The first ten years are sometimes the hardest!

When I was a newborn, my Mom was at the home of her in-laws in Sherman, Texas. She was holding me and she leaned over to latch a screen window in my grandmother's bedroom. As she leaned over, I moved suddenly and she lost her hold on me. I fell into the window, and past the still-unlatched window screen. I landed on the gravel outside the window. My mother and grandmother rushed me off to the hospital, thinking that I had sustained some internal injuries. I was not 'broken', but my Mother lost standing in the eyes of her mother-in-law when the accident happened. She felt like she was not a good mother, at least in the eyes of my grandmother.

I survived that first 'fall', and went on to move, with my parents, and siblings, to Houston, Texas. We lived out on Yale Street -- sort of out in the country -- and we had chickens. When I was two years old, and was chasing chickens one day, I slipped and fell onto an old washtub. The bottom of the washtub had rusted out and had become a sickle-shaped piece of rusted, yet sharp metal. When I fell, that rusted metal went across the top of my head, effectively almost scalping me. Off we went to the hospital. I got sewed up and months later, my thick, curly blond hair didn't betray the horseshoe-shaped sutures beneath. See the pic of me and sister Nancy -- before the chicken-chasing, washtub disaster. The other pic is of me, AFTER the hair came back. (Raegan, your Poppy gave you your pretty, curly hair -- don't ever forget it!).

I didn't want to go to school as a little kid. On the first day of kindergarten, my Mom left me with my kindergarten teacher at the Woodrow Wilson Elementary School in Houston, Texas. I made it through part of the day, but the little girl, Antoinette, who took a nap on a towel next to mine, on the floor, soaked us both while she was asleep! Wet, thoroughly grossed out and embarrassed, I left -- walked right out of the classroom -- out the door -- and went straight home! I didn't care much for school!

I felt pretty good about going home. It was a good decision! I enjoyed the walk. When I got home, however, the novelty left when I got a good paddling --- with Mom's Fuller Brush hairbrush (the good one, with the wooden handle). She marched me right back to school (with dry pants), and I suffered through the rest of the day, looking at the alphabet, trying to duplicate what I saw on the blackboard on my Big Chief tablet, trying to learn the alphabet while taking turns learning to tie shoes on a giant red wooden shoe...and staying WELL AWAY from Antoinette!

The next few years in grade school were better. I fell in love with all of my teachers and not a few of the girls in the classes.

Saturdays saw a bunch of the guys in our neighborhood, going to a local theater for the Saturday matinee, to watch 'shoot-em-ups'. The tickets cost a quarter, and my folks allowed me to do that-- unsupervised, since a bunch of guys all went there together (safety in numbers I guess).

Some of us managed to pick up ring worm at that classy theater. Our school picture showed several of us wearing those flat caps boys wore in those days --you've seen them. Like they wore in 'Little Rascals.' A small brim in front. There we were -- as bald as bald can be. No hair, no eyelashes, no eyebrows. We looked like little Martians. I was especially homely looking, as I was sporting a wicked set of Mortimer Snerd buck teeth. To have been 'street legal', I probably should have been wearing a sign, warning people to avoid bumping into me. The teeth I was sporting could have been their undoing. And that's the plain 'tooth!' The teeth, combined with the bald head, capped off by a dorky looking cap from the 1030's, made me a real looker! See the pic above of my 1954 Grade School class. I'm the guy, 2nd row from the top, left of center, with the dark cap. A kid that only a mother could love! My only comfort was that some of the other guys were in the 4th grade and also bald! As bad as this was, it gets worse...

I went to a doctor (of sorts). The standard treatment among the learned physicians back in the 1950's included irradiating peoples' heads when they picked up ringworm! They would lay what looked like heavy truck tire innertubes lined with lead, on our chests and then blast away at our heads with radiation...x-rays!...to kill the ring worms, of course! Our hair, eyebrows and eyelashes grew back, over time, but the humiliation faded away much more slowly.

In June of 1953, when I was 8, and going on 9, the Alco Fireworks plant, near our home in Houston, exploded! My brother, age 6, and I had been taking a nap. I had awakened, and was 'sneaking' out of the room, so my younger brother would not awaken and start following me around again. As I started to leave the room, a monstrous explosion shook our home, knocking me off of my feet. I landed hard on the floor. My brother, George, came flying out of bed, and barely missed being sliced and diced by a large mirror that shattered and sent large shards of glass all over our bedroom floor.

We ran outside and looked around. To the right, past the Baird's Bakery that was located a few blocks away, right next to the River Oaks Shopping Center, we saw a huge fireball -- a gigantic mushroom -- rising into the air. There was a lot of damage in our neighborhood, from broken windows and structural damage to homes, shaken by the explosion. Later we found out that people had died -- a large number of people had been hurt. An automobile ---a Crosley automobile, if memory serves me right -- had been thrown hundreds of yards through the air. The fireworks plant was blown to smithereens. At this time, however, we didn't know that the explosion was caused by the detonation of a fireworks plant. We all thought that we had been attacked by Russia!

