My Orbiting

Grandmother

and Other Improbable Stories
of Growing Up in Columbus, Ohio

 

By Tom Thomson

 

I am a time-traveler, a genetic visitor to this planet,bewildered, bemused, and saddened.

 

 

Prologue

 

I

Love on the Run

My mother and father were married in Chicago at the Hyde Park Presbyterian Church, which was located on Dorchester Avenue off 53rd Street. Afterwards, there was a reception at the Chicago Beach Hotel.

Once, years later, my brother David was spending the summer with his grandmother who still lived in Chicago. She told him the following account of my mother and father's wedding night. David never got around to telling me this story until after our mother passed away.

When the reception was over, the bride and bridegroom left for an apartment, they had rented a few weeks previously and were still in the process of furnishing.

About two o'clock the following morning, my father was back at his parents] apartment, knocking on their front door. When his mother let him in she could see that he was in a state of great agitation.

"What on earth is the matter, darling?" she asked him in her Texas drawl.

Instead of answering her, he made his way through the darkened rooms to the kitchen where he slumped down in a chair at a little porcelain table.

He buried his face in his arms and started crying. Every once in a while, he lifted his head and sobbed out, "Gawd damn!" His mother looked at him nervously, wondering what was going on.

After futilely trying to soothe him, she started asking him questions.

"Is Lucille alright?" she asked. "Where is she?"

No answer.

"What happened?"

No answer.

Over and over she asked the same questions, sometimes rephrasing them, hoping to get some kind of a response, but he was like in a stupor.

She was really worried now, maybe thinking in the back of her mind that her son had done harm to his bride.

Again she asked, "Is Lucille alright?

"Oh, she's alright", my father finally moaned, "You can count on that!"

To accent what he had just proclaimed, he slammed his fist down on the little table top so hard that the little cut-glass sugar bowl danced a jig.

"Well, I'll never know what the trouble is until you tell me," his mother exclaimed, a note of exasperation in her voice. "Goodness me, I can't imagine what has gotten you in such a state."

By now, she was walking in circles around the kitchen, and nervously biting her lip.

Finally, in desperation, she said, "Ill warm you up a cup of coffee. That will do you some good."

She lit one of the gas burners with a wooden matchstick and pushed a half-filled coffeepot onto the blue flames. Then she walked over behind her son and placed both her hands on his back. Gently she rubbed the tense, scrunched up area between his shoulder blades and neck.

By now he had quit sobbing and muttering to himself. He lifted his head up off his arms, and looked around like he had just awakened. His mother was hopeful that she would soon find out what the problem was.

In a few minutes the coffee was perking and she poured her son a cup of the hot black brew.

"Now you just tell me what the trouble is," she cooed in her most soothing Texas drawl.

"Whereupon, my father blurted out, "Momma, she wouldn't give me my rights."

He repeated this statement several times, as if he were in a trance or maybe, like he couldn't believe that he was telling his mother this bedroom confession. He looked up at here with imploring eyes. "Did you hear what I said, Mamma? My wife and my bride wouldn't give me my rights!"

"There, there," she responded, as at last the truth dawned on her. Why she hadn't understood sooner is anyone's guess. But when you stop and think about it, how often have you ever heard of a similar situation? Well, maybe if it had been a daughter fleeing home from her wedding bed in a terrified frenzy &endash; that might bed understandable. Maybe.

His mother shook her head to clear the middle-of-the-night cobwebs. She was thinking that such goings-on never would have happened back in Port Lavaca where women were women and men were proud of it.

Well, my father ended up drinking his coffee, then sleeping the rest of the night on the couch.

About noon a telegram arrived, delivered by a Western Union boy. It was for my father and it was from my mother.

My father sat up on the sofa, rubbed the sleep from his eyes, and opened the envelope.

He unfolded the message which consisted of printed out words pasted on a yellow Western Union form. He read the words half a dozen times before handing it to his mother.

Here is what she read: "Dining room suite to be delivered today. Stop. Need you to arrange furniture. Stop. Sorry about last night. Stop. Love Lucille."

"I guess I better get over there," my father said. "She's going to need me to move all that heavy stuff around."

"Good luck, son," she said softly.

As he was headed for the door, my father turned around for a moment. "Thanks for the night's lodging, Momma," he said somewhat sheepishly.

"You're always welcome, David," she replied. "I have an idea you won't need the sofa tonight. Bye, dear!

A smile crossed my father's face. "Well, I better get going. You know how women need help in arranging things."

When my brother told me about that night, I couldn't believe my ears. That was our mother alright, was the first thing that came to my mind. She was always good at arranging things and not always to everyone's satisfaction. But then my outlook brightened and I looked at David.

"Well, I guess they worked things out, huh?"

 

My mother, in Chicago, before I was born.

 

 

The Night My Father Died

 

II

Samuel Clemens intimated that life is a dream. Perhaps it is, I don't know. All I know for certain is that my father, David Drury Thomson, went on a business trip and never came back. He fell to his death from a tenth-floor window of the Roosevelt Hotel in Pittsburgh. I was four years old.

So, I have constructed a fictional narrative in which I imagine the details of his last two days alive. Maybe he is speaking through me. After all, I am the carrier of his genes.

No one knows how or why my father fell from that window or anything about the events leading up to the tragedy. Since the coroner couldn't prove his death was a suicide - there was no note or any other suggestion of such a self-destructive urge - they tried to determine that he had been drinking. So far as I know, it was never shown that he had more than a couple of beers. One of the bellboys and an elevator operator remembered he had gone to his room before 9:00 pm. After a lifetime of wondering what really happened, the following account is probably as close to the truth as any.

 

When my father drove his Franklin across the Monongahela River bridge heading for downtown Pittsburgh that long-ago August evening, he had the world by the tail. His good fortune included a faithful wife, Lucille, and two children. As I said, I was four and my brother David was eleven or twelve at the time. My father had a new job that held the possibility of a rise into management, an attractive apartment in Grandview, a suburb of Columbus. Ohio, good health, a positive outlook on life and, of course, his shiny new black car with its imposing hood. Everything was coming up roses, everything, that is, except one or two annoying items that seemed beyond his control.

By the time the bellboy had taken him to his room on the tenth floor of the Roosevelt Hotel at Penn Avenue and Sixth Street, he was probably exhausted. The day had become hot and muggy after the morning storm, making it a long drive from Columbus along the old National Road through the hills of eastern Ohio and on through the mountainous terrain of West Virginia and western Pennsylvania.

The memory of a heated argument with my mother that morning nagged at the back of his mind most of the way to Pittsburgh. That was one of the items. Lucille could be impossible, he decided. She was a carbon copy of her mother, that much was for sure. She was strong-willed, never failing to speak her mind. The least little aggravation would spark her anger.

My mother had been upset because he was going on a business trip over the weekend. He could understand her feelings, but she didn't seem to realize that Saturday was a good day for him to talk to some of his important building material customers. In fact, the only day for some of them. How many times had he told her that?

It also infuriated him that she used the children in her arguments against him. Time and time again she would do that. It wasn't as if he didn't love the boys, his own flesh and blood. He loved them more than life itself. He spent all the time he could with them. When David was only seven years old, hadn't he taken him on a sales trip down to Ironton on the Ohio River? He brought home educational books and sporting equipment for David. And as for little Tommy, he had more toys than he knew what to do with.

It was terribly, terribly sad, he thought. My God, the argument that morning had been almost Wagnerian.

Lucille screaming accusations at him, his shouting back at her. All of this going on as an August thunderstorm raged outside. Sheets of rain rattled the windows, bolts of lightning momentarily lit the mid-morning darkness, and claps of thunder reverberated across the sky. David had been at school, thank goodness, but hadn't little four-year-old Tommy cried out for them to stop? The memory wrenched his heart.

There was yet another source of unease between them, one that Lucille refused to discuss, but it was always there, at least for him, the issue constantly gnawing away at his gut. The truth was, he wasn't getting enough sex and he didn't know what to do about it. That was the plain truth. But then he chuckled to himself. Seemed that was a common complaint of most of his married friends.

The other concern, the second item: he wasn't getting any younger. Thirty-five wasn't exactly old, but then again it wasn't young either. Time was passing. And he was getting bald. No, he was bald. Hair around the sides and back but none on top. Damn, he hated the baldness! That was item Number Three, if you didn't count it as part of Number Two. Who the hell did I inherit my baldness from, he wondered?

His own father wasn't bald. He had a good head of hair. As for his other male relatives, he hadn't seen them for so long he didn't know whether they had hair or not. In their photographs they sported a full head of hair, running down their faces in sideburns, erupting into bushy beards. No telling though, those pictures were taken years ago. Today they might be bald as turkey buzzards!

He crossed the Ohio River about noon and by that time, he had pretty much dismissed his problems, including the argument with Lucille. I'll make it up to her when I get home, he thought. I'll get her something nice. A gift. A token of my love.

I'll get a couple of presents for the boys. He remembered a wonderful old music store in downtown Pittsburgh he had wandered into on his last trip. That's what I'll do, he decided. I'll buy Lucille some sheet music for her piano playing, something she'll really like. I'll get a big harmonica for David and a smaller one for Tommy-boy. He felt relieved, as if everything was settled.

