'Busted -- Six Ways From Sunday'

Dallas, Texas -- Summer of 1957. Edsel automobiles were new to the car scene. The Russians beat the U.S. in putting a satellite into space. I was not quite 13, and my brother George was 11.

We lived on 10th Street in Oak Cliff, 4 blocks from the Sunset church of Christ. The home where we lived on 10th Street, just off Hampton Road, was a modest brick home with a long building behind it that had a one-car garage on the east end, and laundry facilities on the west end. The middle of this long structure was one large room, which we occasionally used for 'overflow' company and as a place for George and I and our friends to play. It was about the size of an average living room. We had a ping pong table in this play area and Mom and Dad would often exile us to this 'away-from-the-house structure' when we were too loud or were not getting along too well indoors.

George and I often escaped to this garage-laundry-playroom structure to get away from a pesky four-going-on-five year old brother, Randy, and a bossy older sister, Nancy, who was 18. One day, while bored, George and I decided to explore the attic of this structure. Exploring was part of our agenda. Smoking some Marlboro cigarettes without getting caught by Mom was the primary item on our agenda. We lit up --- coughed a good bit, and then tried to act like we were enjoying the cigarettes. We felt pretty good about our safety. No way was Mom going to climb up into the attic to catch us smoking. Dad was at work, so we were safe.

We had borrowed Dad's flashlight -- a monster that used a bunch of 'D' cell batteries, and then had climbed up the vertical ladder in the garage. The flashlight was to be used to explore the attic while staying away from the inevitable spiders and wasps often found in garage attics. We found a large area full of boxes of stuff that Mom and Dad had accumulated over the years. Mostly junk, it was of no interest to us, until I found a metal box that looked interesting. It was green and looked very, very old. This was beginning to feel like a treasure hunt! We tingled with excitement! It was not locked, so, with George holding the flashlight while the smoke burned our eyes, I looked through the content of the box. Old letters! They had funny stamps on them and odd postmarks. They were old! They dated from the 1930's! They had been carefully sorted and were then wrapped in bundles with string. We were intrigued! What did we have here?!

I began reading the letters to George. We were both astounded as I read of passionate feelings my Dad was expressing to our Mom. These letters were written when dad was serving in the U.S. Maritime Service during World War II. Of course, George and I didn't know anything about 'grownup talk', like a young husband would use in writing letters to his sweet young bride, but we read and read and read, smoking those Marlboro cigarettes like crazy, and laughing out loud when we read a particularly juicy bunch of love talk! We were laughing and punching each other when I read a totally eye-popping passage in one of the letters! This was great fun!

After a long time, we heard sirens. They got louder and louder. It sounded like they were right outside. Then it dawned on us -- they WERE right outside! We put out the cigarettes and hustled down the wooden stairs, leaving the letters strewn about on the attic floor. Our next door neighbor had seen smoke billowing out from the eaves of the garage and had called the fire department!

George and I got a whipping for smoking. Part of the paddling probably was due to the embarrassment Mom and Dad felt for having had their privacy violated. The letters disappeared. The attic became off-limits. I got paddled harder for having been the older brother and the chief instigator of this summer escapade.

I didn't get much of an education from the letters, since not much of it made much sense to me. I was, for my age, pretty naive, I guess. George was even more so. And yet, as I looked back on that event over the years that followed, it gave me a little peek into things that had always been a mystery to me...about love and about the intensity of feelings that my Dad had for my Mom at a time when they were both very young and so full of young love. It gave me a little bit of perspective, because my parents were very private people, and a lot about life and love was kept very private. Kids my age at that time were largely responsible for their own education about this mysterious thing called love.

Although we didn't much care for the paddling we both received, and though that event is over a half-century in the past, the memory at this point in my life is a sweet memory. We were just two kids -- bored on a hot summer day -- who were having fun...when we got 'busted six ways from Sunday.'