We lived in a time, back then, of drills in the schools, to prepare for the possibility of nuclear attacks from the Russians (as though 'duck and cover' would help when ones' city had just been vaporized!). We had regular 'duck and cover' drills at school, and, as kids, had a sense of impending doom, even though we didn't really understand the threat. We didn't get bombed, however, and so life settled down after awhile. In the fall, school started again, and we went back to buying stamps to put into the pages of our little books. When the pages were filled, we got a War Bond! It was the patriotic thing to do back then. We all wanted to support the Korean War effort, although we didn't know where Korea was or why we were at war. We just did what we were asked to do.

Occasionally, Mom would take my brother and I shopping for shoes. They had this nifty device in the stores in the 1950's that was a kid's delight....none other than a small x-ray machine (they called it a fluoroscope...but an x-ray machine is an x-ray machine...no matter what you want to call it). One could stand in front of the device and stick a foot into the opening, and then press a button and see the bones in ones' foot! What a neat toy to allow kids to play with while Mom shopped for shoes! We played with it endlessly....(no wonder most of us who grew up back then are a little 'different' now!). Sometimes my brother or I would stick our hands in the machine and let the other brother look at the bones in our hands as well. Great fun! Playing with x-ray machines! The thing was probably developed by Hitler's henchman, Mengele, to genetically alter all of America's kids!

I made it to age 10, and watched 'Superman' every afternoon after school, at the home of 'Lalo' Reese, my little neighbor who was short and chunky, and, with her chili-bowl haircut, looked a little like a tiny, female Friar Tuck! My, did we love Superman! Her Mom always served us chocolate cookies and Kool-Aid. The Reese's were also more affluent than we were...not only did they have a television, but they had a window air conditioner as well. Rich people! ....Back to Superman...

I had a lot of confidence as a kid, and became convinced that with a proper cape, I, too, could learn to fly like Superman. One afternoon I strapped on a less-than-perfect cape...certainly not flashy like Superman's cape, but one that I was able to craft out of one of Mom's old bed sheets. I got up on top of our garage and then leaped, and soared off into....the ground! I didn't get hurt too badly, other than two sprained ankles, but came close to landing on one of the 54 turtles that I had collected...turtles that roamed all over our backyard during the warmer months.

We stabled our horses at the Post Oak Stables (Dad was a member of the Harris County Sheriff's Mounted Posse -- something he did as a hobby), and the turtles were, I guess, attracted to the bugs that were attracted to all the manure. Mom didn't like the turtles too much. We didn't have a clothes dryer in 1954, and Mom would hang the wash on clotheslines in the backyard. While she was looking up, putting clothespins in the clothes on the clothesline, turtles would clamber over her feet, sometimes almost sending her into orbit! Great fun, I thought!

Speaking of doing laundry, Mom also made our laundry soap. She made it in large basins, out of lye and what else I do not remember. I can still remember Mom grating large pieces of that lye soap, using a cheese grater. I would also grate soap, and the trick, of course, was to not run ones' knuckles over the cheese grater! We used an 'agitating washer', but, I can also remember Mom using a scrub board for some of dad's clothes. That was hard work. Looking back, I don't know how she did it....leaning over the bathtub with a scrub board and her homemade soap, scrubbing dirt out of three boys' jeans and dad's clothes. We had a 'wringer' on the washing machine, and we were given strict instructions to stay away from it. We had heard lots of stories about people getting hair, hands, fingers, arms, and other appendages caught in the wringer. One still hears an occasional reference to someone getting his/her '(blank) caught in the wringer...'.

When I was 10 we went to the Houston zoo. Nice zoo. I ran ahead of my parents and stuck my head between two of the vertical iron bars outside the zoo - bars that were part of the fence decoration at the entrance to the zoo. Bad move. (Why do kids stick their heads between bars?...because they're THERE, of course!). I got my head stuck and all the kings horses and all the kings men couldn't get my head back through the bars. Finally, in desperation, the zoo people called the Houston Fire Department! Here they came, sirens blaring! A small crowd gathered. What a humiliation. If I hadn't been crying so persistently, I probably would have gotten a huge whipping by my Dad for that stunt.

Not long after this, my family and I witnessed the event in Houston that, even today, remains unexplained. All of Houston, TX., saw the event in the sky. I wrote about it in an earlier post. THAT was an amazing day, and I still think of it often and wonder. When you have a minute, read that earlier post, 'You tell ME what they were!'

Not long after, while messing around in our garage, I found dozens of old shotgun shells that belonged to my Dad. I had been experimenting with the rolled caps from my cap guns and the way the gunpowder 'flashes' when one scrapes a sharp object across the top of the caps. I thought: "I know -- I'll open up all of these shotgun shells and collect the powder that it inside them and make a bigger flash!" Another not-so-bright idea. It took hours, but I got all of the shells opened -- collected the powder and then began my experiment. It flashed all right...so big that when it ignited, it blinded me and seriously burned my face, fingers, hands and arms. I had to go to the doctor a lot that summer....it took months to get over that 'experiment.'