He began to notice the countryside as he whizzed along the macadam road: the herds of Holsteins and Jerseys grazing in the valleys, a little herd of harlequin-patterned goats all bunched up close together, fields of ripening corn in the bottomlands, the plants heavy with upright tussled ears almost ready for picking.

Everywhere along the roadside were the colorful roadside flowers of late summer: the yellow splash of black-eyed Susan's, the bright purple of Ironweed, the dazzling white of Queen Anne's lace, and the nice mauve color of the tall Joe-Pye weed plants, some of them surely seven feet tall, And when the road had climbed up into some of the higher elevations, he noticed the first bright golden spangles of goldenrod blooming, even though it was only mid-August. There were other flowers, ones he didn't know, and he made a resolution right then and there that someday he would learn them.

He was curious to know the kinds of birds there were too. In a little town in West Virginia, he stopped for gas; and while the attendant was filling the tank up, he went to the restroom. As he came back out the door, a brilliant orange bird flew out of a nearby elm tree. He thought it might be an oriole but he wasn't sure.

 

My father, David Drury Thomson

 

III

 

The soil is mixed with loam and clay,

In rugged rocks and silt and sand;

Here life suspended humbly lay,

American dust and soil and land.

 

- Lines reconstructed from my father's notes on hotel stationery

 

Sometimes the two-lane road cut along the sides of massive mountains, exposing a layered strata of conglomerate rocks and shale and seams of coal. Thinking back on it after he got settled in his hotel room, he decided that's what he liked best. The mountains! The freedom of space. And, here and there, where left undisturbed, towering trees paraded up the sides of those cuts, extending up the slopes until they seemed to reach the sky.

My father felt elated, almost euphoric that August evening. It had been exhilarating being on the road, driving across the undulating landscape. It was the only way to see the greatness of the American land and keep in touch with its people.

Sitting in the hotel room, his mind wandered to what he would do the next day. He looked forward to the calls he would make. There was one lumber supply company he hoped might give him a substantial order.

Once the bellhop left, my father took off his wilted shirt, then the rest of his clothes, ran a tub full of hot water, checked the temperature with his toes, stepped into the porcelain. Carefully, he lowered himself into the tub, then slowly slid under the water until most of his body was submerged. He gave a great sigh of relief and pure contentment.

He loved to soak in a tub full of hot water and soapsuds. It was one of the few things you could count on in life, a great boon to civilization. Contemplating his legs and thighs stretched out in front of him, he reassured himself that he was still reasonably fit for a man his age. Soaking in a tub like this always made him feel young again, almost like a boy. When you washed away the sweat and grime along with the cares of the world, he thought, you washed away the years.

With the little bar of hotel soap, he lathered himself, rubbing the sliver of soap back and forth across his stomach, pressing it into the soft flesh around his navel, soaping the fine light hair on his stomach, his hand inducing his body and his mind into a state of complete relaxation.

What strange things navels are, he reflected. Belly buttons. Little inverted knots neatly affixed to every person like badges that say you're a member of the club. Well, at least for most people they're like that, but he remembered back to his school days in Dallas when there were a few boys with belly buttons that stuck out. He always thought they were ugly when they protruded like that, sort of unfinished looking. But what did he know, he thought with an inward smile.

Yes, and there had been a woman, a dark-haired girl, a prostitute at Rosie's place. Her belly button stuck out. He recalled how she would make fun of herself, laugh and say she had been born at home and her drunken father bit the umbilical cord off with his teeth and tied a granny knot in it. He laughed to himself as he thought back to those long-gone days.

His mind wandered back to the beautiful countryside he had been driving through that day. If only he could get his feelings down on paper. Maybe he could write a poem about the grandeur of the American continent.

That would be something worthwhile to do. Ever since high school he entertained the idea that he might have a talent for writing, that someday he would try his hand at a novel, or maybe write poetry.

He liked the work of that new fellow, the poet, what was his name? Oh, yes, Robert Frost. He liked him better than any of the other American poets he had read, except maybe for Walt Whitman. Walt was good but Frost was better, he decided. Easier to understand. His voice was that of the common man, you could sense he loved the American land with all his heart and soul. You could bet your last dollar on that, he grunted to himself.

"Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" was just fine. The words themselves were like harness straps and tinkling bells and snowflakes, but there was a deeper and darker meaning, he thought. The words turned in upon themselves, revealing the poet's awareness of mortality. Maybe, too, against that somber backdrop, the words revealed a determination to pursue one's own personal destiny. My God, I wish I could write like that, he thought, as he brought the washcloth dripping with hot water up to his face.

I must have gotten my interest in literature from my father, he figured. He was well informed, read all the time. Kept a lot of books around the house. Yes, he was a good influence. It was probably his influence that got me into reading good books. And maybe it was Momma's artistic talent, too. All the arts are connected, and that includes writing. His mind thus engaged, he continued to relax.

He recalled the time his father gave him a copy of Plutarch's Parallel Lives and how much he enjoyed reading about the exploits of the ancient Greeks and Romans. All these years he kept the book, and just last year gave it to his eldest son, David on his tenth birthday. He took to it like a duck to water. That boy certainly liked to read, maybe too much. Wish he was more interested in sports. On the other hand, maybe he's going to be a scholar. David has the brains for anything he sets himself to.

After he finished his bath, he sat down at the little mahogany desk in his room, determined to at least start a poem. With his orange and black Parker Brothers fountain pen, he scrawled what he thought might make a promising title.

"The American Land," is what he wrote, and he proceeded to fill several pages with poetic impressions of what he had felt that day, then frustrated with his inability to capture the dream-like beauty of the land and his response to it, he ended up scratching out most of what he had written.

He got up from the desk, and for a moment he looked out over the smoky haze of the city through the big window in his room. Then he opened up his garment bag, selected a light blue shirt, a white collar, and a red and blue striped tie. Standing in front of a mirror, he put the shirt on, tugged the collar into place, slipped the tie under the collar, carefully tied a Windsor knot, attached the collar buttons, pulled on the pants to his seersucker suit, and finally put on the jacket.

The exertion of dressing had brought beads of perspiration to his face. God almighty, it's one hell of a hot day, he thought as he locked the door to his room and walked down the slightly cooler hall toward the elevator. He was hungry and the hotel dining room served excellent food. After dinner he realized he was tired, so he returned to his room, undressed, and slipped into bed. Tomorrow was going to be a busy day with a lot of calls to make.

 

 

IV

 

Our lives of love, the perfect fruit,

Though soon will ripened be:

Then may they fall together down-

Sweetheart, grow old with me.

 

And fallen, may the gardener Fate

Keep them from parting free;

Let us be gathered side by side &endash;

Sweetheart, grow old with me!

 

- Poem my father mailed to my mother from the Hotel Roosevelt on another
trip he had taken to Pittsburgh several weeks before his death.

 

Saturday he made his business calls and toward afternoon he drove to the music store that was just a few blocks from the hotel. He purchased two harmonicas as gifts for his sons, the larger one with a double bank of reeds, the other a small one with a single row.

"Made in Germany, wonderful crafts-manship," the clerk, a frail looking man with a green eye-shade, informed him.

From a display of sheet music, my father selected the aria, "My Heart at Thy Sweet Voice," from Samson and Delilah, by Saint-Saens. That should please Lucille, he thought to himself. He smiled inwardly as he recalled the love poem he had written and mailed to her on his last trip to Pittsburgh.

After he left the music store, he went to a Walgreen's Drug Store. He sat on a stool at the counter where he could feel a breeze from the big floor fan. "I'll take a chocolate milkshake," he told a freckle-faced waitress with red hair. When the frothy confection was set down in front of him, he sipped it slowly through a straw and stared out the plate glass window behind the soda fountain past a cut-glass bowl of oranges and bananas. The late afternoon street was almost devoid of pedestrians. A street- car the color of ripe red plums rattled by, expressionless faces peering from the windows. A distraught woman dragged a squalling little boy along by his arm.

"It's so hot out there, the redheaded waitress smiled grimly, "you could fry an egg on the sidewalk."

He finished his shake and walked outside into the sweltering heat. By the time he had parked his car and gotten back to his room, he was bathed in sweat. He took a bath in the footed bathroom tub, stretched out on the bed and didn't wake up until almost seven o'clock. It was still light out, and from the big open window at the end of the room, the sounds of traffic eddied up from the street below like spiraling flocks of pigeons. He dressed, took the elevator down to the lobby and headed for the hotel dining room.

After dinner, he walked a couple of blocks over from Sixth Street where the hotel was located to a speak-easy he had been to several times. It was a place called Joe's, a fairly high-class spot where newspapermen, off-duty police-men, politicians, lobbyists, and more than a few good looking women hung out, along with anyone else who knew a good thing when they saw one.

During that Prohibition year of 1928, it was one of the most popular watering holes in Pittsburgh. I should mention that the 18th Amendment to the Constitu-tion had ushered in Prohibition across the entire country. That meant that the manufacturing, distributing, and selling of alcoholic beverages was prohibited by state and federal law. No whiskey, no wine, no beer. Period. And, much of the zealous, almost religious, fervor had originated right here in Ohio, the home of the Women's Christian Temperance Union. The spirit of Carry Nation had won the day.

Joe's had been a popular establishment in other more carefree days when bars were legitimate But even so, with city and police officials looking the other way, such places were still doing a booming business, and the money - and payoffs - flowed like wine.

