineers face lit up by the orange flames.
You have to understand the evolution of trains – especially in light of the Eisenhower Conspiracy. When we moved there, the last of the steam engines were occasionally seen. The freight trains, the only trains on the C&NW tracks here, contained freight. Yes, there were some semi-trailers being hauled but mostly the cars were flat cars with things on them; box cars loaded with things, gondola cars; tanker cars; and hopper cars. If you go anywhere near freight trains now you see flat cars loaded with container boxes intended for local delivery by a truck. Some of these are stacked piggyback. The new trains have no caboose. The old trains always had a caboose. The old way required the box cars to be unloaded by the customer. This meant that the warehouse district had railroad tracks with a series of sidings going to the side of the warehouses. The local freight would leave off cars to be loaded or unloaded and replaced with more cars. This generally took about a week when I saw it happening. With container boxes there is no need for sidings: just a place in the local yards where the containers can be transferred to wheel sets and attached to a tractor.
The old way is what we had. On the west side of the tracks and south and north of Burleigh were warehouses with sidings. Not too many. Since vandalism and graffiti were unheard of in the suburbs in those days, the warehouses left their doors on the docks open. Often there was a night watchman somewhere snoozing. We were not vandals. We were just kids with the need for an energy outlet and a warped sense of humor. We already talked about the shop-supply swapping. We did this on a larger scale at the warehouses.
Skip was essential in these forays. He would roam the warehouse and when he found a guard would return letting us know that it was time to leave. Skip was phenomenal. He learned, as we said before, how to climb ladders: Steel ladders, aluminum ladders, wood ladders: any ladders. He also learned to walk on steel grids. Warehouses have lots of these. They stairs have steel grates. The floors have steel grates for drainage. Skip gingerly handled all of these. He was amazing to watch. I think he thought it was fun, a nuisance, but fun. He always wanted to be rewarded when he got to the other side. At least we always wanted to reqard him for figuring out a way to get to us. Sometimes he found ways in and out that we never figured out – or we would have used them.
Why did we go to the warehouses? We were overwhelmed by them. Penney’s Corporation was one. Halan’s Foods was there (they worked around the clock). We learned how to drive the equipment. One of our favorites was to reload a box car that had been off-loaded onto the dock during the day. Do you think this is easy? This is a real talent. Fitting the stuff back in as well as it was originally there was a great exercise. Breaking things was not an option. We were not vandals. We never got to see the results of our handy-work. I wish we had. When we graduated high school, Chuck got a job driving a forklift. He was a natural.
Unlike Bluemound Country Club, Curry is a county park. Thus it had no fences and it seemed like the entire world of grass and hills. The primary concern was that the management had Cushmans. Bluemound did too but we never went there. We called all golf carts Cushmans. In those days, golfers walked. Management rode.
North of our semaphore and fort there was more field with a stream from the tracks to Auer. North of the stream, the golf course came right up to the tracks. There was a tee here with the fairway running almost parallel to the tracks but away as the fairway went north. The gap was filled with woods. This triangular gap extended all the way to Capital. Although the tracks were fairly level, the fairway dipped down and then back up to the green. On the far side of the green was a pond. We named this Curry Pond. We had a fort in the woods behind Curry Pond. Not much of a fort. Just some place to hide when the train people or police were chasing us. I hid my white pants and red jacket in this fort. They were only worn when we went near the tracks.
The interesting part of this fairway was that from the top of the tee-off, you could see the hole but not the fairway in the middle. We had taught Skip to fetch things he could not see. Huh? We would sit in the woods where we could see the players tee-off and see the length of the fairway. Players are polite. When one tees off, the others remain behind him until all have played. Then they all go fetch their balls. When we would see a player about to tee off, we would send Skip out to fetch. He ran in the pointed direction until he found something to fetch. The ball showed up shortly. He would grab it and immediately return. We were long gone by the time they teed off their second set of balls. I know we never got caught. I do not think we were even suspected. I wonder what they thought happened to their golf balls. I think Scott Jordan had enough nerve to sell them at the clubhouse. I did not.
We also fished balls out of the pond. But the pond was messy and muddy and dirty and we did not like to get wet from it. The pond had a better use.
We bought boats. These were about 18” long about 8” wide with a Baby Bee .049 gas engine mounted on the back. They were made to look like the Florida Swamp Buggies. We outfitted them with flashlight batteries and lights so that we could see them at night. We added auxiliary gas tanks and were really proud of our contraptions. Sending them back and forth across the pond soon got boring. We found with a little better balancing, on nights with a heavy dew, the swamp buggies ran forever along the golf greens. That is why we added the lights. The buggies would get so far away we spent half our time looking for them rather than playing with them. We kept string in the fort to snag the buggies when they stalled in the middle of the pond.
Later in life, Chuck and I would go up on Capital to the driving range and buy a 50-cent bucket of balls. We got so that we could consistently hit the targets. Any of the targets. I do not think that they liked us doing that.
We head north. At Capitol and Highway 100, there is a Pate gas station on the southeast corner. This later becomes Enco and then Exxon. On the northwest corner is the Halan’s grocery store where we get most of our food and a drug store, I forget its name. West of this is the overpass where the C&NW tracks cross into the start of the Hampton yards. North of this is another neighborhood somewhat older than ours. In the middle of this is our grade school, Webster. This is where I spent fifth and sixth grades. Between this neighborhood and the train tracks is a strip of woods. The hobo jungle is in this woods. We stayed away from the hobo jungle. It was common knowledge that hobos hurt kids. Hmmm.
Further north at Hampton and east of the highway was the local small airport. On the south side in the same neighborhood (Hampton Heights) was Ziebel’s store. Mike was a classmate.
I had several friends in Hampton Heights beside Mike Ziebel: Danny Deuster, John Reuter, Jimmy Lohmueller, and as I later discovered, Gary Leive. My Hampton Heights friends at that time were all Dodger fans: the Brooklyn Dodgers.
This was unusual. Maybe reactive. You see, the Milwaukee County Stadium had just been completed. The county had just stolen the Boston Braves and had renamed them the Milwaukee Braves. They were doing well in 1954. Hank Aaron in Center. Warren Spahn, Lew Burdette, and the other pitchers. Johnny Logan, Andy Pafco, Del Crandall. Yeah, I knew them all. I watched them play. By the time Red Shoendinst from St. Louis showed up, I no longer was interested enough to go to the games.
In the summer, the City of Wauwatosa sponsored
buses to the
Braves games. You signed up and
then got postcards indicating the games to which you were invited.
I have no idea who created the
invitation list. I just know that
most kids got more invitations than I got. I
figured this out and just started showing up on home game
days and went more frequently than I got cards. It
cost 35-cents to get bleacher seats including the bus
ride each way to the city athletic center. With
my income, a hotdog was a rare luxury. I
loved the Braves Games as they got me
out of the house. I learned to
hate baseball: the objective of the game is to get to the end of the
game by
minimizing the activity of the opponent.
The objective of football, on the other hand, is to minimize
travel
across the field by the opponent by strategic use of insufficient
resources to
accomplish this. TV really lost it
when they started televising bowling, pool, and golf.
I know people who think tennis falls into the same
category. I enjoy watching women’s
tennis. Yes, I am a sexist; but women
use more strategy than men. Men
will attempt to overpower their opponent with serves that have actually
embedded the ball into the red clay court. Women,
on the other hand, find methods to overcome the skill
set of their opponents. Skill is more interesting than power.
The three of us kids got an allowance. It was connected to chores. We got docked for not doing chores. My mother was good at not docking unless chore abuse was flagrant. The allowance went from a quarter to 35 cents. Seriously less than my friends got. This was a problem. There was never enough money. I found ways to make up the difference.
Stealing money from my mother’s coin purse was not
a good
idea. I remember doing it just
once. I may have done it more but
my mother was good at counting and knew when anything was missing.
Also you remember that I grew up there
were many things which could be bought for a penny.
Any candy bar was available for a nickel. A
box of Cracker Jacks was a
nickel. I did not buy Cracker
Jack’s much. I loved the caramel
corn. There were just too many
times that I got the box that did not have the toy in it. This
was so true that I believed that having a toy was a random occurance --
like gambling. I was surprised later in life when I discovered
that all boxes were supposed to have toys.
I worked in the school kitchen from fifth grade through high school. In grade school, this got me free lunches so that I could keep the weekly dollar given for lunch. This increased to almost two dollars by the time I graduated. The high school also paid $1.50 per day so that I got an additional $14.10 each two weeks. I never thought about it until now but I never claimed a refund for the tax withheld.
The next income was absolutely dishonest. The rowe of storees on Highway 100 had a small grocery store in it. The couple that ran the store had a large paper cup with coins in it on a shelf next to the register. Like the Ypsilanti Handy Store, this little store in the Shaeffer’s stores was the local supplier of forgotten items. Unlike the Handy store, this store had frontage on Highway 100 but only local customers because of the parking situation. We kids usually went in and out the back door. I resented that the other kids often got free things from the man and woman. My friends got free candies and things. I never did. I started sneaking in the front door and taking coins from the cup. Yes, this is stealing. I think of myself as honest and never understood vandalism and so on. I looked at this as a sort of necessity. My friends could buy things. I did not have enough money to buy things. This evened the playing field. Sort of. I hated this. One day, I was running back home when the owner yelled for me to return from the back door. I figured I had been caught so I tripped on the road gravel, left the coins in a pile, and returned to my master. He hauled me up front with his wife and they both accused me of stealing their money. They claimed to have seen me come back in and take it. They claimed the coins were marked. I denied having them. She wanted to call the police. I kept wiping my scraped hands as a diversion. They let me go. I picked up the coins on the way home. I never stole again. The store went out of business shortly after that. A chinchilla farm moved in in its place.
The city of Milwaukee had two daily newspapers. The primary paper was the Milwaukee Journal was the afternoon paper. I bought a morning route: the Milwaukee Sentinel. This earned me about $5 per week. The tips brought this to about $8 total. I had good tippers. I was a good paperboy. The rule was that the customer was to get his paper by 6:00am. I delivered, rain, slush, snow, and cold. Whatever the weather. The customer got the paper delivered to their box or door as they wished. I never missed. I never got slips for missed deliveries. This solved the money problem. I now had as much as my friends.
There was a problem with the weather. The papers were so small that they fit in my Boy Scout backpack. This would keep them dry except on Sundays but then there were fewer Sunday papers. The real problem was the cold. When it was cold, my parents would drive me. Cold was defined as more than ten degrees below zero.
When I was sick, my sisters got driven around to deliver the papers. They also got the money, including the tips. They got rides and they got all the money. I did not think this fair but there were no choices. If I could get Scotty as a substitute, he was good. Jeff was not so good and he moved in the middle of things anyway. Scott Jordan, stole the papers and cost me. Chuck could not sub. I forget why.
There was another side benefit of the route:
I got all of the Pepsi I wanted for
free. It cost $1.50 per case.
The $1.50 was the bottle deposit. I
kept a couple cases in the
garage. These were generally reserved
for selling extra papers on holidays.
My route man appreciated my performance and permitted me this
benefit. These days there is no
bottle deposit for reuse. There is
a can deposit for the ecology in some places. There is a tax on
cans in Claifornia.
There was another advantage to the paper route. I would get up early and go out to play. Early? Like 2:00am. I would stay out until 5:00, deliver my papers, get home for a short nap before school started and then get up for the day. This gave me three hours to go down to the yards, play on the golf course, walk in the woods, whatever. I enjoyed baiting the cops. I would make sure that when they were patrolling the neighborhood that they would see me skulking about. I would then take off in another direction. When my papers showed up and I started my deliveries, I would watch the police cars circling the neighborhood seeking the prowler.
A couple of times when I walked down by the woods and circled back, I noticed other footprints in the snow. I always worried about these. I did not like the woods at night after seeing prints a few times. When you live on the edge it does not take much to frighten you.
About half way through, the Jordans moved from the big white house to a couple blocks behind the high school. Scott was not reliable but he would still sub. I found out later that he just discarded the papers sometimes. I would have to loan him my bike. It was 5 miles from his house to mine. I would ride to his house, run back while he rode, show him the route, and let him ride back on my bike. The process was reversed when we returned home. This was done a couple times when we went on vacation.
Camping
Laake’s
Snake
Oldsmobile
Trailer
Florida
This year was a busy one. We moved from Ypsilanti, to Pewaukee, and into our new house. I have said that our area was new. The houses on Highway 100 itself were not so new but anything to the west of the river and to the north of Capital was new. The city of Wauwatosa had recently annexed the entire area. The City of Milwaukee was circumscribed. This meant that our elementary school was recently annexed and became Wauwatosa’s second Webster school. This was confusing and they later renamed it Winston -- now it is closed.
All three of us kids were in school. My fifth grade teacher was Miss McDermott. She assigned one of the girls to introduce me to the class and the school. I instantly had a crush on Karlyn Schmitt. I guess she got used to the problem of boys having crushes on her: by high school, most boys in the class had had such a crush at one time or another.