In late fall, my neighbor Bobby, who was about 13, decided to dig a 'fox hole' in the vacant lot on the corner of our street. He had his dad's pick-ax...you know, a blade on one side and a sharp pick on the other side. He had been digging for a long time when I showed up with a couple of buddies. I stood on the other side of the hole where Bobby was diging. As he plunged the blade down into the hole, I looked down in the hole to check on the progress. He yanked the pick-ax back up, and it hit me squarely in the center of my forehead. It hurt....oh, yes...it hurt a lot! And then the bleeding started, and I bled like a stuck pig. I was skinny back then and I ran home, with blood coursing down my face, neck and chest. Back to the doctor. Stitches. My forehead was mangled...I looked like a 10-yr. old Charles Manson...without the swastika carved into my forehead. It took years before the scar faded.

Later that year, near Christmas, Bobby, the 'old' 13-yr. old neighbor, was throwing a knife into a chinaberry tree. It was a beautiful knife. It has a fake pearl handle, and the blade was about 4 inches long (maybe a little less...to my eyes back then it looked like a Bowie knife!). He was pretty good at throwing it hard enough and accurately enough for it to usually stick in the tree....usually being the operative word here. I was impressed. He threw it once more and it richocheted off of the tree and embedded itself in my thigh. I took off for home, with the knife moving back and forth as I ran. Mom had to remove the knife and...you guessed it...take me back to the doctor again. More stitches. This time, however, Bobby got the whipping-- from his dad. If I had thought about the pick-ax and the knife and had ever put the two events together, I might have had second thoughts about running around with Bobby.

Right after the end of the year, after my dad's shooting-the-ornaments-off-of-the-Christmas-tree-stunt, with his cousin, Otis, (Matt Gayle's great uncle), the neighbors put their Christmas trees out on the curb for the trash man to collect. Good old Bobby -- our mentor and teacher -- collected the trees and put them in his back yard, in order to construct another, in a series, of ill-fated 'forts'. It was a grand fort, and we set about making the fortifications secure -- against imagined 'foreign invaders'. My brother George, as part of his preparations, brought matches from home -- the big kitchen matches. One day in January, George-- ever one for experimentation -- lit a match and accidentally set the fort on fire! He managed to burn down Bobby's parents' garage and everything in it!

We all got a whipping for that...all of us. Especially Bobby. His Dad nailed his hide to the wall! And come to think of it, George and I each got two whippings for that stunt....a 'two-for-one-stunt'---one from Mom and another from Dad once he got home from work. Mom used her Fuller hair brush (I still have it...broken wooden handle and all).

After the Christmas tree fort fire, one of the neighbor boys (from over the back fence, behind Bobby's house)-- still mad about the whipping he got from his participation in our fort activities--- beat up my brother George one day. I heard George crying, as the boy, 12, and his brother, 11, let my brother have it while George was on their side of the fence. George was only 8 years old, and was trying to climb the fence, to come home, and the boys kept hitting him. I grabbed a brick, climbed up the 'hog-wire' fence, and heaved the brick at the older of the two brothers, to try to make them leave George alone. The brick hit the older boy in the shin and he went down like a 'TON of bricks'. Those boys were never friends again after the brick incident, but they also left George alone.

The next summer, while I was still age 10, George and I were at my grandmothers' home in Sherman, Texas (the site of the cannon incident I told about in an earlier blog). We were across the street, down at the bottom of the bluff, just outside the weeds, in the creek bottom. We were playing with Dad's magnifying glass. It was a big, powerful magnifying glass. You could burn your initials into boards in seconds! George got tired of burning words into wood, and he experimented for a bit with dried weeds. You know where this is going....seconds later, the fire he started was racing up the steep wall of that bluff. From the creek bed to the top of the bluff was about 50 feet. The flames were immense! It was an raging inferno! It was loud! I had never heard a fire make so much noise. The cedar trees along the way went up like Roman candles! The heat created wind, that swept the flames up the side of the bluff. In a few minutes, we heard the fire trucks coming. They finally put the fire out. Two telephone poles were charred. The wires between the poles were 'toast', and had to be replaced. Just like my dad had received a hard whipping for setting a cannon off right over the same place (when he was a young kid, maybe 25 years earlier) where my brother George started a fire, George and I both received a 'belt' whippping (much worse than a hairbrush whipping, since it was administered by Dad, and he hit harder than Mom did).

This pretty well summarizes my first ten years! Most of my early years were filled with wonderful days-- fun times that I remember like they were yesterday. Carefree days of wearing a pair of shorts and nothing else...running like the wind, riding bikes and exploring and pretending. These years were just punctuated every now and then with unusual events --- probably much like your lives have likely been!