A handsome mahogany bar seating at least thirty persons ran down one side of the room; lots of tables with red-checkered tablecloths surrounded a saw-dust covered dance floor in front of a small raised bandstand. A Negro chef by the name of Woody was famous for some of the best broiled t-bone steaks in town. He kept the kitchen open until midnight so he was much appreciated by the regulars.

Outside the door, my father pressed the buzzer, said the obligatory "Joe sent me" to a hidden face behind the door and once inside gave his straw hat to the pretty hat check girl before striding into a Saturday night shindig in full swing.

The tuxedoed forms of five sweating jazzmen were swaying and bending to the sultry beat of The Saint James Infirmary Blues. Through a haze of cigarette smoke he glanced around the spacious room. On the small dance floor in front of the bandstand a couple was dipping and twirling, a green silk dress clinging to the girl's curvaceous figure. Her partner, a handsome blond-haired youth probably not more than twenty-one, was obviously tipsy. Together they swirled and stag-gered, bumping into tables, apologizing like mad to people they collided with as they twirled about, the girl's head thrown back, showing her white teeth, laughing and shrieking as if she were riding the Whip at the State Fair.

My father, a smile already on his face, looked around for a seat at the bar. He had made up his mind to have one beer and no more.

 

V

A stunning little brunette in a red knit dress was the only woman seated at the crowded bar in the speakeasy. Her bobbed hair framed a coquettish face, emphasizing painted lips and quizzical blue eyes. She was turned around on her bar stool facing three or four men standing behind her. She wore black net stockings, her legs crossed in such a way that her skirt had crept up above her knees, revealing an exciting curve of white thighs above red garters.

The night was steaming, so most of the men were in their shirtsleeves. Some had dispensed with their neckties or pulled them down, opening up their shirt collars. Many wore suspenders instead of belts. A gray-haired man with glasses, a reporter for one of the Pittsburgh dailies, was singing along with the band, a drink in one hand, waving his straw hat in time to the music with the other.

My father watched as one of the bartenders poured his beer from a chilled amber bottle beaded in sweat. I'll have to come here more often, he thought, meet more of the regular customers, get on a first-name basis with the bartenders. That's what drinking is all about. The sociability. Passing the time in friendly conversation with other men and having the opportunity to look at a pretty face once in a while. You leave all the problems of everyday life at the door, check them with your hat.

He realized he was rationalizing. Alcohol was the ruination of many a good man. He knew that. The thought reminded him that he had to start saving a little money. One of these days, he would buy a house for the family. Been married now a dozen years and still renting. That's no good. He continued sipping his beer.

He was feeling relaxed, entertaining himself with his thoughts, but enjoying the activity all around him. He glanced down the bar to see if the girl in the red dress was still there and discovered that she and her companions had left. It was getting on toward nine o'clock when he ordered a second beer from the bartender.

A pleasant fellow was sitting next to him, gabbing away with a couple of his friends, talking mostly about business and the people they worked with, or so he guessed from the small bits of conversation he overheard. They had gone

through God knows how many pitchers of beer, probably five or six at least. Every once in a while, they interrupted their own conversation to talk to him, tell him a joke, or share some humorous anecdote from their day at the office.

In between these diversions, his mind was free to roam wherever it willed. That was what he liked about bars. Even when alone, maybe mostly when you were alone, your mind sort of unloosed itself from its moorings. You hoisted your sails to catch

whatever prevailing wind happened along. He began to think about his drive back to Columbus the next day. Briefly, he recalled the argument with Lucille the morning of his departure, but just as quickly, dismissed it.

He looked forward to returning to Columbus with the purchases he had made, the two harmonicas for the boys and the sheet music for Lucille. The new piano he had given her, an A.B. Chase parlor grand, had set him back a thousand dollars, but it was worth it. Lucille was a gifted pianist with a lovely voice, and maybe the children would learn to play.

Lifting the glass to his lips, he savored the hearty taste of the brew, reminiscing about his college days in Dallas when he and his friends would go out on the town, bold and rambunctious as they chug-a-lugged tequila down with their beers. His friends would swig their drinks down, but he always preferred to make them last. He would lick the salt on the back of his hand, and then suck on a slice of lemon. Even when his best friends kidded him about it, that's what he would do.

The contrast between the beer and the tequila reminded him of the early spring storms that swept across the plains when hot and cold air collided. He had seen a lot of them, tumultuous clouds spread across the horizon like Furies, so black they looked as if they were full of India ink. Now and then they would spawn a twister that ripped up everything in its path. Same way with beer and liquor. You've got to treat them with respect.

He was thinking of those great storm clouds over Texas when his mind jumped to a tragic event that had occurred in Ohio just a few years previous. The U.S. Navy dirigible Shenandoah with a crew of 43 men on board had been caught up in the maws of a violent storm, which caused the 682-foot long craft to split apart and fall to the ground in Noble County with a loss of 14 lives. And, incredibly, he had witnessed the aftermath - within a day of the disaster.

 

VI.

There were several large electric floor fans at Joe's, which circulated the air and provided something of a breeze. It was probably a well-insulated building because even though it was hotter than blazes outside, the place wasn't too uncomfortable.

My father was sitting at the crowded bar, occasionally talking to people next to him, but basically alone, a traveling salesman, a stranger in town. In between snippets of conversation with the fellows next to him, his mind wandered back and forth between his wife and the two boys back in Columbus and other incidental thoughts such as the joys and dangers of alcohol, and the great storms he had often witnessed as a youth in Texas. Many had been killers wreaking death and destruction in their wake. The thought of those storms suddenly brought to mind the aftermath of a tragic event he had witnessed several years before.

He had been on his way to Marietta in 1925 on a business trip when he stopped at a little restaurant in Cambridge, Ohio. As he sat at the counter looking at the luncheon menu, he became aware of a heightened sense of excitement in the air. It seemed as if everybody in the place was talking to everybody else all at the same time, and he began to pick up phrases like "You don't mean to tell me!" and "It was an act of God, there's no doubt about that," and "It's hard to believe somethin' like that happenin' around these parts."

He asked the plump waitress what had happened.

"You ain't heard?" she said, her eyes growing wide as she wiped her hands on her white apron. "Why, a big dirigible done crashed down at Ava in Nobel County. I don't know how many men were killed. They say a dozen or more."

"A dirigible?" he repeated. "Are you sure about that? What was the name of it?"

"Land o'goshen," she exclaimed, "I can't remember the name of it." She turned to a gray-haired man in overalls sitting at the lunch counter a couple of seats away. "Bill, what was the name of that there dirigible?"

"Shenandoah," the man replied, turning in his seat to face them. "The United States Navy airship Shenandoah. Crashed about four, four-thirty this morning, part of it on the Nieswonger place, part of it over at the Nichols' farm, and other pieces God knows where. Someone said the control car and the men that were killed fell at Andy Gamary's."

"Does anyone know what happened?" my father asked.

"Crashed this morning just before sunup," Bill answered. "Just broke up and fell out of the sky in two or three pieces. They say it must have run into a storm south of here."

My father couldn't believe what he was hearing. For some reason he had felt a special kinship with that particular airship and the men who flew her. He had read numerous newspaper stories about the Shenandoah. Right then he decided he would try to find where it crashed.

After getting directions, he hastened to the register and placed a crisp dollar bill on the counter before heading out the door. He drove south out of Cambridge until he came to Route 78. From there on it was easy. All he had to do was follow a steady stream of cars that were headed for the crash sites.

The first place he stopped at was the Nichol's farm that was right off the highway. There were so many cars parked along the side of the road, he had to walk damn near a quarter mile before he got there. He noticed that most of the men and boys going back to their cars were carrying silvery swatches of fabric. Some of them were lugging pieces of the airframe and other parts of the airship he couldn't identify.

He quickened his steps thinking with a laugh there wouldn't be anything left for him to see if he didn't hurry. Then he saw it! It was just this side of an angular tree line, the grayish-silver hulk of the bow section, lying there like a butchered whale in a field speckled with yellow flowers, misshapen, crookedly tilted to the sky. At least a hundred people, maybe more for all he knew, swarmed around the fallen craft.

There were old men hobbling around as fast as their arthritic joints would take them. Women with babies in their arms and young children tagging behind them stood about gaping at the incongruous sight. Older boys and men in caps and summer straws either stood back a ways looking at the spectacle in awe or rushed right up to it, knives in hand, cutting, ripping, and tearing at the fabric in light-hearted abandon.

Many of the men were farmers, wearing suspenders, ruddy-faced from work in the sun, laughing and swearing as they stripped the fabric from the twisted framework. He couldn't believe his eyes. These damned people were dismembering it right out here in broad daylight, in front of God and everybody else. They were like ants crawling around a dead animal.

He wondered where all the authorities were, the sheriffs and the National Guard. He had noticed only one man with a badge, a heavyset fellow who looked like he might have been a constable or maybe a deputy sheriff, standing around laughing and talking to friends. He stayed there maybe twenty minutes, then feeling sick at heart, walked back to his car and headed for the Neiswonger farm.

All of these thoughts tumbled through his mind as he nursed his beer at Joe's speakeasy that hot August night. From the bandstand across the room, a voice was crooning "Toot-toot-tootsie, good-bye. Toot-toot-tootsie, don't cry."

 

 

VII

The scene shifts from Joe's, a speakeasy in downtown Pittsburgh to the Roosevelt Hotel where he is staying.