I do not remember saying much about it before. My father smoked. He smoked Camels and Lucky Strike. Think that kids don’t know the ads? I still remember from grade school that the packs of Luck Strikes have ‘L.S.M.F.T.’ on the bottom of the packs. Everyone knew smoking was a bad habit. In those days, most men smoked. Some women. There was not the health scare then although everyone suspected it was harmful.
I had serious problems with the smoke. It made me sick. While in the car, I would roll the window down. Cars did not have air conditioning then so windows were always open in the summer. I would crack the window in the middle of winter – below zero during Wisconsin winters. I really hated the smoke. Now that I am older and there is less smoke, I am even more aware of it. If I am in the RV in the middle of the night and someone walks past smoking, I will wake up.
My father quit a couple of times while I was a teenager with the thought of being a good example to his teenage kids. It made no difference. I would not smoke until 1967.
My father always had some liquor in the house. I think he liked Manhattans. I think he drank too much but then I would not know. The only evidence of excess is the drunk driving thing and that could happen to anyone.
Now I have a serious fear of heights. I am surprised that the RV steering wheel does not have engraved fingerprints after I go over a long bridge with no side rails. These bridges include freeway ramps that only go a coup0le of hundred feet off the ground. An airplane is a tin can exploding across the sky. Terrifying. I try to be asleep by the end of the runway or the handrails may get those engraved fingerprints. It was not always this way.
At the northeast corner of the Menominee River Parkway and Burleigh is a giant limestone quarry. The walls are vertical cliffs for about 200 feet. The quarry hole is about a block square. At the top is a standard 4-foot, wire fence. Rusty. There is about 3 feet on the quarry side of the fence that is grass and then drop off. Enough to walk on and hold to the fence in case of your foot slipping. At the bottom is a giant conveyor with a sand hill under it. A couple of trucks and a roadway to the top. Things were not so secure and guarded in those days. No guards. No dogs. No 10-foot fences with razor wire on top. Common sense: don’t go there, you will get hurt.
But I was 11 years old and immortal. All eleven year olds are immortal. We would climb the conveyor and dive into the sand cone. We rode the slope all the way to the bottom. Great fun until you got bored or got buried. I got buried. It is frightening. This sand is not really sand. It is much finer than sand. It gets everywhere. Shoes. Shirts. Shorts. Eyes. But mostly it is not packed like beach sand. You can sink in it. This is the thrill. You jump off the conveyor such that you slide down the wall of the sand. Not into it. Not above it. I jumped into it. I was lucky there was someone there to pull me out. It did not scare us but we stopped doing it. Besides while you were at the bottom, there was no escape if someone comes. The police would occasionally drive down and up.
One day Chuck, Scott, and I were walking around the outside. I was inside the fence. I slipped and fell off the cliff. Just like the cartoons, I grabbed a weed. The alternative was 200 feet straight down. My feet were holding but the weed was pulling out. I called to Chuck who looked over the edge. I convinced him to extend himself. Not enough. I convinced Scott to hold onto the nearest fence post. Chuck crawled down Scott as far as he could. I climbed up Chuck. I hauled him up over Scott and then we pulled up Scott. We never went back after the fall. They filled the quarry later that year. I did not notice when they built the houses over it.
Interestingly enough, when we moved from Michigan, there was one person in the school who was smarter than me: Bobby Bartelt. He was at Webster in fifth grade. It was always a contest. I do not think he was in school in sixth grade. I ran into him again in my first year at UWM. Bobby and family moved into the house on the very corner of what had been the quarry. It turned out that the Wauwatosa/Milwaukee city line meandered around that neighborhood but that house on the very corner was Milwaukee. Bobby went to Milwaukee schools. Here is the difference that a school system makes. In fifth grade, it was a contest but Bobby was smarter. I always knew that. I liked the contest as it was the best game in town – but I came in second. When we met at UWM, he was a business major and mathematics was beyond him. I was taking calculus and he never would. I felt very sad: a great mind, wasted. We never crossed paths again.
You know, I grew up knowing that I was already a failure. Sometimes I think that I will be a failure forever. When I think this, I have been driving around in my motor home for 4 years living off of some of the income from my retirement account. I earned that money. I have owned houses with swimming pools. I have been married and raised children. I graduated from college after fighting desperately to do so for almost seven years. Success is a state of mind that comes from watching the flying moons of Barsoom and seeing a child smile. I think success is sitting on top of the wall on the east side of Sedona and watching the tourists going from shop to shop not ever knowing that the real world is a half mile above them. Success is sitting on the north wall of the Grand Canyon in the National Forest campground fifty miles up the dirt roads from the park and reading by the starlight. I was successful thirty years ago.
On the east side river parkway the park was developed. On the west side, there was just woods – undeveloped. The woods at Burleigh was just a hundred feet or so. By the time it wrapped around and crossed Highway 100, the woods was at least a block thick between the river and Keefe Avenue. Between Auer and Keefe was a limestone set of blocks that we called the dam. The dam kept the spring torrents from destroying the banks. There were other such dams but not in our stretch. Sometimes we went down to the dam and caught crabs. Sometimes the water was too high to cross the dam. This was good since the bad guys lived over there.
We never knew who the bad guys were but we had rock fights with them. His went on for years. I got very good at the rock fights. I rarely got hit and I could nail anyone with a rock at any slope. That is, I could throw the rock hard and straight. I could throw it almost straight up and hit someone on the vertical. Mostly we won the fights. I practiced by throwing rocks up in the air and hitting them with another rock before it landed. We also practiced among our selves in areas where houses were to be built and the trucks left dirt piles. We would not try to hurt our friends. I think I knocked out Fuzzy Norton’s front teeth. Not on purpose.
One day I was down at the dam with Jeanne, Joan Gammel and another boy. I think it was Scott Towle. Maybe there were others. Since there were girls, there was no reason for a fight – but the bad guys showed up and started throwing rocks at the girls. As they ran for cover, us boys threw rocks back. Joanny took a rock to the head and it hurt her. We were badly outnumbered and we fought only to delay the bad guys as they came across the river and pursued us into the neighborhood. Boys will be boys. These guys were malicious: they hurt girls – on purpose.
One day a black kid showed up on the other side. He joined them. Could he throw! I mean, I thought I was good. This guy had a side-arm pitch that hooked the rock -- and he controlled the hook. He was really dangerous. We asked why he fought on their side and he said that we had started it. We had not but that was beside the point. It turned out he was Jeanne’s age and was in her classes: Art Sanders. His family was the only black family in our part of the school system. Later he turned out to be the school’s star athlete in multiple sports.
On the east side of the river was developed
parkway. I place of wild grass and trees
the
area was neatly mowed and had two circular pools that were spring fed
and
emptied into the river. I
think. This is Wisconsin.
In the winter everything covered with
snow. The lagoons froze.
They were the local ice skating
park. The county-placed building
in which you could change your skates.
My mother and sisters and I were down skating one day.
It was early in the season and the ice
at the far lagoon was thin. Thinner
was over the spring. As I skated
over it, the ice cracked and broke.
Did anyone help? Not a
chance. Maybe it happened too
fast. We all heard the cracking
noises. I fell in slowly but there
were no choices. As I moved, the
ice broke under me. I was all the
way under the ice at one point. I
was holding onto the edge of the broken ice and was trying to get back
to solid
ice. I made it. Frozen
solid. I managed to crawl onto the solid
ice and crawled to where
it no longer broke and managed to stand up – with help at this point.
I think they would have just watched me
disappear. I mean I was really on
my own. I walked the mile back to
the house. Uphill and wet and cold
and really unhappy. I mean I fell
in alone. I got out alone.
I walked home alone. Before when I fell oer the quarry edge my
friends
helped out My family just watched me at
the lagoon. I decided ice-skating
was dangerous for my physical and my mental health. But to be
fair, it happened very fast and there were not a whole lot of choices
for any of us. But I again came close to death that day and am
here to tell you about it.
Somewhere along the line, early along the line, we picked up another cat. I kept my distance since the memories of the first cat were too close. I still think of cats as dirty but not so much as then. Boo Boo was a Persian cat. Of mixed heritage but basically Persian. He had the long fine fur that needs to be brushed every day. Except that nobody did this. Boo Boo’s fine hair was not maintained and got burrs and sticks caught up in it so badly that the poor cat would have difficulty walking at times. When the matting got really bad, we cut the fur off and then brushed what was left. This left our orange and white cat looking like it had mange.
Boo Boo had a personality problem: he was mean. I mean, really mean. Boo Boo did not permit running in his house. We had a rule that the last person at the table (except for my father who did not say grace or my mother who was setting the table) had to say grace. Really the blessing but our family as many Catholics had the world backwards. In any case, Kathie was most frequently the last. She would come running from her bedroom after my mother made the dinner call. More than once. Not too many times more than once but more than once, halfway through grace, Kathie would let out a scream. Boo Boo would have attached himself to her leg with claws and mouth. Dinner was easy for Boo Boo: the target was easily located. Boo Boo held a grudge. If he did not get you while you were running or immediately after, he would wait until you returned. His rule about running in his house was absolute.
Bob Boo had one supporter in the neighborhood: the gas meter reader. Every house had gas. The meter could be read if you had good eyes from some distance but usually the meter reader went up to the meter and recorded the readings. Unlike others who feared the cat, this man discovered that the cat enjoyed playing fetch. Fetch with a stick. He would throw the stick a few times for Boo Boo when he came by. This was sort of strange to watch as you saw a stick go flying across the yard with the cat in pursuit. When you saw this, you knew it was that time of the month again.
He was the heralded guard cat. Any stranger entering the yard was subject to attack. If they were in a hurry, they were attacked. My sisters defended the personality of the cat. I mostly stayed away from him. One day our my sisters were playing with Jeanie Udovc. She was a couple years younger than my sisters. Or at least younger than Jeannie. Maybe the same age as Kathie. In any case, her younger brother was with her and went home all scratched up. He claimed that Boo Boo had attacked him. My sisters claimed that he had fallen into the rose bushes.
Remember, yards were mostly open in those days. You could tell the boundaries by the change in the color and thickness and height of the grass. Godwin’s in back of us had a Curry Blue Terrier (dog). Unlike anything we had, this was an expensive pedigree dog. The Curry Blue is about the same size as a full size poodle. Not a miniature poodle – one of the big ones. In other words, the Curry Blue is a long-legged, sturdy but not husky, large dog. This dog was generally well-behaved but always on a chain as hw, unlike our dogs, was not good at obeying verbal commands. One night as we were eating dinner and watching out our back yard, we saw the Godwin’s dog get loose from its chain and tear off towards our house. Boo Boo was sitting in the middle of the yard ignoring the world. Specifically, he was ignoring this big, blue, dog that was barking at it. After a few laps around the cat, the dog stopped and quietly came up and sniffed the cat. Bad mistake. Lethal mistake. The cat attached itself in the same manner as it always did to Kathie’s leg. All four feet and mouth were embedded into the dogs’s snout. The dog made a worse mistake: he attempted to free his snout by shaking the cat off. This did not work as it only caused the claws to sink further into it snout. When the cat finally let go, the dog went home. I forget if we got there quickly or if the Godwins arrived or if the cat just gave up. It only took a few seconds and at first seemed funny. It was not so funny when the dog died that night. These days we may soon have heard from a lawyer. I am sure Mr. Udovc would have volunteered his services to the Godwins. But then, our cat was in our yard doing nothing provocative and only defended itself by doing things natural to a cat. Too natural.
Later when Boo Boo disappeared, the rumor was that Mr. Udovc had shot it. We knew he had a pellet gun for obnoxious birds. I could substantiate the rumor as I found the cat dead in the fields. Dead with a hole in it. We never got another cat. Skipper III joined us shortly after Boo Boo left.
I guess that I was the class nerd. Maybe there were other nerds. My classmates in Wauwatosa always picked on me. Shoot. Not just my classmates, anyone in the school thought I was fair game. The one’s I remember are the Berg’s. Oh. There was Bruce Davey and a few others. Mostly it was the Bergs. They were the tough guys. There was Bud Culbertson but he was just sort of pushy and not really malicious. Ned was in my grade and I avoided him like the plague. He would hurt me given the chance. The name of his older brother was Ken. He was a nice guy. He was the Explorer guide for our Boy Scout troop. I am sure he became an executive somewhere. Big, strong, leader. Then there was Timmy. Timmy thought because my classmates could push me around, he also could.
In a Boy Scout winter campout at Mauthe Lake, Timmy had swung a board with a rusty nail in it into my leg. I still have the scar. He would taunt me wherever. Like other people, I ran rather than fought them. The winter campout had been an exception: it is hard to run in a couple feet of snow.
One day my sister Jeanne, Mary Ellen Heidtman,
Jeff Cleary,
and I went sledding at Curry Park.
I think Jeff had a crush on Jeanne. She
would never return the favor to Jeff. I
know I had a crush on Mary
Ellen. It was a good foursome for
the day. The park was only about a
mile from our house. We tried to
enjoy the day but Timmy and his friend would not leave me alone.
They would run their sleds over me;
push me down the hill, etc. I did
my best to ignore them but Timmy finally crossed the line: he started
calling
me obscene names in front of my sister.