Looking at his pocket watch, my father saw that it was nearing midnight and he wondered where all the time had gone. He felt like a time and space traveler out of an H. G. Wells book he had once read.

Here he was in a speakeasy in Pittsburgh, yet in one way he had hardly been here at all. His mind had been everywhere else but here. There are many mysteries in this life, he mused, maybe even dimensions of the mind that we know nothing about. He smiled to himself with this secret thought as he paid his check, left a tip, and said goodbye to the people he had exchanged pleasantries with. Then he was out the door and into the shadowy streets of the hushed city.

The hotel lobby was almost deserted. The cigar stand, flower shop, and dining room were all closed for the night. He chatted with the uniformed elevator operator as they ascended to the tenth floor, then made his way down the hall to his room.

Even though the window was open, the room was unbearably hot. It smelled of freshly laundered linen, furniture polish, maybe a whiff of lavender.

He stripped down to his underwear, went into the bathroom, turned on the faucet, brushed his teeth, bent over the basin and splashed his face with handfuls of cool water. As he looked in the mirror, he smiled wearily, and considered for a moment the idea of checking out of the hotel, driving home, and getting there before noon. No, I better not do that, he immediately decided. Too many mountain roads. Anyway, I'm tired. Might as well try to get a good night's sleep and leave in the morning. He turned out the bathroom light, walked over to the bed, pulled the covers back and lay down.

One time he almost drifted off, but the heat was so oppresive it was impossible to sleep. He got up, padded in his bare feet over to the dresser for his pack of Camels and an ashtray and took them over to the low window seat. Pushing back the heavy blue curtains, he leaned back against the window frame and lit a cigarette.

The office buildings across the way, their windows darkened, bereft of workers, were like high-rise tombs. He looked past them, through the haze, over in the direction of one of the broad rivers that delineated the city. Somewhere far out there, his ears picked up a familiar sound. It was the long drawn-out whistle of a train, so far away it came to him like something imagined than actually heard, echoing in his sub-conscious like a blues note that had followed him home from the speakeasy.

Sheet lightning played hide-and-seek with the low-lying clouds on the horizon, outlined them every few minutes, turned them into momentary shapes of whales and elephants.

Tomorrow morning, he thought, I will take the unfinished poem I scribbled on the hotel stationery home with me. On the drive back to Columbus, I'll stop now and then, soak up the atmosphere, write down some more impressions of the countryside. I'll write it for the boys so they will grow up to appreciate this great country. I'll call it "The American Land."

Tomorrow that is what I will do. But even as he was thinking these things, a humorous inner voice reminded him that it was already tomorrow. It was August 25, 1928. About then, the beginning of a dream entered his mind. Was it something about the Shenandoah? Yes, it was the Start Daughter! He could see her now, nosing through the dark clouds that were sharply illuminated now and again by flashes of lightning. She was being buffeted about by the wind and he reached out a hand as if he could steady her. Those were the last thoughts he had - except for the sudden sensation that he was falling, falling . .

.

My father was only 34 years old when he died. Way too young to leave this earthly vale. It's quite possible he was a victim of prohibition, because thousands of men and women died from the rot-gut they drank during those tumultuous times.

He left behind a grieving and guilt-stricken wife and two young sons. In fact, I can barely remember him. All I have are disconnected snippets of memory, like pictures in an aging scrapbook. When his Franklin was returned to Columbus, the sheet music he had purchased for my mother was still in the car, as well as two harmonicas, a large one for my brother, a smaller one for me.

I thank you for bearing with me while I told this tale. Writing it has been comforting, and even though all of this happened many years ago - I am still my father's son.

 

1

My Orbiting
Grandmother

 

My memory was just catching hold when my father died. Like a handful of aging photographs in an old album. That's all I have, but I will share them with you.

Da, my orbiting grandmother on my mother's side, was always somewhere in the background. The truth is, for the first year or, after the death I spent quite a bit of time at her house. I wasn't in school or anything, and I guess I was pretty easy to take care of. I think, even way back then, I had an attitude that I wanted to make life as easy and pleasant as possible for the people around me. So help me, it's true.

I probably should mention that right after my father's death, my mother was running around to a lot of fortune tellers, spiritualists, and what not. Little wonder she parked me at Da's so much, but I didn't mind. I was leading the good life of having people wait on me hand and foot. Da was a really good cook, she had to be, you know, because she was from the South. I remember everyday as being a culinary adventure. Sometimes it would be fried apples, or baked apples, or fudge, or cookies, delicious gumbo soups with okra in them. When she cooked chicken &endash; fried or baked &endash; she would make corn meal dressing to go with it. Oh, so good!

My grandfather lived there too, but my memories of him are limited. I just remember I learned to stay far enough away from his so that he couldn't swipe me with his cane. I think he was already suffering from a series of small strokes that would eventually takes his life ten years later. He was mostly retired, but made a little pocket money as a salesman from a variety of products he sold to stores around the neighborhood. A lot of the money he made went for booze. I know this from hearing some of the wild and wooly stories about his madcap escapades.

More than once, Da would collar him in some downtown saloon and take him home in a taxi. Sometimes when I think back on those times, I can't help but wince and feel sorry for the old gentleman because Da had a quick temper that matched her high contralto voice. Little wonder the old gentleman suffered from high blood pressure!

One time my grandmother arrived on the scene too late. My grandfather must have made a big sale that day because he went to one of his favorite downtown watering holes, struck up a friendship with a woman I have heard variously described as a frowzy blonde, at best, to a whore, at worst, hopped a plane and flew out to Iowa.

Drunken tongues are loose and it was no great trick for Da to find out where the amorous couple had gone. As you might guess, she was on the next plane west. I hate to think of the confrontation that occurred out there, in some little hotel room in Sioux City, Iowa, but I would guess it must have been like an atomic bomb going off. Some things are probably best not thought about.

Anyway, when I appeared on the scene, his traveling days were long over, and his drinking, if any, was sharing a bottle of Dago Red once in a while with some of his pals around the neighborhood or, maybe when he was really lucky, sneaking a pint of whiskey into the house and hiding it where Da couldn't find it. Of course, there would be hell to pay when she caught a whiff of booze on his breath.

Looking back on those days, it was plain to see that my grandmother was the power and the force in that household. She paid the bills, did all the housework, the shopping and the cooking, took care of her husband when he was debilitated, and tried to keep him in tow when he wasn't.

It's a mystery to me where their money came from at that time. Maybe Da had socked some away for a rainy day from the days when my grandfather was in his prime. I don't know. He had been a traveling salesman and a manufacturer's representative for a long time. When his health started to fail she undertook a number of enterprising ventures that included making divinity fudge and selling it to several shops and restaurants, and at one point, she even started a little tearoom in her home. I don't think it was very successful, but I do remember a bunch of women bridge players invading the premises on several occasions. Looking back on it, I can't believe what an entrepreneur my grandmother was.

In all of these endeavors, Da had the help of a loyal and hard working black man named James. He did the yard word, drove her around in her Chevy because she had never learned to drive, waited table with a big, wide, polite smile in her little tearoom, and even washed dishes when she was lucky enough to have any business.

James was light-skinned, lanky and likeable, and his services were more or less on call. I remember that he would pour pancake syrup on his fried eggs. I also remember him making a remark to my grandmother after the members of a bridge club had finished lunch and left.

"Miz Page ," he had said, "those ladies sure liked the food you fixed for 'em. From the looks of their plates, they must have licked 'em off with their tongues. They hardly needed washing at all!"

 

2

A Driving Lesson

 

James played a major role in an episode I will never forget as long as I live. As part of her divorce settlement, my mother found herself the owner of shiny new car. I think it was a stick-shift Ford, but I'm not sure of the model or the year. Anyway, she asked James to give her driving lessons, and they took me along for the first lesson. Don't forget, I was only four and a half years old. And, don't forget my mother - the decidedly high-strung type - had never been behind the wheel of a car in her life.

Whatever model Ford it was, to my youthful eyes it was an imposing vehicle, bright and shiny, red colored with black upholstery. Very sharp.

The car was parked in the garage behind the house, and with an air of confidence, my mother took her place behind the steering wheel. James climbed into the front passenger seat, and they stuck me in the back

Hanging over the front seat, I intently watched every change of expression that passed across my mother's face as James told her to push down the clutch pedal with her left foot, then turn the ignition key with her right hand. She followed his instructions and the car came to life with a roar, not to speak of a lot of shrill squealing sounds as she continued to earnestly turn the ignition key.

"Easy does it, Miz Page," James said. "You can quit turning the ignition key now." Mother's expression had momentarily turned to one of alarm because of the discordant sounds that emanated from the car's entrails.

Now James was telling my decidedly edgy mother about the gear shift and how to back the car up by putting it into reverse and then slowly letting the clutch pedal out and gently stepping on the gas pedal. Mother's face paled. Her left leg was still doggedly stuck out in front of her, holding down the clutch pedal as if her life depended on it. One white-knuckled hand gripped the steering wheel, the other clutched the gearshift knob, and from what I could tell, she seemed not to be hearing James. Even to my childish mind what had started out as a lark was rapidly becoming a life-threatening situation - and we weren't even out of the garage yet.

With wide eyes, I watched my mother's right hand, the one tightly wrapped around the gearshift. I had ridden with my father enough to know intuitively that a smooth movement to the upper left would get the car rolling backwards.