I beat him up. I mean I
really beat him up. I stopped when
I saw that my hand was bloody and it was not my blood.
At the park monitor’s suggestion, we
all left in a hurry. They took
Timmy away in am ambulance. He
never bothered me again. Ned came
up to me at school a couple of days later and told me to leave his
brother
alone but that was also the end of Ned picking on me.
As I mentioned a while back, Cub Scouts were OK mostly because my
mother was den mother. About all I remember of Cub Scouts in
Ypsilanti were pack meetings in our basement and troop meetings at the
school in hard metal chairs.
Boy Scouts was a different matter. Things went from OK to
barely surviving. We had an active troop. I remember Bob
Powell. His father was some sort of regional person and I always
thought he must be a descendant of Wesley Baden Powell. I mean
Bob went to Jamborees and New Mexico and had all of those ribbons and
badges that us plebescites wondered in awe about.
I went to Indian Mounds Boy Scout Camp the first summer and earned
my First Class -- all the way from tenderfoot. I mean I attended
everything and notched out that little card and spent no time at all in
the tent. That had sort of a Kool-Aid that they called bug juice
for meals. I hated that stuff but the other kids seemed to like
it. Indian Mounds was within bicycling range of our house but I
forget where it was. It was in the direction of Waukesha and
further from home than my parents would have liked me going on an
afternoon ride.
Then things changed. I heard about the Hiking merit
badge. This was something I could do. Five 10-mile hikes
and a 20-mile hike and you got the badge. Shoot. I could
run 10 miles. You did have to bring a lunch to be cooked with
meat, potato, and vegetables. The standard hike was from Webster
grade school to the scout camp and back. The very first hike I
brought my mess kit and all of the fixings for a good meal. I was
last to finish and had to clean up my mess kit. Enough of
that. The other times I brought a can of beef stew and ate out of
the can.
I also brought along a little jar of gasoline. This was
strictly forbidden. But this was Wisconsin in the winter
time. We would hike the five miles to the campground, gather wood
and try to start a fire with two matches. Even in those days they
did not make us rub sticks together although we had learned how.
The problem was the sticks were all under the snow and none were dry
enough to light with a match. The leaders would ignore my bottle
in order for us to eat. I would be told not to do it but I was
not good at following rules when I was hungry.
If you have not lived where there is lots of snow, you are missing
out on a lifestyle that most northern people endure or even like.
On one hike, I burowed under the snow and took a nap. This caused
a panic in the camp: I had disapppeared. I woke up to a lot of
yelling and hollering. I mean I would have had to strayed a long
way from camp to have been out of sight and hearing.
In general we followed the roads to the camp. Roads were
safe. Mostly. Have you lived up there? I mean, the
snow is beautiful and smooth and level with drifts up and down and
around. At this point the roads are plowed and packed.
Milwaukee, unlike Detroit, always does a good job of plowing its
roads. We walk south along 124th street -- a good rural
road. Almost rural: Briggs & Stratton has a big new plant on
the corner at Burleigh. Not much traffic -- it's Saturday.
You can tell the edge of the road because that is where the snow banks
up from the plow. Except today it has not snowed for a while and
the wind has blown it smooth all the way across. I wonder a
little to the left of the group and suddenly am gone. I mean I
dropped a good six feeet down into nowhere. These
kinds of roads are mostly gone in the USA now. They still exist
in Mexico but not in the USA. This was all agricultural
land at one point and the rain and snow have to drain. Next to
each road is a trench for the water to run off. This may be
nothing except an inconvenience or maybe there is a culvert to walk
across at the driveways or like on 124th street, it was a trench deeper
than I was tall. I forget how much deeper but it was over my head
and arm's length when I stopped going down. Someone saw me drop and
others came to rescue me.
I did eight 10-mile hikes. The 20-mile hike was up at Mauthe
Lake. No problem. But then there was the day of
reckoning. It turned out that just hiking was not the
requirement. YOu had to have a map of each hike and a narrative
of the hike including wildlife seen and other stuff. We had to
display our trophies to a regional Boy Scout person, one at a time, at
the weekly troop meeting. I was dumbfounded. I had
nothing. I was angry. I could have had all of this but
nobody had told me I needed it. One at a time everyone else went
into the room and came back out. The rest of us just played at
something. I never went in. The scoutmaster got enough
badges for everyone, including me. But Mr. Powell knew.
This ended my happier days in scouting. I felt I had been
cheated. They knew I had not 'earned' the merit badge. I
ended up with three badges and no more. The sceond year at camp,
I stayed mostly in the tent. If I earned six badges, I moved to
the next level of scouting -- but someone would complain about the
hiking badge. I was not about to let them -- I never earned
another badge.
Scouts are 3-year things. Cub scouts is three years and you
promoted by survival: wolf, bear, lion. Boy Scouts earn their
promotions: tendersfoot, scecond class, first class, star, etc.
At the end of three years of Boy Scouts you get a Barlow knife
and go on to Explorer Scouts. I had no interest in Explorer
Scouts. OTher than my BOy Scout knife, my father would never let
me have a knife so I endured the last year waiting for my Barlow
knife. At graduation, they announced a new policy: no more Barlow
knives. We would each get an explorer handbook. I
cried. I mean I really cried. It stopped the
show. I had endured the entire year. Not very productive
but I had been there. Gone to their overnight camps.
Hikes. Craft show. No knife. And a book I would never
use to remind me of no knife. They did not understand. My
father was embarassed. No more scouts.
One time about now, my sister, Jeanne, had Candy over for the night. Jeanne on the top bunk; Candy on the bottom. During the night, I crawled under Candy’s bed and we were talking. Jeanne woke up. I do not remember where Kathie was that night. This became a disaster. Remember that Candy was part of my crowd. Jeanne’s crowd was in the other direction. By junior high, however, age and sex transcended geography. Jeanne and Candy were the same age. I do not remember if Jeanne and Janice ever became friends. Maybe I never knew. In any case, Jeanne reported to my father that I was in her room during the night. After dinner that night my father challenged me to ping-pong. I was in deep shit. Ping-pong was not the issue. He needed to talk away from the family.
He asked about me being in Jeanne’s room. I categorically denied it. I knew Candy would if I got to her first. No chance of that now. Moreover, if it came down to believing Jeanne, or me I would lose. If he decided I had been in her room, it would be off to a mental hospital. That was always the threat. That was worse than a spanking. And the threat was always over my head.
About this time, my father was arrested for causing an accident while driving drunk. He lost his license for a year. After 90 days he was able to get a restricted license for work and back. He took this hard. It also caused him to have insurance problems. These got worse when I started to drive.
Jay was another nerd but he thought he outclassed me. So he started pushing me around. He was one or two years behind me and lived down by the river (richer part of the neighborhood). The last straw was he hitting me in the boys’ room. That afternoon, I got off at his bus stop and beat him up. He was bigger than me. I was more motivated. His mother drove up to the bus stop in her Cadillac and rescued him. I got it that night from my father. The next day Jay and I were called into the Vice Principal’s office. Jay tried to wimp out since he knew it was his fault. The VP could not do the damage that my father had. The VP treated as what it was: 2 kids not getting along. I was at fault for getting off at the wrong bus stop. I was also older and according to both parents, the instigator. Sorry, guys: I never instigated. The fear of my father kept me from starting anything, anywhere, ever.
I am not quite sure when it arrived so I put it here. It was my sisters’ chore to clear the table and wash and dry the dishes after dinner was finished. Like myself, they minimized the effort on this. Unlike my chores, dishwashing was visible: the table was clear or it was not. My sisters found a way to reduce the effort by letting the dog lick off the plates. This was thoroughly enjoyable by the dog but caused me a logistical problem. The girls used cold water to wash the dishes and detergents were not as sophisticated as they are today. The end result was a layer of slime on the plates.
Before dinner each night, I started going to the sink and washing my plate. My father took exception to this and forbade my eating off clean plates – but it drew his attention to the problem. It was not long before my father noticed the slime. A confrontation with myself would have made it hard to sit down and time spent in my room. The confrontation with my sisters resulted in buying a dishwasher. The dishwasher was a yellow, portable, Frigidaire. It worked well. The problem was resolved. The dishwasher had a breadboard top and found a home next to the refrigerator.
I was 15. She was 12. Maybe 14 and 11 when we met. We kids played softball in the afternoons in the lot next to the Jordan’s house. The area was fenced as part ot the Schaeffer's store complex. You can see it on the map. We did not go into the Jordan’s house real often. Scott and Candy were twins the same age as Jeanne but were part of my crowd. We already did this. We did pretty well for teams. I mean we had Chuck and Billy Krueger. We had the Nortons: Dale and Fuzzy. We had Jeff Cleary. Janice and Scott Towle. Sometimes Jeanne and sometimes Susie Godwin. This was the hangout. When the games were over, we went home. Behind the house was the Jordan’s garage, driveways to the back of the stores and the back of the stores.
One day after we finished playing and moved into the parking area, I saw a beautiful girl standing at the back of the stores. I went over to her and instantly fell in love with Maryann. Baseball was never the same. She did not play. Her brother Johnny would have probably played but they were different. Johnny was tougher than we were used to. Maryann was shy. They both went to Catholic schools and helped their parents in the restaurant.
Restaurant? They moved a restaurant into the north end store of the Schaeffer’s stores. They had a railroad train that delivered the meal at the counter. Maryann at twelve knew all about sanitary rules on silverware and dishes. She probably knew how to cook the meals. Her mother was the cook. I do not remember her father there.
The problem was that they started a restaurant in a place that could never succeed. There was no parking available on highway 100. The stores were on the east side of the highway. People driving by would have to drive the full length of the block, turn into the residential neighborhood, turn right again to the end of the block where we met in the back of the stores. Nobody did this. I mean who is going to drive up the highway and around unknown blocks to see if there is a back way into the corner restaurant. All stores in the Schaeffer complex went broke. The restaurant did not last long. The Schaeffers foreclosed and kept all of the restaurant equipment. The Schwinghammers moved to Butler.
My father hated the Schwinghammer family. The only reason that I was aware of was that they were poor. I know he did not like Johnny. I became very dependant on my relationship with Maryann. I mean she was a total escape from my family. The more my father hated them, I more I loved her.
When they moved to Butler, I saw her the best I could. I rode the school bus to its furthest north and west point. I ran the remaining couple of miles to her house. They lived way up north on Eggert place. A tiny house. Her mother worked at Grrbch’s restaurant as a cook or waitress. Her mother was a really bad cook. She was a good mother.
My mother helped a little. One
day Maryann and I went bowling and my mother gave us a
ride home -- part way. We discuss
the Bowlero somewhere but I will mention it here. The Bowlero
had Brunswick lanes and was the largest bowling complex
in the Milwaukee area: 48 lanes that eventually went to 72 if I
remember
correctly. This was on the south
side of Burleigh at about 118th street.
This day I remember helping Maryann across the stopped train and my
mother picked us up there. Maryann
was afraid of the train. It was
one of the few times I touched Maryann.
Trains will hurt you if you are afraid of them.
My father had wanted me to get a part-time job. Johnny (the brother of my girl friend, Mary Ann) called to let me know that the Shell station on the corner needed some cheap help and he had recommended me. My father said not a chance I could take the job. I did not understand. He wanted me to have a job. Johnny had helped and my dad was angry.
My father called the phone company and called
her/his
mother and informed her that he would see them in court if he ever
found them associating with me again. Separately, I was also told to
not take the Shell station job. This left me somewhat
confused. He
did not tell me about his phone call. After multiple calls to
Mary Ann
where she refused to see me, I went to her house after school.
She was
home ill with a cold and was in bed. Getting to her house
undetected
was not difficult. I rode the school bus as close to Butler as I
could
and then ran the rest of the way to her house. A small cottage on
the
east side of Butler. It could not have been further from my
home and still be in the county.
Maryann did not want to see me. I went over to her house anyway. She was sick in bed. I talked to her and her mother. It turned out that after Johnny called, my father called the telephone company, obtained their number and threatened them with a lawsuit if he ever heard about me associating with any of them again. Maryann was frightened of him. She should be: he is the meanest man in the world. At least my part of the world.
I convinced her mother and father that my father could not do that. He could threaten. He could hurt me. He could not hurt them. I think Maryann was tired of me at this point anyway. Shortly after this her mother had a stroke. Their house burned. They moved out of state. Before that happened Maryann had a boyfriend. I knew who he was. He went to my school. I got him suspended. Later.
<>I ran home -- maybe got a train ride part way -- the train yards were in Butler and the train tracks came within a mile of our home. Now I had to face my father without a cause and without support. It would be tough.
When I got home, I refused to speak to my father. I mean
nothing
at
all. He made a point of asking me questions which I did not
answer.
Since he did not talk to me much anyway, the questions were an obvious
attempt to break my silence. After a few days of this he could
not
take it any more. I used no bad language as did the girl in the
movie. I just refused to speak with him as I knew that anything I
said
would be used to hurt me. He was good at twisting my
words. I
learned to always make positive statements. For example if I
said: "I
don't think ...", before I could finish the sentence he would break in
and say "That's right, you don't think".
He never admitted that he made the call -- until that morning when
he beat me bloody. I mean really bloody. He was
angry. He was going
to be late for work. He broke his watch on my face. He
broke his
college ring on my face. When I put my hand up to protect my
face, he
told me to put it down. When I put my hand down, he hit me
again.
When I got back up off the floor, he would ask another question, pause,
and then hit me again. He finally gave up and left. After
that I
would speak when spoken to but in my heart, I knew I had won. But
I
have never been sure of what I had won. I guess I could have won
whatever it was after the first blow but I needed him to give up
first. Stubborn I guess. I have learned since that after I
have been
hit hard in the head something changes in my ability to think.
Adrenaline maybe. I know only that when I am hit, my thought
processes
go South and my only thoughts are directed at preventing a second
blow.
While this was going on, my mother kept the girls in the bathroom getting ready for school. They took a long time getting ready that morning. My mother told me that he needed to use pliers to take his ring off that night. I looked so bad that I thought I should stay home from school but I was told that was not an option: wash my face, change my clothes, and make it to the bus on time. After that I talked to him when necessary -- I learned about respect that day. I hope others learn about respect in a more positive manner.
They started building the new high school. I would be going there in my senior year. We did not know if that were good. We sort of liked the old high school. Chuck and I extended our territory to the south of Burleigh and kept watch over the construction. The new school was right west of the train tracks. That made it our domain. Until they started framing the building, it was not interesting. When the building got framed, we owned it.
We would roam the building at night or on the weekends during the day. It really did go up fast. At first we just crawled in the window frames. They added windows. We went in the doors. Wooden. We pried or jimmied or untied. They put real locks on the doors. We used the ladders to enter on the second floor. The second floor was not complete. We crawled through the heating ducts to get from one section to the next.
What did we do? We were not vandals. We hated vandals. We did want to learn how you built a school. We also did some damage -- but not intentionally. Others would do that. We did have nuisance value. The building was built facing Center Street with a slope down to the north. You entered on the second floor. The offices were to the right. The stairs down to the left. At the bottom of the stairs were 4 rooms with no windows since these were below ground level. These were the only ones below ground level. In those days, classrooms had windows. A room without windows is good for the storage of things. It is unhealthy for people.
These rooms became the storage rooms for the workmen. One for the locksmith. One for the electrician. One for the plumber. One for I forget what. In any case, these were not doored or locked. Chuck and I spent an entire night rotating half of the stock from each room into the next. We also took one key from each lock set.
I have always felt guilty about the spool of intercom cable that we stole. I do not like thieves and I became one. We used the cable for our train switch.
A week later, we found doors to the work rooms. Wooden doors with hasp locks. We undid these doors and did our rotation thing again. A couple weeks later, the doors had better locks. We did it again. Pretty soon they had steel doors and door locks. We had the keys. We did it again. This was the last time since we were really exhausted after a night’s work and we had had our laughs.
One Saturday we went in during the day. Well. This Saturday. We went on Saturdays when we were bored. On our way home along the tracks, we were surprised by a sidecar. The wind must have been blowing north or something. Before we could run, it was on us. We ran to the side and hid behind a bush. We knew we could be seen but we wanted to look innocent. The railroad guys came down to the bush and asked. We were just walking the dog. Our usual, ready-for-consumption, excuse. They told us that the tracks were not good for dog walking and to never do it again. We shuddered with fear and promised. They showed us a mimeographed sheet. You know mimeograph? It is purple print and smells of ether or acetone. This is what the world did for copies before Xerox. This paper was a reward poster. $2,000 for the arrest of a boy wearing white pants and red jacket. It was me. Someone blamed me for things going wrong in the yard. Probably the train derailment. No, we had not seen anyone like that. The red jacket and the white pants were never seen again.
Another Saturday we were cutting pipes and threading them when workmen showed up. At this point, the plumbers no longer used the storage room. The pipes and tools were in what later became the shops for wood and metalworking. They were on to us. This was time to flee. We made it. So did Skip. We never worried about Skip. He was always ahead of us. I think he thought this was as much fun as we did. After this, we abandoned the day shift. Somewhat later we entered the second floor on the railroad/highway side. This was dangerous because at this time Center ended from the west at the train tracks and there was open field but no street to the highway. The building wing facing the highway was only on the lower level with the second level behind it well lit by spotlights. We could be seen from the highway. The police-car traffic density is higher at night and we were very visible from the highway on the roof of the first floor with our shadows on the second floor wall. But we had been using the door to the roof as our primary entry. All three of us.
Three? Chuck, myself, and my dog Skip. We discussed Skip earlier. Our high school escapades had taught Skip to climb ladders. He could go to the second floor as easily as we could. We ran to the door and opened it. The alarm went off. This was new. Not only were we well lit. The alarm would draw someone. We ran the length of the building. Off the end. A two-story drop. And down to the train tracks. I do not know how Skip made it down but he was right with us. He was smarter than to jump 20 feet so I have no memory of what he did. We could hardly walk for a few days until our knees worked again. That was our last visit until the open house.
We took our spool of intercom cable and hooked it up to the train semaphore north of Burleigh. On the side of the tower, there is a control box. Like everything else, it is painted silver and has a lock on it. Not a good lock. We dug a trench from the east side of the tracks up the hill to a big bush. We planted a switch box here under a rock. The other end was trenched under the tracks and to the semaphore about 100 feet east. We came up inside their conduit into the box. From there I wired the semaphore going into the yards. This was our primary need for rides. The train engineers were used to kids on the tracks and knew that the number would increase as the high school was completed. They reacted to this by driving into the yards at higher speeds. This made it difficult to ride a freight into the yards. We could not jump onto anything over 30 mph. Anything over 20 was difficult. By controlling the semaphore, we could stop the train at Burleigh and it would then idle into the yards. Great fun. One serious problem.
The idea was that one of us would set the switch to red and the train would stop. Its existence then would leave the signal on red. We then released our switch and when the train was gone, the signal would return to yellow then green. I do not remember if Scott Jordan knew about our switch. Chuck trusted Scott more than I did. If Scott knew about it, Dennis Hughes knew about it. They did not share our concerns about vandalism.
In any case, someone left the switch on red for, as it turned out, a couple of days. The trains ignored the semaphore. About 5 o’clock one morning, as I delivered newspapers, I felt the earthquake. Not a real earthquake. I knew what it was: a train derailed. I finished my route and ran down to the yards. There it was. A long freight flat on its side. I had never seen anything like this.
You have to understand trains.
During the night, trains are built in the yards.
The built trains then leave for their
next destination. It is fun to
watch them build trains. You can
figure it out. The yards is a
series of two-point switches. So
one track goes to many tracks and then back to one track.
Really two tracks: one in each
direction. While they are building
trains, the mainline tracks are switched into the yard tracks.
This would cause harm to people if a
mainline train came into the yards.
When it is the case that the mainline track is switched into the
yards,
the same lever that does the switch also throws an angled piece of
steel
(called a frog) across the mainline tracks ahead of the switch.
If a mainliner hits the frog, it
derails. The intent is to derail
with minimal damage. Anything to
keep the mainliner from running over people in the yards.
This is what happened. Not running over people -- rerailment when
a train hit the frog.
<>I mean one morning when I was out delivering my papers, I felt the earthquake. I knew instantly what it was. I finished the papers and ran down to the tracks. The train engines and about 20 cars were flat on their sides. Track was damaged. I went home and readied for school.
<>
<>It took about a week for
them to haul up a derrick from Chicago – or maybe just the east side
tracks but
I think Chicago. On each side of
the car holding the derrick. The
derrick is permanently mounted on its own flat cat.
It takes a special train to do this since the derrick is
strong and long. There is a flat
car on each side of the derrick car.
These flat cars contain tanks of oxygen and acetylene.
These tanks are about 5 feet tall.
The oxygen is green. The
acetylene is orange. We took a green one.
We could not carry this thing.
It is steel and about a foot in
diameter. Less than that.
But it rolls on a train track really
well. We rolled it from the yards
south on the main tracks until the Curry pond woods.
We buried it in the woods at our ‘fort’.
Later I took up some aquarium plastic air tubing at attached it to the valve. We now had our own oxygen. This was great. When chased from the yards, we headed for our fort; got oxygenated; and then took off across Curry Golf course for home or the Menominee Parkway woods. We never got caught. After a while someone found our tank and we found it half submerged in the Curry Pond. We hated the vandals and we never knew who they were or where they came from. We suspected Butler. We knew it was Butler since we knew everyone on our side and did not think the Milwaukee kids went this far north. The hoboes did not come south of Capital. Capital was where the yards started. It was fun while it lasted. Nobody tells a teenager that you can fry your brain on pure oxygen.
In any case, I released the switch the same morning as the accident. We did not use it after the high school opened since our direction of travel changed from going north to going south. The trains flew out of the yards going south so it was rare that we could get a ride to school. We still got rides occasionally home from school but had to be careful about the cops.
I returned a few years later. When I was 21, the switch was still there but no longer functioned. At 25, the switch had been removed.
I started high school: I was a sophomore at the Wauwatosa High School. I had never ever even been inside until the bus arrived at the back door and we all piled out. Same bus stop in the neighborhood -- different time. My buddy, Chuck Krueger, still took the bus then. He was a junior. You know. I do not remember the kids on that bus then. Interesting. I have lost a lot. The bus driver was a nice guy but I do not remember him.
My father had a couple of women that he drove to work. He picked them up near Longfellow on North Avenue. There were no freeways in those days so getting to work just meant which choice of arterial roads. The high school was just down the road a mile from Longfellow on 76th street. He would drop me off on his way. This gave me an hour before class in the school to do homework. The car was much faster than the bus.
Remember Scott and Candy Jordan in the big white house behind the Shell station? They had moved to a couple of blocks behind the high school. I had a real crush on Candy. I was also growing taller but not heavier. I weighed 135 pounds. I could run like the wind but we have already been through that.
Just now as I am writing this I ruined my day. I had always thought it was an even 5 miles from my house to high school. I just used the Microsoft Streets and Trips (I use it a lot these days) to see the real map. It is 3.3 miles door-to-door. It took me 22 minutes to run home from the high school. If it had been 5 miles this comes to 4.4 minutes per mile. This is Olympic timing. I now find out I only ran an average of 6.6 minutes per mile. This is good but not great.
Why run? There were several reasons. Mostly because I had to be home by dinner or I did not want anyone to know that I had missed the bus. I would run down Milwaukee Avenue to the Menominee River Parkway, take it to Burleigh and then up Burleigh to Knoll Terrace, up Auer to 106th street: home.
In any case, Candy liked me also. I started going to her house after school for an hour or so. I would then run home as if nothing had happened. I have no idea if my parents knew about Candy. In fact I am sure they did not. Remember the bunk bed incident a few years ago. Remember MaryAnn. It was never safe to let my parents know my romantic interests.
Candy’s parents still worked at the beauty parlor. They were not home after school. Things are so different now. I was 15. She was 13. Her parents permitted me in the house when they were not home. Maybe my parents were the exception. I would guess so. I held Candy’s hand while we played Monopoly. She was the first girl whose hand I ever held. It gave me butterflies. I was worried that if my parents found out, it was off to the mental hospital. At the vary least I would have been banned from seeing Candy.
My relationship with Candy was short-lived. I worked in the school cafeteria. You know that. A senior girl, Karen Holgersen, had her eyes on me. I have no idea how we saw each other but we did. I stopped seeing Candy. As I look back, I think that that was a mistake but I became very serious on Karen. I never saw Candy again. I saw Scott again but never Candy. I hope she has had a good life.
Just before I turned sixteen, I ran away. It only lasted a few hours but it shook me up. I packed a few things in a small pack. Not even enough to keep me warm for the night. I went down to the tracks and hopped the first train south. I got scared and hopped off at the east side yards. I do not know exactly where I was. I was near the lake and somewhat south. I started walking home. I knew I could be there before daybreak. I could fake my way through the day at school. Not a problem. I walked. I walked. I walked past an all-night laundry. A man was lying on top of a woman in the back. It seemed like a strange way to neck and make out. I was eighteen before I figured out what sex was.
I got to Wisconsin Avenue east of the Milwaukee River and figured that I would be safest staying on the main street for as long as possible. If I took back streets, I was more likely to be picked up for being out after curfew. I had one of those little bamboo letter openers to protect me against rats. I had seen to many rats along the tracks. I hate rats.
I walked all the way to thirty fifth street. I was walking past Edawards Doge and was about to cross the river viadoc. The Braves stadium was down there along with the Miller Brewery. It would be about fifty something street by the time I was on solid gruond again. I rested as I looked at the new cars in the dealer window. Bad mistake.
A police car pulled up and the two officers got out. The near one had me raise my arms while the second one remained on the other side of the car. Suddenly he called out: “Joe, he’s got a knife”. Joe fell on the ground in front of me as they collected my letter opener. I was taken to the police station. The one on Sherman, I think. I was given a few choices. I do not remember what they were but they were not really choices. My father was out of town on one of his weekly trips for AC. My mother came down to get me and take me home. After all of this, school was really hard the next day.