I also aware that if she accidentally put it into first gear, we would take out the back end of the garage. I also knew that the cramped space between the front of the car and the back wall of the garage was a storage space for a haphazard collection of gardening tools, including hoes, rakes, and a lawnmower, not to speak of an old bicycle with two flat tires and a step-ladder. Furthermore, hanging from nails and pegboards were pieces of hose, a variety of hats which had seen better days, hedge trimmers, and abandoned coats and jackets, one of which had a bird nest in a pocket . On the floor there were a dozen or more paint cans, a heavy metal toolbox, a cardboard box of Christmas decorations, a stack of old magazines, and who knows what else?

In spite of my apprehension and impending sense of doom, another thought flashed through my childish mind. If Mother put the gearshift into the wrong position, and the car crashed through the back of the garage sending all that stuff flying in all directions, what a great story I would have to tell Daniel and the guys he hung out with!

But then a shudder ran through my body. What if I died? What if my head got cut off by those hedge trimmers? Argh! What if my head rolled out of the driveway and down the street? Then I thought of something very funny. I was familiar with some of the words to a song that started out : "I ain't got no body." Maybe my head would say that when they picked it up. I giggled to myself as I thought about it.

I was brought back to reality when I heard James talking to my mrother earnestly, repeating his instructions, his voice remarkably unemotional, but I could tell by his eyes that he was as scared as I was.

Suddenly mother released the clutch pedal - all at once - and the Ford gave a little shiver, lurched backwards out of the garage, then stalled. To my mother's credit, she started the car again, backed it out onto the street, stalled it again, somehow got it started once more, and in spite of several inconsiderate motorists honking at us, haltingly drove it down the street and around the corner.

After a couple of blocks of clear sailing, we came to a downhill grade, proceeded swiftly but uneventfully to the bottom of the hill where the traffic light was green, careened around the corner and headed toward the next corner, where the plan was to go back up the hill.

With tires squealing , Mother navigated that corner which, fortunately, had no traffic light , and we started uphill. I was studying my mother's face again, this time in the rear-view mirror. I thought I detected a crazy glint in her eyes as we started up the hill.

"Change gears," James started saying. "Change gears, Miz Page." His voice kept rising in pitch. "For God's sake, put it in second, Miz Page!"

That's when Mother froze up again, went rigid as the proverbial ramrod, and in the rear-view mirror I could see an agonized look of desperation in her eyes.

James was now screaming, "Put it in first! Miz Page, put it in first!" His hand went to his face and I think I saw real terror written there.

We had proceeded about half way up the hill and I couldn't understand why James was suddenly so excited. At my young age, I guess I had never heard the old expression, "What goes up has to come back down."

That afternoon, as it turned out, gravity defeated momentum and inertia might have been the winner over energy. The car shuddered to a stop, shook itself like a huge St. Bernard, gave a sigh, and died.

My mother's foot should have been searching for the brake, but I think at this point, her mind had gone blank, and the car started rolling backwards down the hill

"Put on the brake! Put on the brake, Miz Page!" James was now shouting. "No! No! That's the clutch! "Use your other foot! Oh, Lord! Get it over on the brake!" He was halfway on his knees now, trying to lift my mother's right foot onto the brake pedal. Evidently her legs had turned to rubber, so he shoved them out of the way and tried to find the brake with his hands.

The car was now rolling backwards down the hill faster than ever and had started to zigzag, which is probably what saved our lives. Mother had an iron grasp on the steering wheel, and seemed more intent on tugging it from left to right than anything else. She seemed oblivious to anything on the floor of the car, including James, who I think was now getting kicked in the face by her heavy oxfords. It was evident that Mother didn't comprehend how anything down there on the floorboard could be useful in driving a car.

In the meantime, and I am talking mini-seconds, in the rear view mirror I saw a car coming up the hill toward us. James couldn't see it because he was still down there on the floor groping for the brake prdal and fighting off my mother's feet. My mother, of course, didn't see the approaching car either. Her eyes were riveted straight ahead as if she was hypnotized. I think James had probably forgotten to tell her about the rear view mirror and the function it played.

"Mummy, I think a car's coming up the hill behind us," I whispered in her ear.

"Oh, my God, " she shrieked, and without once looking back, she yanked at the steering wheel with all her strength. I ducked my head as I saw a utility pole whiz by within inches of the front fender. Finally, our car lumbered up onto a sidewalk and ground to a stop, its front end protruding into someone's bushes. James had finally gained supremacy over my mother's feet and was pushing down on the brake pedal with both hands. I think I was the only one who saw the red-faced man who had been behind us wildly waving a clenched fist in our direction as he drove by.

As James extricated himself from the floor and climbed out of the car, Mother, looking like she might faint at any moment, got out her side. "James," she said in a faltering voice, "I think you better drive us the rest of the way home," and with that she climbed into the back seat with me. When James slid behind the steering wheel and was starting the car up, she added, "And, another thing, James, don't mention a word of this to anyone, do you understand?"

"Yes, Miz Page, I understand," James replied. Within my childish head, I was thinking, "Oh, sure, I'll bet. By this time tomorrow, the whole neighborhood will know all about this wild ride." James's was blinking his eyes like he couldn't believe everything that had happened. I also saw his lips moving like he was saying a prayer to himself. Then he maneuvered the car back onto the street and drove us home.

Well, that's the story of my mother's first driving lesson and, would you believe me if I told you she never drove a car again?

 

3

The Throne

 

After a few months and the shock of my father's death receding,, my mother began what would turn out to be one of many household moves that would continue until I finally left home years later.

The first of these moves was to an apartment building not more than three blocks away. There were two bedrooms, a living-dining room, kitchen and bath, Daniel and I shared one bedroom. He had a regular bed. I had a little daybed. Mother had the other bedroom. About half our furniture was put in storage. I was five years old.

Within a few months, we had moved to another apartment building in the same block, probably because the rent was cheaper. Da, our orbiting grandmother and Gran, our ailing grandfather, still lived in their spacious home which was not far away and I was a frequent visitor.

I was aware that a lot of things were going on in our lives because Mother would explain everything she was doing, even if we didn't really understand a lot of what she was talking about. Well, maybe Daniel would understand more than I did. But I wasn't dumb. I would usually get the general drift.

One of her major decisions was to get a job to supplement the child support she was receiving from my father who was just getting started in his practice. Getting a good job was going to be a case of easier said than done, because she had absolutely no experience in the workplace. The most logical - and the most abundant - kind of job would have been secretarial, but she was devoid of any skills in that direction and she showed no inclination to attend a business school. Her other best bet would have been something in the retail field, but she seemed dead set against that. "Too many hours on my feet," she would explain. So you can see, finding a job that she felt capable of doing, and one that wasn't below the high standards set by her pride, and my grandmother's advice was going to prove a formidable undertaking.

Another big event the occurred about this time was my grandmother's decision to sell her house &endash; and this was probably the biggest mistake she ever made, one reason being property values were at a low ebb

The next thing she did was strike a deal with a couple of painters to paint her house in return for her Chevy. Even at my tender age, I knew this was a dumb deal. I couldn't believe her getting rid of her really nice car for a stupid paint job, even though she couldn't drive. She could always try to learn, I figured.

I've seen pictures of my grandmother that were taken when she was nineteen or twenty years old. She was an attractive blonde, slender and pretty, and you could tell just by looking at the photographs that she was high-strung and irascible. The same traits she passed on to my mother, even though my mother was a brunette.

Now, I'll tell you a strange little story that has stuck in my memory over all these years like the memory of a first kiss.

After my grandmother had decided to sell her house, she probably advertised it someplace. Don't ask me where, probably in the newspaper. At any rate, I was staying with her one day and having a good ol' time just not doing much of anything. Living on the fat of the land, you might say, Remember, I was only five years old.

My grandmother's house had an interesting back yard with a cherry tree and a grape arbor, so I was probably playing out there part of the time. Anyway, I remember it was right after we had eaten lunch that a young married couple stopped by to look at the house. They were from out of town and the man was a junior executive with a large insurance company. His wife was about twenty-three and breathtakingly beautiful of face and figure.

How was I savvy enough to appreciate those qualities at the tender age of five? Don't ask me. I have no idea how I knew. I just knew. I couldn't keep my eyes off her. All of her. Her face, her long hair, her slender neck, the swell of her breasts, her shapely buttocks, her marvelous legs.

Neither had I been exposed to any kind of sexuality of any kind. I had absolutely no idea of the concept of sex. I was totally unaware of sexual gratification of any kind. My mother was attractive, but in a very subdued way and not at all like this marvelous female who so entranced, charmed, and beguiled me.

Perhaps such an awareness on the part of a young boy is innate, something you're born with, a quality that is transferred genetically from one generation of males to the next. I don't know.

This is the very reasonable argument of homosexuals. In the great majority of cases, they "don't become," they are already that way. I believe it. Granted, having all those awakening hormones at the ago of five might be unusual, but proves to me that I was pointed in a heterosexual direction. But, just wait. The best part is still to come!

However it came to be, I knew I was in the presence of a goddess-queen, a woman so beautiful and desirable that I was transfixed. Like a little shadow, I followed her from room to room as she and her husband inspected the house.

As I look back on this episode, I can see how laughable it is. Me five. In short pants. Mesmerized. My heart stolen away. My eyes soaking up every detail of her lovely body, deeply inhaling her perfume, on the verge of swooning.