I learned years later that I now had a criminal record. My father went to court to plead my case. I was conviced in absentia of attacking a police officer with a concealed weapon. When stupid people collaborate against you in secret, and you are a minor child, it is hard to beat their system. I started having weekly meetings with a psychiatrist near where I had entered Wisconsin Avenue that fateful evening. This was a real waste of time and money. Not my money. I do not remember many visits but this did not last a long time.
As I just mentioned, I started seeing Karen. She worked in the
cafeteria dirty dish line next to me. In grade school and junior
high, lunch was served on trays with fixed portion-control
sections. This was thought to de demeaning to high school
students so we had trays with real dishes. Kitchen work like this
was always sort of dirty. There were no latex gloves in those
days. But then again there were no fatal diseases coming back in
the uneaten food.
When you finished lunch, you put your tray into the designated
window and walked away. the traywas on a roller track with us workers
in a line next to it. The first person removed anything paper
or junk that did not belong. The next person removed the
silver and tossed it into a large steel pot with very hot water in
it. The next person, at the high school took off the plates and
stacked them. The last person stacked the trays. ANother
person removed the rinsed silver and placed it, handle side down in
metal cylinders for washing. Periodically the adult help removed
the plates, trays, and silver sylinders to the wahing machine.
In the middle school and grade school things had been easier.
There was no disaassembly line. Students tollsed their trays into
the window and someone there removed the silver and jung and shoved the
tray to the adulkt woman who rinsed it with a hanging spray and passed
it to the dishwasher loader (usually me). If not me, usually
another adult did this as it needed to be done very rapidly. The
logistics of the washig machine and dish sink were such that the loader
needed to use his left hand to collect and stack the trays for the
washer. I was left--handed. ON the back side of the washer
the unloaded stacked the clean trays in shoved the track racks up the
backside of the wash3r to be reused. Timmy Berg did this and did
his best to make my life miserable.
In the high school, I think the dishwasher was controlled by adults.
I do not remember how Karen and I got to spend time together outside
the kitchen but we did. On the last day of school I got my
driver's license and was able to drive her home.
During this school year, I had Mr. Matzdorf for geometry. Geometry was hard for me. This seemed a contradiction since math had come so easily before. We were required to have a project for the year.
My project was to be a circular slide rule. I had bought the plastic: Orange, clear, and white. I had cut the circles. That was as far as I had gotten. As you know, or maybe you do not, there are two kinds of circular slide rules.
They each are comprised of a big circle/wheel with printed/embossed logarithmic scales. There is also a long, transparent pointer with a line down its middle -- which pointer is permitted to rotate freely from the center of the circle.
The first type has a second, shorter, pointer that can also be moved around the center but, when released, stays at a constant angle with the large pointer as the large pointer is moved. It is this constant angle that makes it a slide rule.
The second type has only one pointer but the wheel is split such that there are two identical scales, one inside of the circular split and one outside. Thus, you find your two numbers on the separate scales and rotate the outer wheel to match the inner wheel. You then move the pointer around to find the answer. Where you move the pointer is determined by the problem.
Until I encountered a circular slide rule, slide rules as a tool (the long sticks) made no sense at all to me.
Because I had serious problems with geometry, I also had problems working on my project. I feared them both. I received a ‘B’ for my grade. The Lord only knows how. Analytical Proofs in any subject are beyond me. Geometry was just the first time I learned this. In any case, my project was not complete at yearend and Mr. Matzdorf could have given me an incomplete: he did not on my promise to finish it by the end of the summer.
I have always carried the guilt of not completing the project and not earning the generous grade. He died the following year of a heart attack at the age of 39 or 40.
In April, I turned 16. I got my temporary driver’s permit and my father started teaching me to drive. We had this behemoth Oldsmobile 4-door sedan, Garnet Mist (dark red) battleship.
You know, I wonder now how I roamed such a large territory. Renner Oldsmobile was at the corner of 68th street and Milwaukee. A half-mile east of the high school. In those days it was possible, and frequently done, to roll back speedometers. All it took was an electric drill and a pair of pliers. You disconnected the cable at the transmission, set it in the drill and ran the drill until the odometer read what you wanted. Then you replaced the cable end into the transmission and walked away -- smiling for having beat the system. Now it is a criminal act to do this and there are mechanical safeguards to prevent you -- and the new ones are electronic and there is no cable to rewind. In any case, I wondered by Renner and saw our new car in their service bay. I presume that it had been delivered and they were doing final cleanup and adjustments. That night at dinner I told my father that it had arrived. I also said that it had 350 miles on it. This was a mistake in two directions. The car should have been trucked or trained the 300 some miles from the assembly plant in Flint. A mileage of 350 sounds like it was driven since that is almost exactly the distance from Milwaukee to Flint. Secondly I made my father angry. This is something that was to be avoided whenever possible. It turned out that I had not noticed the last digit was a tenths indicator and that the mileage was actually 35 miles plus a few tenths. He calmed back down when he saw the car. It was indeed a beautiful automobile. This was a totally new design for Olds. The easiest way to describe is is as a solid rectangle with an extended curved dome for the passenger compartment. Yes, there were curves in the sheet metal on the door sides but only enough to give the sheet metal some strength. The taillights were wedge-shaped at the top of the rear fenders. It made the car look like an owl. Sort-of. The grill was all chrome with horizontal slatted pieces that accentuated the squareness of the body. I would think it beautiful today if I saw it and it were the hardtop model and not the sedan model.
I think my father thought I would be the worst driver in the world. He was so very critical of my driving. I still remember him yelling at me to use both hands on the wheel. To this day, I drive with one hand, even if the second is on the wheel and it slides. If I do have my right hand on the wheel, it is because I am tense -- I am afraid that someday I shall leave permanent marks in the plastic. Tense? Today I drive a13-foot tall motor home and when the winds blow or I am going over a bridge, I am tense. When the winds blow and I am next to a cliff or on a bridge (winds always blow on bridges), I am so tense that by the time I stop I am perspring profusely even if the temperature in in the fifties.
On the last week of school, I was sick. I was sick with something contagious. You were not permitted to be sick during the last week of school: you missed your exams. I missed all of my exams. I went from teacher to teacher to see what I had to do. None of them were nice about it. No. I could not make them up.
Don Gohrman. I know I am spelling his name incorrectly. He was the driver’s education teacher. This was a required course and there was no behind-the-wheel practice in our school. We did take the state test here though. Outside of class we called him ‘Donny’. We learned a lot in this class. Mr. Gohrman was also the student commons proctor and the sponsor of the track and cross-country teams. He had been an Olympic something or other once upon a time. Our teams placed in state competition and I am sure that is why he was at our school.
I learned something this term: there was something wrong with my vision. I did not learn then what it was. I learned when I was in college. I did learn that I could not take the driver’s vision test and pass. I had the fastest braking reaction time in the class. The vision test had a set of signs. You were not only supposed to identify each sign for the test but to state which were closer than the others. Some were supposed to be close, some in the middle, and some more distant. I just saw two sets of signs with some missing on each side. I presumed this was normal although it was not. Signs 3, 8, and 16 were closer. I knew the answers or I would not pass the test.
In any case, Karen worked for him in the commons. She bragged me up to him. I did not need this. She finally convinced me to go out for track. I practiced for a week. It wiped me out. Especially since I had to run home afterwards. These guys did things that were beyond me. I started late and I think that I would have done well had I continued but I did not. After a week, we had time trials in the gym. I placed third in the 44 -- and quit. If I could not be first, I would not play. Mr. Gohrman was angry with me. I did not understand this at the time. Who wanted someone that was second-rate? He saw my potential but he was disappointed in my lack of competitive spirit. Another thing I wish I had learned then rather than later: spirit counts, place does not.
Mr. Gohrman asked me to compete with him in any track event for my final grade. I wimped out. He asked me to compete with him in the commons at ping-pong. I wimped out. He passed me anyway but he taught me to compete. Wimping out is undignified.
I disappointed many people with my refusal to compete. It is sort of like another part of my life that I did understand. The purpose of a trip is not only to reach the destination. The purpose of the trip is the trip itself. I enjoy the getting more than the being there. I wished I had learned that about competition as I would have learned about teamwork.
Oh. I shall tell you about it now rather than wait for 1967 when I found out. Mr. Gohrman was fast. He even walked really fast. When a kid got too big of a head on the track team, Mr. Gohrman would take him on in his own event. And win. Easily. I mentioned this to my friend, Len Johnson, who said that this was really bad since someday someone would beat him and he would not live it down. I told Len that the teacher’s name was Don Gohrman. Len stopped me and said that Mr. Gohrman had been a medal winner in the decathlon in the Olympics. Winning was not a problem.
On the last day of school – final exam day, my mother and I drove downtown and I took the driver’s test. I was well enough to do this. Like all kids and mothers, we went down to the county courthouse for the test. I waited my turn and drove off with the tester. Halfway through the test, he asked me to do something that I considered absolutely stupid. We stopped on a hill with the car in Park and the emergency brake on. I was to start up without rolling backward. With a stick shift, there is a purpose to this. You learn to use all three pedals with only two feet. With an automatic, you just put one foot on the brake, put the car in gear, release the emergency brake, put your other foot on the accelerator and take off. Dumb. I refused until he told me the purpose of this with an automatic transmission. He told me to do it or fail. I did it. He jumped my case when turning the final corner – he claimed that I had only looked in my side mirror and had not looked over my shoulder to see oncoming traffic. We got back; he got out and marched off. My mother asked. I did not know. I ran after him. He told me that I was one of the best drivers that he had tested and that I certainly had passed.
We drove home. My mother let me take the car to school to pick up Karen. This was a great day for me. It was the only day that I drove the Oldsmobile to school.
My father thought I was hot-rodding his Oldsmobile around and bought a Corvair (for my mother). A 4-door but the cheapest one they made. It cost lest than $2000 but not by much. The Olds really was a hot rod. My father had ordered the biggest engine and the highest possible gear ratio so that the car would not burn out when hauling the trailer. The car was so powerful that if you stepped on the gas too hard, the wheels spun and you just sat there ruining the tires. You had to learn to start with a very soft pedal.
The Oldsmobile was to be the tow car for our new 14-foot Manorette Trailer made in Grafton (northern Wisconsin). We had the strongest possible trailer hitch installed on the car. When the receiver was not in place (the normal condition without the trailer), the 2” square was really good at excising asphalt from domed roadways. This was not good for either the road or the car. The cars in those days worked really hard to be close to the ground. The drive shaft was in three segments to facilitate this. In those days, the normal drive was the engine In the front with a drive shaft to the rear wheels as trucks still have today. Since drive shafts do not bend, segmenting them permitted the endgine/transmission to be at the normal front end height but the rear differential to be at the normal wheel height and a transmission hump to be minimal sized. The Oldmobile Hydromatic transmission was huge compared to todays transmissions. The Hydromatic was the strongest automatic transmission and very expensive compared to normal torque converters. It was used in Oldsmobiles, Cadillacs, and Rolls Royces.
But this section is about the Manorette. It was 14 feet and yellow. It had a gas refrigerator and a Duo heater. We joked about the heater and commented that the tag might fall off and say Therm underneath. The two companies eventually merged, I think, as there is now a Duo-Therm company. The joke about Therm was that just previous to our buying a trailer, there were multiple deaths from carbon-monoxide poisoning in Therm-heated trailers.
After my experience with Boy Scouts and promising myself to not get
involved again, they had an organizational meeting at the town hall boy
high school boys. This was an experimental thing. They
group the boys by their professional intentions. I was in the
engineering group. After the initial speeches and groupings, they
annonced that this was an experiment by Explorer Scouts: professional
activities instead of more outdoor activities.
I signed up. There were corporate sponsers and we visited a
lot of major companies in Wauwatosa and Milwaukee. Actually I was
vice-presiendt the first year. I renigned the second year as my
interest were elsewhere. The thing sort of folded for lack of
interest. I understand the concept was successful even if our
post was not. I never looked back.
Oh, the Science Club. We had the most unbelievable science
club. The tops tudents in the school, and me, worked against each
other to produce the most controversial and interesting
meetings. By the end of the school year, I had become the
program manager and was elected vice-president for the next year.
We had: Dave Stowe, George Kassal, Pam Voell, Laurie (I forget her last
name -- the one with the raccoon for a pet). We had so many other
geniuses that there was never a dull moment. For example, Allen
Fulton demonstrated a volcano. He died a while ago of a heart
attack. But the volcano was not just a little demonstration of a
little bunch of lava. No. This was a real volcano. It
ate through evrything and into the concrete floor. It generated
real lava and real sparks/flames, smoke, and fear. The classroom
was unusavble for the rest of the year. Who wants to study n a
black room anyway. The fire department was not impressed.
The rest of the school was. Oh, and when Al was preparing for the
volcano, he almost killed himself and others. He was packing
explosives into a CO2 cartridge. He made a mistake and it blew
up. It blew up the bunsen burner clamp, pole, and burner.
The shrapnel went through cabinets and bent a triple beam balance into
a 45 degree angle. It embedded pieces into the brick
walls. Even Allen was unscathed but the damage from that little
cartidge was impressive. And Mr Voos, our totally deaf chemistry
teacher turned around to see what made the noise. He had a smile (and
was angry and was ...). THe smile because he had heard a
sound. So did half the school.
This is getting to be longer than a paragraph but it is worth
it. The school board was unhappy that we contributed nothing at
all to the county science fair. We looked beyond fair
projects. We wanted every kid in the school to become interested
in Science. We sponsered a folk music bus ride to the Museum of
Science and Industry in Chicago. We started the annual Science
Club Dance as a money-making event to get everyone involved. My
father came one night to coke and donuts (coffee for kids came after my
school days). He explained to our overflowing classroom at 8:00
at night how inertial missile guidance systems worked. Yeah.
Boring. Remember that this was 3 years after sputnik. All
eyes, nerd and cool were looking to the stars.
We went to the planetarium one night out, way out, in Hales Corners.
But it was cloudy. No stars. We started a ping-pong contest
at one of the houses (not mine). We had it right. The
next school year we had a new sponso: our beloved physics
teacher. He wanted the club back to the nerds. More on that
later. Buthere is the problem. I hear that girls are losing
ground in math and science because of the nerd image associaed with
these subjects. This is waht we were fighting 45 years ago.
We were way ahead of our time. Our best student girls (including
Kathy Kabot) were involved. Active participants not arm
candy. We were not nerds. We had some of the best
entire-school interest of any school group. We lost the battle to
the school board who felt slighted over the lack of booths in a
fair. A nerd fair. Just thinking about what we lost mkes me
angry all over again. More next year.
The new high school opened. Finally. But I was in the
hospital for the first three weeks. I have to explain this.
My senior year was starting. I had lost Mary Ann. I was
frustrated with the girls I had met since. I disliked that my
best friend Chuck had such a negative outlook on girls. I
had to deal with my father -- a lost cause. This meant I would
never grow up to be me. I would be forever a clone of him.
Money would be the top concern. Working without values would be
my life. I hated the concept. I can not possibly explain
how insignificant I felt. Lower than dirt. I was not
prepared for living another set of years as horrible as my first
17, I did not blame Mary Ann for leaving me behind. I would
have left myself behind. But without her, facing another
year overwhelmed me. Maybe I am not clear here: I needed a
handle on the world. I needed to have something real to hold
onto. She was my handle. Unfair. But without any
handle, I was drowning. I sat for hours on my bed with a knife in
my hand. I could not even cut myself, let alone stab myself
through the heart which I knew was the only place that would hurt me
enough to end it all. I feared permanent injury and
failing. I
did not fear dieing. Dieing could not be worse than living as I
was. Living as a possible invalid and hearing how stupid I was
for
the rest of my life kept the knife in front of me. Those are the
words I shall alsways remember: "If your so damn smart, why aren't you
rich?" I did not want to be rich, I wanted to be happy.
But I figured it out. I wold take so many sleeping pills that
I would die. I bought a couple of bottles of the favorite sleep
medicine: Sominex. 100% safe sleep. They meant it. I
did not die. I just got very sick. Years later I met a girl
who
had taken twice what I did and just got sick also. But talk about
being sick. I was delirious for several days. I felt the
bugs biting me and saw the snakes. I have no idea where I spent
the next couple of days. I know at least once I was on a hospital
gurnery under bright lights. Someone asked me to show them one of
the biting bugs. I could not produce one. I tried very
hard. I may have ended up with a broken thread from some clothing
or garment but of course there was no bug. Why would someone ask
such a stupid question? I was sick. My nerves were reacting
to poison. Similar to alcohol poisoning. I hurt. My
vision was shot. I saw bugs. There were no bugs. Why
would a sane person ask me to produce a non-existant bug?
But when things settled out I was in the closed ward on the sixth
floor of Saint Michaels Hospital. That is their "Diagnostic and
Treatment Center". My room faced the front, Villard Avenue.
I started timing the buses for a potential escape. When I
entered, I weighted 135 pounds and was 5' 9" tall. Skin and
bones. So little fat on me that when I went in the water, I
sank. I had learned to swim underwater as it was easier than
trying to stay on top.
I was on some medication that made my mouth so dry it was like I had
eaten cotton balls. Or maybe it was the sleeping pills. I
think I
had told people about the pills. I did not remember. There
was no way to convince peoiple that I was all right and that I should
be able to go home. They wanted me to gain a lot of weight.
I was put on a diet to make me fat. They were successful. I
have never been thin since.
Each inmate/patient had a doctor. When our doctor was in
residence, he was
in
an office and his patients were lined up outside the door. My
doctor
was Dr. Henry Veit. He was the father of one of my high school
friends:
Kirk
Veit. Kirk and I were never close after that. I always
wondered why
not. Did he change? Did I change? Was he warned to
stay away from
me. I always thougt it was the latter. At our reunion he
said no. I really asked. But thenI still think he was
encouraged to avoid me back then.
I did not like getting fat. I tried to skip meals. They
threatened
to force feed me. I hid in my clothes closet at lunch time.
This set
off an alarm across the entre hospital: a patient had escaped the
closed ward. When they removed the tray, I went back to my bed
and
started reading. They read me the riot act for causing such a
problem. I concluded that it was possible to escape but I also
concluded that it would serve no purpose.
Then my new
roommate came in: Johnny.
I think Johnny was Italian. I do not remember. But he attended the junior high school just up the road. We were permitted 2 visitors at a time. My parents came every night I think. Maybe they missed a few. Maybe not. I do not remember. In any case, Johnny had half his school in the hospital. Only 2 at a time in his room but they had overwhelmed the hospital. There were literally hundreds of them on the front lawn. They invaded the entire hospital. The mother superior came into the room one afternoon and told Johnny that they had had to stop. His friends had entered the maternity ward and were watching women in labor. They were observing some surgeries. They were everywhere.
This is where I learned about electro-shock treatment. I
instantly hated it and was thankful, very thankful, that they were not
doing it to me. Maybe they thought I had doone enough brain
damage to myself. One day I encountered Johnny walking up the
hall. He asked me who he was. He asked where he was.
He did not know anything about anything. He could have stepped
out of a science fiction movie as one of these blank zombies. I
helped him back to his bed. The concept of shock treatment is to
fry your brain so badly that you do forget everything. What
nuerons that were not permanetly damaged sooner or later come bback to
life. The theory is that the bad memories will go away and only
the good ones will recover from the shock. Are these the same
people who also buy bridges and Arizona beachfronts? The concept
is absurd -- the results terrifying. Later.
I do not remember much about Johnny after that. I do not think he was there long. At least not in the closed ward. You never knew where people came from or where they went.
I do not remember how long I was in the closed ward but I was moved
to the open ward after they decided that I would not escape. The
open ward meant that we could leave the ward but not the
hospital. We were permitted to go the lower floor
cafeteria. Maybe just during visiting hours. I do not
remember: I had no interest in the cafeteria. I already had too
much food and in keeping with family tradition: I had no money to spend
on snacks.. We had an arts and crafts room. I made a belt,
leather coasters with flowers, I made everything there that I thought
was interesting and then started over. Arts and crafts are not
paid for by insurance. I had not thought about it but I was
running up quite a tab. BUt then I was bored to tears. My
sister, Jeanne, brought me my homework each night. The written
stuff she returned to the school the next day. I had teachers
that I had never met. I read Hamlet and McBeth. Ir ead
anything I could get my hands on. Then I met George.
Geroge was my new roommate. He was a really interesting
guy. He had stolen a car and had gotten caught. It was
apparently not his first offense. The judge had given him a
choice: detention center, army, or hospital. He took the easy
one: the hospital. I had a new roommate.
Nobody remembers any moe but there was a 1930's movie with Jimmy
Stewart about an invisible, blue, rabbit named Harvey. People
thought Stewart was crazy for seeing this 6 foot blue rabbit and
blaming everything on it. George was not as dumb as most people
think hot-rodders are. But he did not count on the
consequences. George started seeing Harvey. Everywhere
George went, he made room for Harvey. We went down to the
cafeteria one evening. Oh. My parents were not there --
I guess they did miss some nights. When we got on the elvator,
George
made sure that there was plenty of room for Harvey and everyone crowed
to the walls. Since Harvey was so tall, George took off Harvey's
invisible hat
and had one of the men hold it,. The man held it carefully in front of
him with his arms under it to make sure it did not fall. When we
got out in the cafeteria, George took the hat and replaced it on
Harvey's head. George even apologized for stepping on Harvey's
foot while reaching up. We laughed all night: -- the poor man
holding the hat was terrified that he might upset one of the inmates.
But the joke was on us. George also was seeing Dr. Veit.
On the next visit, George saw the doctor first. George was a
redhead so his skin was already pale. But he came out of Dr.
Veit's office in total shock. He could barely speak. It
reminded me of Johnny but this was just an office visit. As he
passed by, he told me that the nurses had reported his seeing Harvey
and
the doctor believed that he really saw an invisible, blue,
rabbiit. Nothing George had said to the doctor convinced him
otherwise. George could be in the same situation as Johnny.
He asked me to help. I fared no better. Dr. Veit was
conviinced that George was seeing Harvey. After all, the nurses
had put it in writing. I think George won or maybe he lost but he
was gone a few days later. Here's to you George wherever you
might be -- you proved that the crazy ones were the ones in the white
robes. For those of you who think the title "doctor" implies
inteligence -- you are wrong. "doctor" only implies that you are at
least as pig-headed as I am and will perserverce 7 years at the
universoty or in training under really bad conditions.
Asking who was crazy is not a mute point. One woman there was
as nice as you could find. Her husband visited her
frequently. She helped other people with her smiles and
comfort. I asked why she was here. A more 'normal' person
you would never find. I was told that many peple can appear
normal in a controlled environement but can not handle the strains of
everyday life. To many of us, those strains are really huge and I
understood the concept although I did not believe it was true of my
friend.
I later, as written elsewhere, had myself commited to County
Hospital and even later did volunteer work at the children's mental
hospital in Madison. Like the song: "I have seen both sides now".
Maybe you read all of this, maybe not. But I have some strong
opinions here. I saw "One Flew Over the Cuckko's Nest". It
was a terrifying move because it very accurately portrayed a
situation that most people think is just a Steven King type
movie. Believe me: the portrayals in this movie are very
real. I was in one ward where we all pretended to ask for help to
change the TV channel as it was in a locked wood/wire cage. But
the lock was broken and when the nurse was not looking we conspried to
change the channel and adjust the tuning. Right out of the
movie. Cutting the hero's brain to stop him from protesting is
not outside the rights that these doctors (read as murderers)
have.
Murderers? Maybe a strong word but cutting a brain or poisoning
with chemicals or electro-shock treatment is so barbaric that the movie
exposure may have saved lives. But unless you have been in
there, it is so gruesome that you find it hard to believe can happen
in real life. Believe me it does. Or at least it did into
the 1970's. I doubt it has changed as I am not an optimist when
it comes to people who are able to secretly control populations.
I had gotten out of the hospital a few weeks back. I missed
the senior photo shoot at the school and had to drive to the photo
studio to have my picture taken. I was driving east on
Capital. I had stopped for the light and was proceeding to 84th
street. I had been first in line. One of those 56/56
green/white Buicks was driving faster than me on my left. With my
zombie pills, anyone drove faster than me. Right at 84th street,
a car which had been driving west suddenly turned in front of me and
stopped. Stopped? Wisconsin has/had this stupid law that
if you are stopped, you cannot be the cause of the accident.
Ergo, whenever there is the possibility of an accident, everyone
stops. Or tries to. The end result is that there are far
more collisions than necessary and the person causing the collision, if
he were lucky enough to stop first, is not to blams. Really
dumb. So this car stops dead across the middle of three lanes of
oncoming
traffic. There is no place for me to go. There are cars on
either side of my little Corvair. It is 2 minutes to 4
o'clock. I pass out but quickly revive. Both my knees were
smashed under the dash panel. Come on -- I am not too tall but
the Corvair really is tiny. I could not stand up but I was able
to hold myself up against the car. The police quickly, I think,
arrived and I was asked if I wanted to go to the hospital. I said
yes as I had no idea how badly my knees were injured. I just knew
that they hurt.
When I got to County General, the nurses call me a cry-baby for
wanting treatment at all and even more names when I refused anesthetic
for the stitches. I think the same police also drove me
home.
After all, we were in Wauwatosa and in those days, police were
helpful. The changes came later.
Some time after that I received a phone call asking if I would
attend the hearing regarding the accident. I said I would.