At one point in their tour of the house, the lady of my dreams excused herself to go to the bathroom. "Oh, my gosh, she's human!" I thought to myself. "She has to go to the bathroom!"

I would like to have accompanied her, but since that was out of the question, I posted myself at the bottom of the staircase and watched her as she ascended, my eyes glued to her behind.

What can I tell you? That's what I did, and I must have been smart enough that my behavior wasn't obvious. And, there I stood my ground. No way was I going to miss a moment of her reappearance and her descent down the steps. To my five-year-old mind, she was Aphrodite.

Suddenly, I heard the faint flushing of the toiled and a minute later the opening of the bathroom door. Then, there she was!

Down the steps she came, gracefully, and I drank in her delicious beauty, my eyes on the mysterious swelling under her blouse, her trim waist, the wonderful way everything seemed to come together below that: the tight roundness of her buttocks and, in my imagination, I speculated on how magnificent her upper legs and thighs must be at their conjunction with the rest of her.

There was more talk about the terms of the sale, and then suddenly they were gone.

They were hardly out the door when, unobtrusively, I went upstairs, entered the bathroom, and locked the door behind me. Quickly, and without thinking, I knelt down and bestowed a kiss on the sweet and blessed toilet seat.

That was the first and only time I ever saw my Earth Mother.

As it turned out, she and her husband bought the house and a month or two later my grandmother moved out.

But, like Christopher Columbus, I had discovered America. And, like him, I wasn't aware of the vast extent of what I had discovered. And, by the way, it is my firm *belief, as this little story demonstrates, that in the vast majority of cases, sexual preference is inborn.

A strange little episode, huh?

It would be several years before an older boy showed me how to masturbate while looking at magazine ads of sexy looking women. It would be ten years before I discovered the intriguing beauty of birds. And, as you can see, I was a receptacle, ready to receive these gifts when they came along.

 

4

The Cambridge Arms

My mother was a courageous woman, as well as a survivor in the truest sense of the word. I say this in spite of the fact that she was a chronic worrywart and, in her last years on Earth, fearful of the inevitable end - even though she was an extremely religious woman, brought up as a Carmelite, a fundamentalist religious sect of the South. My feeling is that none of us ever figures out every nuance of what another person's life is about, not to speak of our own.

"When the going gets tough, the tough get going," the old adage says, and my mother fit that description to a T. Widowed when she was in her early thirties with two young boys to care for, and little in the way of money, she soon demonstrated that she was capable of making her own way in this world.

My mother's name was Lucille Page Thomson. She was brought up in Nashville, Tennessee, and went to Ward-Belmont, a girls' finishing school. There she learned the rudiments of proper English and all the social graces, but not much else. Don't forget, in those days not many women pursued careers outside the home.

Fortunately, soon after my dad died, she heard that the owners of an apartment building on First Avenue in Grandview were looking for a manager. In spite of the fact she had absolutely no work experience, on sheer gumption, she applied for the job, and got it. A rent-free apartment went with the modest salary, and she was on her way to self-support.

And, guess what?

She did such a good job that the owners of the building, the Huntington National Bank, offered her a much better position at their newly acquired Parkview Apartments on East Broad Street, opposite Franklin Park. It was a pretty spiffy place in those days. Dr. Melvin Croaty, the famous goiter specialist lived right next door to the building we lived in. And Webb Huntington and his family lived in the apartment below us.

This was a big step up. A nicer rent-free apartment with utilities paid, a better salary, and other amenities such as complimentary laundry service, and dairy and bakery products.

Well, she did such a good job that she attracted the attention of the John Hancock Insurance Company which had just purchased the Cambridge Arms, Columbus' premier high-rise apartment building at the time. So we moved again.

The building was owned by the John Hancock Insurance Company, and was surely Columbus' most exclusive high-rise apartment building at the time. Along with her salary, a beautiful two-bedroom apartment went with the job. How lucky she was to have that job when millions of people were out of work. And, they were lucky to have her, because she was hard working and talented. She made a good impression on the tenants, and she oversaw the maintenance and interior decorating of the apartments, the financial leasing arrangements &endash; all of that in addition to raising two boys by herself. As the years roll by, I am ever more aware of what a great woman she was. Sometime soon, I'm going to tell you more about her.

The structure is still there at 926 East Broad Street, but I fear it is no longer the fashionable place it once was. In the days I'm speaking of, there was a tearoom off the lobby, uniformed bellmen, and a roster of residents that included some of Columbus' wealthiest and most influential families. Among these elite tenants were two young married couples of the Wolfe family. Richard Wolfe and his bride in one wing of the building, Preston Wolfe and his bride in the other.

The nine-story building featured a tearoom off the lobby, uniformed bellhops, automatic elevators, a two-level parking garage, and an easily accessible rooftop from which I could look out over the city in all directions. I would take it all in: Beyond the surrounding houses, past the church steeples along Broad Street, all the way to the AIU Building, which the Lincoln-LeVeque Building was called in those days. I swear I could see all the way to the fairgrounds and the buildings on the Ohio State University campus.

Boy, did I ever have fun while we lived there. Plenty of action. I got to know the bellhops and I would be all ears when they'd gossip about the tenants.

I went to Douglas Elementary School, which I liked a lot. The old red brick building had a big cylindrical fire escape attached to one wall. Thank goodness, I never had to slide down it.

James Thurber once attended school there.

Because I wanted a paper route but I was too young to go to a sub-station to pick up my papers from a sub-station, Mother called up the Circulation Department of the Columbus Dispatch and talked to the manager, a Mister Thomas.

Soon a Dispatch delivery truck was dropping off a roll of papers every day in front of the building.

I had a paper route! Not a big one, but a paper route, all the same. My route consisted of the apartments in the building and the stately homes along East Broad Street for a block or two in each direction.

Thus, I began delivering newspapers when I was eight years old, and I've been in one or another type of journalism ever since.

I delivered to the people who lived in the building and up and down Broad Street for about a block and-a-half in each direction.

So it was that one wintry evening, after delivering my route, a few leftover papers under my arm, I got on the automatic elevator to go up to our second floor apartment. Right on my heels, destiny stepped into the elevator car in the form of a tall burley man bundled up in a heavy overcoat wearing a Stetson hat. He pushed a button for one of the upper floors and acknowledged my presence with a nod.

I immediately recognized that I had a prospect here - better yet, a captive audience - for one of my leftover papers. This guy was trapped in an elevator car with the paperboy from hell!

Right away I pounced. "How about a Columbus Dispatch, Mister? It's Ohio's Biggest Home Daily! Not only that, it's got all the local news, national news, international news, stock market reports, sports, business news, who was born, who died, the weather, radio listings, movie reviews, comics"- almost out of breath, I gasped, "You need one to make your life complete!"

The man smiled and said, "I'll take one." He reached in his pocket, withdrew his wallet, took out a one-dollar bill and put it in my hand. "Keep the change," he said. "I own the Dispatch and that's the best damn sales talk I've heard all day."

My eyes grew big as I eagerly grasped the crisp dollar bill. Those were the days when a dollar was a dollar. A dollar would buy twenty candy bars &endash; and bigger ones than the little skinny ones you get today for all kinds of money. Gee, Mister, thanks a lot!" I managed to say. I found out later that my benefactor was Harry P. Wolfe, and he was going up in the elevator to see one of his married children. Oh, by the way, it was so many years ago, I can't be sure if it was Preston or Edgar in the one wing of the building.

That's when I decided to make journalism my career and I did - graduated from Ohio State University's School of Journalism with the a degree in Newspaper Management.

Incidentally, when I lived at the Cambridge Arms, I went to school not more than a block away at Douglas Elementary. That's where James Thurber went to school for a few years. He also worked at the Dispatch off and on. And here I am writing about him every month in the Gazette. Talk about a small world!

By now, Mother had gained a lot of self-confidence and was becoming ever more proficient in her job. She showed apartments to prospective tenants, listened patiently to those who had complaints, hired maintenance people for the endless task of keeping the building functioning properly, and painters every time an apartment needed refurbishing. Not only that, she was becoming ever more proficient at interior decorating, which included everything from selecting wall colors to purchasing draperies and carpeting.

Of course, she also had the never-ending job of running a household for our small family, which meant everything from grocery shopping and cooking, to keeping my brother and I reasonably well-clothed and shod, not to speak of trying to keep some semblance of law and order when my brother and I were fighting over one thing or another.

Those were depression years and up to this point Mother had been unbelievably lucky. But then the axe fell.

To save money, the owners decided to let the tearoom manager show apartments, and Mother was without a job.

So we set about packing. Cups, saucers, and dinner plates were wrapped in newspapers and put in a couple of wooden barrels, along with silverware, bric-a-brac, pots and pans and whatever else that we could tuck in. Books were boxed, linen bundled, clothing crammed in a couple of wardrobe trunks, and - Whew! - we were ready for the moving van.

Hand in hand, we climbed aboard a streetcar and headed for our next adventure. Mother had rented a big house in the University District, and we were going to rent rooms to students.

But, wait! There is one more adventure I want to relate before we left the Cambridge Arms. It's an episode that/s been simmering inside all these many years and I dared not tell it.

 

5

A Memorable Afternoon

 

I was eight years old.

My brother, David, was fifteen.

Our mother was thirty-seven.