Things are more formal today. I thought I was being called as a
witness to the drunk women causing the accident. I was
wrong. My mother drove me to the courthouse for the
hearing. The trial was to be held afterwards. My mother was
not permitted to be present even though I was a minor. Minor
status lasted until 21 in those days but even still I was only
17. I could have had a lawyer but I did not know I needed one.
But the accident was all my fault. I was speeding. We
verified I was within the posted 35 mph speed limit but the school zone
that started
at that intersection lasted until 4:00. That the sign said "when
children present" had no bearing on the speed. There were no
children present. Two things happened immediately in my favor and
I needed them badly. With the medication making me a zombie,
quick thinking was out of the question. The first good thing was
that the officer in charge turned out to be the husband of my woman
friend in the hospital. This immediately turned him into my
friend in the courtroom. I wish he had been my friend at the
scene and given the women sobriety tests. He verified the
overwhelming smell of beer coming from their station wagon but the
judge dismissed this due to lack of testing. But the officer had
tried for me. The next thing was that the women had a lying
witness. He claimed I was passing him on the right, driving with
one hand, very fast. There is/was no law prohibiting passing on
the right in Wisconsin but everyone seemed to think so.
I not only remembered that a Buick was passing me on my left but I
remembered its license plate. This in itself was amazing as I did
pass out immediately afterwards. But their witness quickly
disappeared into the woodwork and the judge referred the matter to
trial as there was obviously room for dispute. Then the third
good luck thing happened.
As we were walking to the courtroom for the trial, we passed our
neighbor, John Udovc. He was surprised to see us. More
surprised than we were. We told him the situation as we all three
walked into the courtroom. John acknowledged that he was
representing me and apologized to the judge for not being able to make
the hearing as he was in court for another case. John was very
well respected in the Milwaukee County Courthouse. The tables
quickly tuirned and the case was decided inmy favor. I still
remember the gasp from the opposing attorney when John introduced
himself as my lawyer. It was not over but there was no more
ticket (WIsconsin requires ALL incidents to be ticketed, sort of
Nepoleanic). The insurance companies now fought it out. 20%
my fault, 80% her fault. My father was never going to
permit me to drive again. This was the third incident and by far
the worst. To him anything that happened to me was my
fault. His reasoning was consistent: if I had not been there, it
would not have happened. He always used that reason. That
reason is hard to argue. I begged and pleaded and he gave me one
more chance although he did not believe that I really would have no
more accidents as I had promised.
Up until this accident I could run for miles as I has written
earlier in this document. After the accident I never ran
again. Between the medication which prevented any rapid activity
and the extra weight which hurt my knees which were sore for a long
time, there was no chane of running in the near future. In
physical education, PE, we played football outside. I could not
play. I walked over to the sideline and took a nap.
I think my teachers had all been warned about me being crazy and on
medication. I rmember the PE coach not saying anything but just
watching as I bumbled to the line. I was asleep by the time I hit
the ground. When they say that Thorazine makes you photosensitive
they mean more than just getting a sunburn.
But PE was something else. The PE locker rooms were at the far
end of the building, just before the shops. Closer was the pool
and then the cafeteria. This posed a serious problem. We
shal get to that.
This was a brand new school. It was my second such as my
junior high, Longfelllow, was also new. But I was more cognicent
of newnest here. As I think I covered earlier, I had keys for the
entire building. This included the locks for the lockers.
Oh. We each were assigned a padlock but I mean the little key
locks int he doors themselves. The arrangement was six little box
lockers and one tall clothes locker repeated a dozen times on each side
of a bench. The problem was that we had more kids in a class than
there were tall lockers. As a result, you ran to the locker room
at period start and claimed one immediately. Not being so fast on
my feet in those days, I resorted to an alternative. I just
locked the tall locker next to my box locker. We each had a box
loccker to hold our PE uniform. I alsway had my tall locker
reserved for me. The downside was of course that the other 5
periods were short a tall locker. I was not there so I do not
know the level of pain that they went through. I just presume
they ignored the locked locker. This is a fair presumtion since
had they gone to the maintence people, they had the same keys.
Two other things happened at this point.
I noticed other boys staring at my penis when I was in the
shower. This is sort of disconcerting. I did not even know
what a homosexual was but I did not think this was that. So I
started looking at theirs. Mine was different. This was
obvious. I found later it was different in two ways. The
first was that I had not been circumcised: I had a skin flap over the
end. They did not. But then I was n an innocent: I did not
know what circumcision was when I was 17. I suspect most 8 uear
olds know it now. The other difference was a problem A
problem that would haughnt me in later years. I had a birth
defect. Not to uncommon but usually repaied at birth as it is
almost impossible to repair after maturity when the penis grows and
shrinks on a regular basis and such skin grafting is a high art
form. My penis had not fully developed and therefore instead of a
hole in the middle of the dome end, I had a hole at the end of a slot
on the bottom side. This may be a little awkward to describe in
such detail but to me it was significant and I write about it in a
coupl;e of places later on.
Another incident here occurred when another student stole my
basketball in the main gym one day as we were waiting for the
coach. My daughter, Megan, may appreciate my actions here as she
did the same sort of thing in preschool many years later. Dennis
Gugliardo. That was his name although I may have spelled it
wrong. He was a very tall Italian (with a name like that, what
else) fellow. We had made up groups and wer practicing shots when
he ran off with our ball. I caught up to hime and took the ball
back on the run (Oh. I guess I could run iun gym class).
But he had pissed me off and he kept running so I pursued. But as
I said above, there was now no chance of me ever catching. But I
had deadly aim in my throwing arm. as he approcached the
bleachers, I threw the ball at his foot. He was not seriously
hurt. But he felt a lot of pain and did not walk very well for a
few days. WHen a big guy like that takes a flyuing leap into the
wooden bleachers, he is lucky to not have broken anything. But
the coach saw it. I was in real trouble. I thought the
coach to be nfair but you did not win arguments with teachers. I
had to write an 8 to 10 page theme paer to be corrected by the Englich
department with a grade of C or better. Any subject.
Wow. I had survuved to my senioor year without writing any papers
for the ENglish department and now I had to write one for the
coach. I pick the subject: diferences in social disoreders
between the Irish and the Italian cultures. Needless to say I was
overly critical of the Italians.
But it did not end here. Oh. The end of the basketball
incident ended but I had another problem. In any school so far,
at the end of the period before luch, there was a mad scramble to get
to the front of the cafeteria line so that you could spend more time
eatin and relaxing than you spent waiting for your lunch. They
had reduced lunch from 45 minutes down to 30 so getting to the
cefeteria fast was even more critical. But we had the furthest to
go to the line and we were all boys with a lot ovf energy and we pushed
and shoved and ran as soon as the bell rang. Now again I worked
in the cafeteria so I could skip the line but the problem was that I
still had to go through the line. This was a serious problem and
people thought I was taking skips in line and tried to prevent
me. SInce I was nto to poopular in the school anyway, the
resistance was not negligible.
But I had another way. Just as the bell would ring and the
crowd shoved through the double doors, I ran the other way into the gym
itslef. I ran into the mat room, up the stairs to the
cooling/heating equipment area, and out tthe door to the roof.
From there I tan the length of the building to the front side where the
loading dock railings made the climb down very easy., The primary
purpose of the loading dock was to supply the cafeteria. Or at
athis was the primary purpose during the school year. I was doing
this for some time and I aroused some suspcion. I never knew how
much the teachers talked to each other but I knew they did and I knew I
was sometimes the object of the conversation.
Nowit took me a while to come to this conclusion as I mentioned
before, they knew too much about my hospital stay and medication aadn
were very forgiving of some of my behaviour. But I do not think
my roof running fell intot his category. I noticed the coach was
eying me several times as I ran the wrong way. His problem was
that he knew I did not go outdoors and that I did not come back and I
just sort of disappeared. I do not think he came to the
conclusion himself that I was escaping through the roof door. If
so I wold have heard a very strong yell as I escalated. But one
day as I was eating lunch, Joe, my physics teacher approached that
table and told me that he did not see me run across the roof earlier in
the luch period and he was just sure that he would not see me agin
tomorrow running across the roof. He was right. He never
agin saw me running across the roof. I did find another shortcut
to the kitchen through the loading dock but without a roof run.
It did take me past the teachers lounge but I think they thought me
running through there was preferable to trying to figure out how I got
through double locked doors. At the end of the school year, I
went to the front office and gave them my keys. I had found them
in the hall and did not know to whome they belonged but they did open
thre front door. Sometimes I think I should have made a stronger
exit with my jokes (?) I mean after all, the girl at the desk
probably just turned them over to the janior who picked out a few and
tossed the rest. Maybe i I had left a note saying that these keys
were the masters of the entire builkding, including the gym and street
ockers, someone miight have understood what they had in their
hand. But then they might have alsounderstood who had had them
and how they were used. Better off with the understatement and no
recognition than a stronger statement and some very negative
recognition.
You see, even with my medication making me a zombie, the Spanish
word "traviesa" fit me well. And who would have known? The
zombie who fell asleep anywhere, mostly a nerd type ahd everything but
a copy of the school blueprints in his pocket.
I cover Mr. Towle elsewhere in this document. But here I want
to mention what our class was like. I was in the lower track for
English. ALl of my smart friends were in WOrld Literature.
I was taking English Literature with kids I knew but were not often in
my other classes. Of course tracking was never discussed.
You did not think about it or at least I never did. Mr. Towle,
like Joe in Phsics was an inspired teacher. He did not have the
charm the Joe did. Mr. Towle (always Mr.) was a strict
disciplinarian. He had a great sense of humer and he could be
mean. He had us readingmore books than Ihad read for school in
all of my previous years.
We read plays, lots of plays. Two by Shakespeare. 3 or 4
by Shaw. We read a little of historic everything. We read
Beowulf. I think we read it here. I know I read it heare or
in Sophomore lit. No we read it here because I took German so I
could understand the origianl. This was a waste becasue we have
documented my inability to learn alanguage. ANd becuase Germanic
does not mena German. It means Dansh. and I took German in
my sophomore year of college and sophomore lit in my junior year.
So Beowulf came first. High school. We read Chaucer. EAnd
Mr. Towle explained that the limerics we read were not typical -- they
were very baudy. We learned the sexual references in
SHakespeare's play were subel and very ntentional. He told us to
read whatever we could get our hands on. This must have ben
frustrating for him as we discussed alter he was afraid that the only
books that his lower track group would read in the entire lives were
going to be read in his class. He cust me no slcak for the meds
or for my absence, He did not cut anybody any slack. If I
had more space I would tell you about thepickeld pigeon eggs, the fried
grasshoppers and bees and the chocolate covedred ants. I'll try
to cover those elsewhere.
There was a new man in town. I discovered that I was not so
smart the very first time I met Joe. and he wanted to be called
Crazy Joe. As the years have gone by I have learned about the
Philadelphia (?) high school principal who had adopted the same
moniljer. Mybe Joe plagerized. He was not crazy. He
was not evene eccentric. He did have a good ego. Tall,
receding hairline, glasses. He was smart and he knew it and he
would make us all smart or die trying. My first encounter with
him taught me the difference between speed and velocity to my
embarassment. He was not adverse to embarrassing people like me
who thought they knew it all. But I did know it all. In my
junior year I had read the physics text in my spare time.
<>But Joe was really different. First off, he liked me and it showed. This was unusual because as I write a little later, he thought I was a quitter. Several years later when I went back to the high school and visited some of my techers (these days they would arrest you first), after talking to the class about my computer career, he introduced me as one of the smartest kids to have ever attneded Wauwatosa High schools. From him this was one of the highest compliments of my life. We had a large number of really intelligent people in my class. I coulkd start wth Dave, and Kathy, and Barbara and Kirk and Jeff Potter and Tom Jensen and ... I should not forget my friend Steve Keidl but I do. We had been so close for so many years that I am/.was a poor judge here. But for whet Steve could do with cartoons and his radios, he would always be in front of me. I wss envious of his talents. He was also a great friend through high school and into college.
<>But this paragraph is about our physics class. Joe had a technique where he would toss out a question worth 5 points on the 6 weeks report card. I remeber one question. A mechanics question. How big of a mirroer do you need to see all of yourself? With a few off-the-wall guesses from thepeanut gallery, Paul Ramsey got the correct answer: one half as tall as the observer. But he cvould not excplain why. I cold draw the lines to demonstrate it and Paul and I sheared the 5 points. I never felt competitve with Dave or George or some others but I always fest some competetion with Paul. I never knew whyu. I did not think it was me.
<>One of the girsl in the class objected to this technique
claiming
it was discrimitaory. Mayber she was right but she had no
business being in the advanced track physics class. This was for
innovaotrs. It was not for people whoe just wanted to work their
way through for a grade. Joe was going to make thinkers adn
inspired scietntist out of all of us. I think he blew it on his
direction in the science Club but in the Physics class, he was miles
above any other science teacher I have ever met. He is dead now
so these words will not be heard by him. Maybe others of my class
who have the same meories.
<>Another technique was that before a test we could write
anything
we wanted on the front board. Formulas, constants,
whatever. Alkl of our classwork was metric. Unlike my
college profs who fet that nit system cnversion was a major part of
physiics, Joe considered unit covnersion and absolute waste of
time. Therefore we never evenlearned there was a controvery: we
just did metric and we just learned physics. as I learned later,
calculus was invented to support the physical laws, that is
physics. WIthout calculus, physics is seriously harder to
understand. But Koe did it.
<>We glossed over mechanics and delcved into partical
physics.