We were in downtown Columbus, near Broad and High, waiting for a streetcar.

Because it was a beautiful summer day, we had walked downtown from the Cambridge Arms which was located at 926 East Broad Street.

My mother was the manager of that beautiful and prestigious high-rise apartment building. Notable among the residents were two members of the Dispatch Wolfe family and a Mr. Garber, who was a State Senator who had romantic ideas about my mother.

One day he asked her for a date to see a movie at a downtown theatre. Mother said she would love to - and would it be alright to bring her two sons?

He must have said ok because I remember all of us sitting inside the old Grand Theatre on East State Street, near the old Hartman Theatre which is also no longer there - part of the thoughtless destruction that robbed Columbus of much of its heritage.

Anyway, as you can well imaging, Mr. Garber never asked our Mother out again.

The year was 1932 and the country was reeling from the first effects of an economic depression that was to last until World War II. But our spirits were high.

We were on our way to pay a Sunday visit to our orbiting grandmother who at that time lived with our grandfather out on Northwest Boulevard near Goodale Street.

They lived in a duplex next to Mister and Mrs. Hawkins, and a couple of doors down the street on the corner was a small factory that was home to a company the manufactured a cleaning product name Skidoo.

This was a neat scouring paste that came in a little gray tin can with a bright red lid. For some reason unknown to me, it fell by the wayside years ago.

So, anyway, there we were waiting for a streetcar.

Streetcars were really neat, lots more fun to ride than busses. I especially liked the streetcars that were on the Grandview route because they had a lot of wood in their construction. For some reason this made them have a smoother ride than those that were all metal.

You would think just the opposite but, believe me, they had the smoooothest ride you can imagine. They just glided along.

Another thing. Along Goodale Avenue the tracks were not in the middle of the street like they were everywhere else. They were set in the ground on the south side of the street.

There weren't many stops - at least on Sundays &endash; because there were a lot of small manufacturing plants along there. So the motorman could open up the throttle and really let her rip. I can't begin to tell you how exciting it was, gliding and swaying along for blocks on end without stopping.

All of the streetcars were electric . That is, they had trolleys that extended up to overhead wires, For that reason, they didn't pollute the air like busses do.

They also had two-man crews: a motorman up front, a conductor at the rear.

Back then not all that many people had cars. So lots of people rode the streetcars &endash; and took cabs.

It cost five cents to rise the streetcar. Less than that if you bought a strip of tickets for a quarter. The cabs were a bit more, but really not all that much considering that they would take you right to the door of where you were going.

Some of them might have had meters, but during those depression days when they were competing for business they had all kinds of other payment plans. The one I remember the best was a map they had posted in the back seat that had the city divided up into zones and it was five or ten cents every time you went from one zone to another.

There were probably half a dozen cab companies. The ones I remember were Hill's, which my mother like best, and Green Cabs and Radio Cabs.

So, on this particular day my mother had evidently decided that we would take the streetcar. Probably to save a few cents because, after all, it was quite a way out to Grandview.

We were standing in front of Howard's Furniture Store.

Back in the 1930's the two leading furniture stores in Columbus were Carlisle's and Howald's.

Howald's was located downtown on the east side of High Street between Gay Street and Broad Street.

Carlisle's was actually my mother's favorite furniture store. It was located on the corner of North High Street and Vine Street a short distance north of downtown, hence it came to be called "the Short North" by taxicab dispatchers.

How well I remember wandering around inside that store while my mother ordered drapes and various items of furniture.

Although most of the apartments at the Cambridge Arms were unfurnished, a few were furnished

 

6

Fire! Fire! Fire!

 

While we were waiting for a streetcar I was fidgeting around like any eight-year-old would do, I was also keeping a eagle eye on my brother/.

In case you forgot, we were standing in front of Howald's Furniture Store which was located at 34 N. High Street in downtown Columbus.

The year was 1932.

Waiting for a streetcar, that's what we were doing. My mother, my brother, and me.

David was in the ninth grade at Franklin Junior High School.

I was in the third grade at Douglas Elementary.

David brought home all A grade cards, Mine were spotted with a few B's and C's &endash; especially in arithmetic.

Even at that age, I was in awe of my brother's intellect. Like I've said before, I was behind the door when the brains were passed out.

All of his teachers recognized that my brother was something special.

And, my mother! Oh, my God!

My mother thought he could do no wrong.

Now, don't get me wrong. I was well loved, well-fed, well-clothed,and well-shod.

My biggest worry was that I might have smelly feet.

Speaking of feet, our mother used to take us to Gilbert's Shoe Store which was on East Town Street in the Central Market District. They even had an x-ray machine to make sure yoir new shoes were a good fit.

Some more thoughts about my brother just danced into my head.

He would not only religiously bring home his school books every day, he would lug arm loads of books from the school library. Biographies and books about famous philosophers, and he would talk to our mother about them and they would read them together.

Many a night I would go to bed with the droning of their voices in the other room lulling me to sleep.

I'll tell you how smart my brother was - and remember we're talking about a fifteen year old kid.

My brother, David, now grown old and deceased, could whistle the exact notes from dozens of symphonies and operas.

Our mother knew she had something special on her hands. That's why I didn't resent any special treatment he might have gotten.

I swear she probably thought he was going to grow up to become president of the United States, or maybe become another Albert Einstein - or, at the very least, a university professor at some famous university like Yale or Harvard.

Me?

I guess I was just going along for the ride.

Even way back then, I found out that there are many advantages in not being the center of attention.

I wouldn't have had it any other way.

While my brother was basking in the limelight, I would just go off by myself with a Big Little Book or a pulp magazine. Or, more than once, I would find a newspaper or magazine with ads for women's fancy undergarments and do what I did best of all.

Well, I've been digressing too long.

It was a cloudless summer day and so hot you could fry an egg on the sidewalk.

That was one of my grandmother's favorite expressions, and that was where we were headed, to pay my grandparents a Sunday visit.

And, as I was trying to say before I kept interrupting myself, I was keeping a close eye on that fifteen-year-old brother of mine.

He was standing close to one of the store's plate glass windows, with his back to me, and he had taken something out of his pants pocket .

He was acting as if he didn't want me to see what he was doing.

That just made me all the more curious, of course, and I moved around to the other side of him to get a better look.

Then I saw what he was doing. He had a little magnifying glass - the kind that came with stamp collecting outfits - and he was focusing a ray of bright sunlight onto the drapes that were hanging inside the show-window.

Suddenly, a brown spot appeared on the cloth and as I watched with widening eyes it became black and emitted a wisp of smoke.

Oh. My God! A tongue of flame appeared out of nowhere, instantly grew bigger, all red and orange and yellow with evil looking streaks of blue.

Then without warning, the flames raced up the drape, jumped to other drapes that were framing the display of furniture &endash; and suddenly the entire window was on fire.

A passerby, a slender Thurberish-looking young man took one look at the conflagration, then ran down the street yelling "Fire! Fire! Fire!" at the top of his voice.

7.

The Fure's Aftermath

The Thurberish looking man ran down the street to a fire alarm box, all the while yelling "Fire! Fire! Fire!" at the top of his lungs.

My mother who had turned deathly pale was hissing at my brother to follow her up High Street to the next streetcar stop.

Then she almost jerked my arm out of its socket as she pulled me along after her.

Luckily, our streetcar cam along just in the nick of time. We were climbing aboard as the first fire engines came racing past us.

My face was pressed to the window as more and more of them went careening by. They seemed to bed coming from all directions: pumpers, hook-and-ladders, fire chief cars. The whole shebang.

Our streetcar kept grinding to a stop as new equipment kept arriving.

What a blast for an eight-year-old kid to be at the scene of the fire &endash; right in the middle of things, you might say. .

Finally, we left all the hubbub behind us and it was clear sailing out Goodale Avenue to Northwest Boulevard.

Being a Sunday, we practically had the car to ourselves.

My mother was distraught looking and tight-lipped during the entire ride.

She was obviously confronted with a situation she had never imagined happening in her wildest dreams. The result was none of us said anything. After all, what was there to be said?

For my part, I had a lot to think about, including the fact that sometimes it wasn't all that bad being the younger brother.

When we arrived at our stop, we got off and walked the short distance up the street to my grand parent's duplex,

"I'm a nervous wreck!" were my mother's first words to my grandmother."

"What on earth's the matter, Lucille?" my grandmother responded with obvious concern.

"Let's go in the kitchen and I'll tell you all about it" my mother said with a great sigh/

They went in the kitchen, my brother had disappeared somewhere with one of his beloved books, and I was left for the time being in the connecting living and dining rooms with my grandfather.

I should explain something about him.

Bootleg whiskey and cigarettes had don him in when he was only in his mid-fifties.

From a handsome and debonair traveling salesman, a series of strokes had reduced him to a pitiful shell of his former self.

When he wasn't in bed, he could barely hobble to the bathroom with the use of a cane. The rest of the time, disgruntled and distraught, he spent slouched in an easy chair in the living room.

I had experienced the whack of his cane on the back of my legs more than once, so I was especially careful to give him wide berth.

I knew I had to get out of there or go bonkers, so I headed for the front porch and some fresh air.

I had a lot to think about.

The fire, of course. My grades at school. My financial situation. At the time, I think it was about fifty cents. More or less.

And, there were other things equally important like whether my feet smelled bad. That was always high on my list of things to worry about. And whether my stockings had holes in the heels.

Don't think little kids don't have their worries. They surely do.

After we ate dinner, we said goodbye to my grandparents and took a streetcar back downtown.

There were still a couple of fire engines hanging around the still smoking front end of the furniture store.

The Journal Night Greenm had just hit the streets and the newspaper men were yelling: "Read all about the four alarm fire downtown."\

We bought a paper, jumped in a taxi and rode home in silence.

So, that's pretty much the story of the mysterious furniture store fire in downtown Columbus.

The authorities never figured out what started the blaze, but they came close. They speculated that it might have been caused by faulty wiring, or the late afternoon sun.

Close, but close only counts in horseshoes.

Maybe some good came from the fire. Maybe, in its aftermath, they had a big fire sale and made a lot of money.

Who knows? After all, those were depression days.

The above events happened when I was barely eight years old. But I remember them as vividly as if they had happened yesterday.

And, I wouldn't be telling this little story if my brother was still alive.

I wouldn't have dared.

8

Beating the Great Depression

The Great Depression didn't scare my plucky mother one bit. Once we moved up to the University District, she set about renting our spare rooms to students. In the big houses that we usually lived in, that meant as many as two or three rooms rented out, maybe more if the house had a finished third.

From my point of view, it was pretty exciting having all these strangers come and go. Most of them were undergraduates, but occasionally we would get somebody working on a Masters or a Ph.D. Mostly they were men, but every once in a while a woman would settle into a room. And, of course, if she was pretty, I would fall in love with her, although I probably would have fainted if she had asked me what time it was because I was so bashful.

We even had professors, mostly quiet intellectual types, but I do remember a couple of oddballs, including one who drank too much, so Mother eventually had to ask him to leave.

Until I became old enough to acquire a paper route, I settled for selling packages of seeds door-to-door, and magazines such as Collier's, the Saturday Evening Post, and Ladies' Home Journal.

Evenings we would gather around our faithful Clarion radio and listen to all the bad news about unemployment and World War I veterans selling apples, and the latest measures that President Roosevelt was proposing to combat the bad times.

To tell the truth, the never-ending news of people killing each other around the world made for more exciting listening.

Back in the '30s, Japan was rampaging through China, Italy invaded Ethiopia, and the Spanish Civil War was draining the vitality of that nation - all of this bloodshed over territory and to gain economic advantage, or to put down a rival religion, or to force their own national creed down somebody else's throat. I still have the war scrapbooks that I faithfully kept for many years.

For relief from all this bad news, after dinner we would listen to our favorite shows, the likes of Amos 'n' Andy, The Shadow, Fibber McGee and Molly, and the Green Hornet. And, I dare not forget to mention some of the other great comedians of that era, such as Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, Jack Benny, and Joe Penner, to name a few.

I swear my mother must have had Gypsy blood. If she wasn't entirely pleased with one house, we would up and move to another. Maybe live there for a year or two, then move somewhere else.

In such a fashion, we lived in two separate places on Neil Avenue, two on West Tenth Avenue, one on Hunter Street, and two on West Tenth Avenue. Those are the ones I remember.

Off and on, if we had a spare room, my orbiting grandmother, "Da," would live with us for awhile. She was a stern disciplinarian, so I was careful never to get her riled up. I remember one time I must not have been careful enough because she bent my arm behind my back and wrestled me to the ground - all the while chewing me out for whatever it was I had done. Come to think of it, my magazine manager had stopped by to collect and I didn't have quite enough money to pay him in full. Must have spent a little too much for candy that week.

My grandmother was a very superstitious woman. I can remember she and my mother screaming and yelling at each other one time because my mother wanted to start a trip on a Friday. She wanted to take my brother and me up to Chicago to see our paternal grandparents.

"You'll never make it back to Columbus alive!" my grandmother wailed.

"Don't be silly," my mother laughed, "the trains are perfectly safe."

"The children will be killed," Da shot back, "Or kidnapped!"

And so it went, their voices rising by the minute, until they were standing there face to face screaming at each other.

I can't even remember now whether we left that day or not. Chances are we didn't. Chances are my mother gave in to ignorance and superstition just to quiet Da down.

I forget most of my grandmother's other superstitious fears, but I do remember that if you have to return home for something you have forgotten, it's important to sit down before you leave again. It might even help to toss a dash of salt over your shoulder.

Never walk under a ladder, and of course, she would have added that it was just plain common sense not to let a black cat cross your path.

I'll say this for my grandmother though. True to her southern heritage, she was a mighty fine cook, and she passed a lot of that cooking knowledge on to my mother.

Fried apples, a breakfast specialty of hers, were so good they'd make your mouth drool just thinking about them.

 

9

The Boy Gourmet

Some of my fondest boyhood memories are of my mother's cooking.

Picture this: A platter of spareribs , browned to perfection, the succulent meat so tender it is practically falling off the ribs. On the side, baked sauerkraut, tart and tasty but sweetened with a dash of brown sugar, In a casserole dish, homemade scalloped potatoes, creamy, golden brown and, oh, so good. Another dish was heaped with broccoli, or maybe green beans. For dessert, there would be a thick slice of ripe Honeydew melon.

For Easter dinner we frequently had leg of lam with the traditional mint jelly, and for sides something like a baking dish of scalloped corn and, maybe another dish of candied carrots.

For Thanksgiving there would be a small turkey, basted in its own juices, roasted until succulent and tender. There would be a casserole dish heaped with yams that had been topped with marshmallows and placed under the broiler until melted. Two or three different vegetables, some of them in a cream sauce would round out the menu, not counting the homemade pumpkin pie.

It goes without saying that cornbread would accompany many of these meals.

Looking back on it, I'm still amazed at my mother's ingenuity and creative ability in the kitchen.

Off and on, we would have typical southern dishes, the kind she had grown up with. Some of them were tasty, others I wasn't all that fond of.

Grits, for instance.

I could take them or leave them.

Another was black-eyed peas.

Not bad - if I was starving/

She would usually serve them with a dab of butter on top, but sometimes we had the option of drowning the in syrup.

Yuk!

One of her favorite dishes was scalloped oysters. Not a food I would ordinarily enjoy, but the way she prepared them, they were sensational.

Oh, we had plenty of hamburgers for lunch or dinner, but my mother didn't call them hamburgers. They were "meat patties" consisting of upper round steak custom ground for her by the butcher.

On the other hand, I can never remember much junk food around, not even goodies like doughnuts, or most soft drinks - with the exception of Vernor's Ginger Ale. It goes without saying, there were no alcoholic beverages, After all, remember, it was just my mother, my brother, and me.

Getting back to the meat patties for a minute, if were having them for dinner, they would be accompanied by Idaho baked potatoes, a vegetable, and maybe a salad. There would be plenty of butter for the baked potatoes, and a dash of salt and pepper. Unfortunately, it was before scour cream made its way to Columbus,

Some of the dishes my mother came up with would sometimes prompt another "yuck!" from this sometimes rebellious kid.

Calves liver, for instance. But it would look so delicious, and smell so wonderful, that I would give in and taste it. And after the first taste, well, yes Mom, I'll have some more. Mother would always specify to the butcher that she wanted baby calves liver. For supper, she would fry it either with bacon or sliced onions.

These are the kinds of meals I'm talking about. Memorable. And she would put theme together on a limited budget. Of course, these were depression days and everything was selling at rock-bottom prices. By the same token, money was as scarce as hen's teeth, but she made do.

Mother was a wonder, and I wish I had her back so I could tell her so.

Funny thing, though.

She never mastered the art of Italian cooking.

Spaghetti, for instance.

She cooked her spaghetti in a big pot with all the ingredients thrown in. It was soup.

Not very Italian, but good though!

When we lived in the University District, one of my mother's favorite grocery stores was the King Avenue market. It was located right about where Viking Carryout is today. She especially liked their selection of meat.

There was a Mykrantz Drug Story over where Dragonfly neo-v cuisine is currently located. It had a soda fountain and everything.

Another friendly place where my mother shopped was the Weiss Sisters' Red and White store. It was located on either Hunter or Highland Avenue a couple of blocks south of West Eleventh. And, there was a small Kroger store on the west side of High Street between Ten and Eleventh avenues.

Amazingly, none of these place were self-serve. In other words, a clerk would take your order and fetch everything for you, the possible exception being produce where you could help choose what went into your market basket.

My mother was a very particular shopper and she would keep an eagle-eye on everything she ordered.

Sometimes, when we could afford it, we would eat Sunday dinner at a very nice restaurant at the corner of Tenth and Neil. I think it was called the Campus-Neil. Or, sometimes we would go up on High Street and eat at the Dutch Tavern. No relation to the Dutch Café. And, a lot of times, we would walk over to Pomerine Hall, which overlooked Mirror Lake. They had a cafeteria with good food at affordable prices.

As the old song goes, "Those were the good ol' days," and you can bet your bottom dollar I'll never forget them!

 

10

Unsung heroines

There were no little leagues when I was growing up, but that didn't stop some kids from forming baseball and touch football teams on their own hook. There was a boy like that in my neighborhood, a real sports organizer. His name was Jimmy Reeder.

Jimmy lived down the street from us, in the 1400 block of Neil Avenue, in a big brick house with his mother, grandmother, and two brothers.

Bob, the oldest, was overweight and always had his nose in a science-fiction magazine. He wen