We did this in the first 6 weeks. I remeber because I missed the
first 3 and Joe called me in because I had written nolab reports during
the other 4 and my grade score because of the 5 point quesitions was
100%. He said he had a problem with giving me aperfect score when
I had not written any lab reports at all. I accepted a 98 when
Iwouldhave preferred a 99. He had an argument for that too but I
forget what it was. I was going to get the 98% so logical arment
was not appropriate: it couldhave been worse.
<>I remember on of those experiments in the first 6
weeks. I t
was the one I did not have to write up. We had an experiemtn to
measure the angle of refraction of light going from air to water and
back to air again. We were using the particle model at the time
(as opposed to the wave model). I sat with little group
andpondered the sequence. after mentaly walking through the
proces several times, I raised my had for Joe's attnetion. I told
him that I could not perform the experiment satifacorily. He
asked why not and I went through the process with himn showing
that there was no process that I could perform that would give the
results that were necessary for the partical model. And he said
"And?". After stumbling what to folow up with as I thought i had done a
good job of explainging my thought, I bumbled upon the right
answer: "therefore, the particale modle fails tto explain
refraction". I goat an "A" on the experiment and did not have to
compete it. He later told me that I should still have written up
my thougth process incoming to that conclusion. But the rest of
the class was shocked: I got out ofhaving to do an experiemt just by
iopening my mouth. I think it was events such as this that gave
us all a great admiration for the man. He was not as much
interested in protocol as he was in having us able tothink our way
thorugh a problem set.
<>Joe was a great learning experince. He taught us that
thinking was its own reward. The downer was when I got to college
and discovered that first year physics at the univesrity had no
interest whatsoever in education. It was purely a matter of
how well you folled instruction. THinking ws discouraged.
But that was the Graeat University of Wisconssin and not high school
physice with a man who was qualified to teach anything at any level.
<>I do not know his youth or his background or his age.
But
Joe made all of it come to life for us. THere is this place as
sort of an add-on to PRinceton Univeristy called the Institute dfor
advanced research or something like that. If you are a real
science freak you will recognize the name. This is where all of
the stolen German scientists were housed during their invention of the
atom bomb. Great things happened here. Great minds.
EInstein. Heysenberg. Pauli. all of the names we associate
with the bomb were here. So was Joe. He could tell us
anecdotes about these people so that we coud see that they were real
people and not just names from the text. He told us aobut one
scientist who enjoyed supplying homes with firewood in his spare
tiem. He told us about the guy who came up with the
demonstration,very popular at the time of the muse traps and the
ping-pong balls. WHat? You nver heard of the ping-pong
balls? The idea was that you made a close array of set mouse
traps. The conventional,, spring loaded mouse traps. On
each trigger, yo placed two ping-pong balls. The idea here is
that he wanted to demonstrate the quntity of energy from a reaction of
freeing electrons from atoms. As we learned in chemistry class
(yes we took nuclear chemisrty in our high school) The amount of
energy released when an electron is freed from an atom is very
great. Even in the 'F' orvbitals. How was thos
proved? The mouse trap springs reperesented the energy af
attraction. A single ping-pong ball was tossed into the middle of
the araay of mouse traps. It would trigger the release of two
more. These would inturn fly and land oon two toher muse
traps. In a few seconds all of the mouse traps would have their
ping pong balls flying threough the air. A visible,
understandable, representation of what happend in a nuclear reaction
when atoms staart flying aaround in closely packed, high-energy
atoms. But the zinger in this lesson was nit the
demonstration..We had all seen it on Disney many times. THe
zonger was that Princeton is located n south Jersey close to
Philadelphia. The trip to New YOrk City is not terible but
at night it takes wuite a while. THis genius (they were all
geniuses) had apcked his pping pong balls and mouse traps in the back
oif his car and was driving to NYC to make afilmed demonstration.
He was arreasted on some violation and had no wallet. He like
manny other such people forgot his wallet. The police had to
acall the institue to verify that he really was this famous
person. after identification,t hey escorted him to NYC. Our
class got to laugh. We got to identify this genius (no, I donot
remember his name, come on, it is almost 50 years ago and my memory
gave out a long time ago). We also understand forever how a
nuclear reatction works. all in a 15-minute anecdote.
<>Joe seemd to know all of these peole personally. It
was
1962. The war was 1944. If Joe were 18 in 1944, he would
have been 36 in class. The time frame fits if he were a
college student at the time. So he could have known them..
But Joe never answered questions from me as to why he was there and
when he was there. If you knew Joe, did you ever ask? Did
he ever say? How did our glorious physics teacher get involved
with some of the greatest scientific minds in the hisotory of the
world? And what did he teach that I do not remeber? Help!
By the time I returned from the hospital, the Science Club had been
ruined. It only took 3 weeks of my absence to guarentee that
theScience Club would be returned to the nerds. The school board
was going to have its projects. There was to be in place of the
Science Club a Radio Club. They took over the entire science work
room behind the classroom. They strung an antenna across from one
side of the building to another. We shall get to that. I
was in no position to argue. The medicine that I was on
(Thorazine)
had turned me into a zombie. I could not speak without
stuttering. I could not get excited without falling asleep.
My mouth was so dry that I could not speak in whole sentences as my
tongue got stuck. But I tried. I went before the club and
explained my postion on where the science club member priorities (those
that had elected me) had been and
should have continued. Then Joe, our teacher/sponsor got up and
gave his
spiel. There was a vote. I lost. I quit the
club.
Joe never understood. He called me a quitter. He was
wrong. He had replaced the group that had elected me with a new
group. He had directives the exact opposite of where we
started. There was no compromise. Had I stayed, I would
have just objected to everything. It was better to have executive
level people who agreed with the new directives -- not attempting to
put them
back.
It did get a little interesting though. Every week on science
club day, I drove a group of students at break-neck speeds to the old
high school. We got there almost on time. The little
Corvair was packed and seriously overloaded. We did this for
about a month. But we could not keep it up. I almost killed
the group going down the hill from the old high school to State
street. The Corvair was not intended to have 8 people -- the
brakes gave out. Luckily the traffic cop saw us coming and
cleared the
intersection.
I was called into the principal's office and told that I must
abandon my attempt to start a second, unsponsored science club.
This new club was a surprise to me but a group of fellow students were
attempting just such a thing. I had to call it off. I have
been called a male chauvenist many times by my daughters. And
maybe I am but I am here to tell you that when I was in high school, it
was my objective that ALL students, boys, girls, whoever, should have a
posive attitude towards school and especially the sciences. I
wanted it to be fun because without the fun, it was just a jumping off
point for the nerds.
Oh. The radio club. One night we needed a loaf of bread
from the store. I volunteered to go to the super market to buy
some. The local supermarket was a couple of miles away.
Jeff Cleary and Chuck Krueger and I had been planning such a
trip. I picked them up and we took off for the high school.
It could not have been Jeff he had moved to Brookfield by now. We
had a third. We dropped me off at the school and they went for
the bread. I climbed to the roof and cut the antenna into
sections. The dogs were barking and the police came. I
actually hid in the building chimney as the police scoured the building
looking for me. I always wondered how they were so prepped.
In any case when they settled down, I climbed down, ran to the sand box
out front. Up in Wisconsin, there are snnd boxes in case of
ice. The school driveway was downhill and so we had a box.
When Chuck came by, I hopped out and we went home. I have no idea
when the cops left. My mother was
not too upset by the delay. No one ever heard about who did this
until this writing right now. The next day at school the entire
school was called out on the grass to look at the cable sections.
Not a word was said and we returned to classes. I asked why we
did that and was told about the cable. Some things I will never
understand. I did understand that a boy from Butler took the
blame. In fact he was Mary Ann's new boy friend at this
poiint. But that was a long time ago and that was just a
rumor. Cutting the cable was not a rumor. And the only
damage was for them to reconnect the sections and put it back up.
It is not like I caused any damage -- just some additional effort and
some solder. I could have plugged it into 220v up there on
the roof. I could have stolen it but those would have been
damage and malicious. We did it more as a joke or prank than to
cause damage. But then no body understands anything.
Nothing really happened here of any excitment. I bring up this
class as it was important to me. American history. Most
students took it in their Junior year. Why I did not, I do not
know. But the teacher, like many of the Wauwatosa High teachers,
no make that most of the Wauwatosaa teachers of any grade, were
exceptional. Eveyr one wanted to get into Mr. Avery's class
although I do not remember any other history teacher there. On
the first day of class, he had each of us take out a single piece of
paper. On one side we were to sketch a map of the USA and drawn
in all of the states and their capitals. Wheh. On the other
side, name all of the Presidents, their terms and an event for each
term. I got 47 of the 48 states. To this day I do not know
which one I missed but I think it was a midwestern state like Kansas or
Missouri. No, I got Missouri. Whatever. The oteher
part was a disaster. I got the ifrst 3 presidents and the last 3
presidents but noone in the middle. I fared better than almost
everyone. I think maybe one or two got all of the staes.
Many got more presidents. But the class was really disheartened.
Disheartened until the teacher collected the papers and stated that
this was to be the first prt of our final exam. This is what we
would learn this school year. the current papers would not be
scored. But it gave each of us a goal. We knew what we had
to do this year. We took our studies seriously because not one of
us wanted to draw another blank paper.
I still remember that one president was in for such a short term
that the only significant event of his presidency was that his wife
moved a piano into the White House.. Not historically significant
unless you are a music lover but it counted and that is what we
need to have.
This was the most serious disaster of missing the first 3
weeks. I never recovered as by the time I got to class, all of
the key stroke exercises for learning the keys was over. We were
now tping papers. Easdy papers but papers. Except for
me. The techer gave me an option: quit at the semester and he
would give me a 'D'. Contiue and he would give me an 'F'. I
happily accepted the 'D'. Now I had a study hall period where
before my day was full.
I hope I can remeber his name somewhere along the line. He was
the Mu ALpha Theta sponsor at the old and now the new high
school. The first semester was Trigonometry and the second was
Analytical ANalysi, a warm up for calculus. Danr. I wish I
could remember his name. He always wore a tweed sport coat.
Was not short but not tall. Sort of chunky with heay rimmed
glasses and always a sort of Mona Lisa smile.
Not much happened as far as math was concerned. But a couple
of things did happen. One day as class was about to start on of
the sudents, Bryan I think was his name, came intto class with that
same look as after a shock treatment. Oh, he was cognicent but he
was shocked. He had just learned that the wall tiles in the
hallway were blue. He had always thought they were gray. He
had just learned that he was color blind. I really do hope the
schools are doing a better jog of vision testing than they were doing
when I was in schoool. As I have mentioned somewhere else, I saw
double until I was 21 or 22. Nobody had told me that I should not
see double and I had two eyes so I thought it was normal Car
accidents? If you have no depth perception, the scrapes that I
had might have been much worse.
The other theing that happened was I again took the prelinary test
for the Mount Mary College math contest. Our school was permitted
7 stduents. Each school got a team of 3 to represnet the school
for scoring purposes. I had placed third as a sophomore. As
a junior in Mrs. Striegls class, I was never even informed of the
competition. But now me, as a zombie took the preliminary
test. I missed the qualigying score. I placed 10th. I
was not too surpised as this is a timed test where accuracy and speed
both count. Speed was not my forte this year. But the most
amazing thing happened. The three students who placed before me
disqualified themselves. You could have knocked me over with the
proverbial feather. I started to object but this would insult the
graciousness of these students. I do not remeber who they were
except for one. Barbara Schrage was the seventh and she let me go
in her place. I did not do well in the test at the college
although Bob/Bill, Steidl did and we did place as a school as a result
of his score. I really felt like I hhad let Barbara and the
schoold down. Thank you again, Barbara, wherever you may
be. I thought your action was misplaced because you were
certainly one of the very smartest people in our class, but your
genorosity has never been forgotten.
Our school did not have a dress code. But in those days, everyone
dressed respectably. Shirt with collar, slacks. Girsl wore
dresses or skirts unless it was too cold and then they were expected,
although not required, to take slcks during class.
For not having a dress code, I think we had a dress code. The
boys slack sould nothave outside pockets. This made them "jeans"
and jeans were not permitted. So guess who blew it? One of
the two times I got called to the princiapls office. Easter week
was approaching and our veloved Student COuncil with Miss Kritz as the
sponsor, posted two dress up days the same month. Dress up was
always optional but in those days optional had a stronger meaning than
it does today. SO when she announced the second such day in one
month, I posted poster saying: "In the spirit of Easter, Let's crucify
Miss Kitz". The posters did not last too long but the word was
out: we would ignore the second dress up day. My problem was that
I did worse than ignore it. I ignored the rule against outside
pockets and was hauled into the pricipals office and told to go home
and change but to not miss any class time nor leave the campus.
This implied that my mother must come with a change of clothes for
me. I think if I had intentionally worn sloppy clothes, I would
have beeen in real trouble but as it was, these slacks probpably would
have gone unnoticed on any other day., But not this day. I
was reprimanded, told I was a bad example, and sent back to class,
somewhat embarassed because everyone knew why I had seen the principal.