Ping Pong and Pool

The basement was either the scariest place (for me) in the world or where the action was. I can't imagine what it was like for Ron and Dick to have their bedroom tucked at the head of the garage. Was there a dirt floor in the garage, or cement? It had to have been a cold place in the winter because even as the garage later became the recreation room, the tile floors were always numbingly cold. But regardless the temperature, there was an allure to the basement, especially after  Dad managed to wedge in a pool table down there. I remember the night the pool table was delivered - such excitement! Before the pool table, I'd roller skate down there around the poles and over the smooth cement floor, but only in the light of day. Nighttime transformed it into a dark, shadowy hell (for me).

The pool table was a cool acquisition, and not one readily made in our family - Dad must've been dreaming of Minnesota Fats and The Hustler when he came up with that one. It was a hit for quite  a while. Games after dinner occurred nightly where "rack em up" floated up the basement stairs and the usual muffled argument rose above the volume of the Wonderful World of Disney or Flintstones on television in the living room. Dad took himself and the game pretty seriously - asking one year for a jet black pool cue for Christmas. Even as a kid I sense pending disaster when he unwrapped the long pole-shaped gift under the tree only to find a broomstick. I never thought I'd see him cry, but he nearly did in that moment - somewhere under the rage of being punk'd. Thankfully, the pranksters had a nice fancy pool cue waiting in the wings. The lesson that Dad didn't take jokes aimed at him well never seemed to sink in...but, I think he loosened up years later on that score (I have, too).

At some point, the pool table was transformed into a ping pong table by a slab of plywood, and I don't think we never played pool again. A radio was set up on a sideboard and hours were spent before and after dinner playing game after game after game of ping pong. Dick was the reigning king of the game - practicing fancy paddle moves and continually finding those imperfections on the plywood that would send the ball careening off the table at crazy angles as his opponent's paddle swished the air where the ball should've been. I was at least one of his 'training' partners and ended up being a fairly decent player in time. Music always played in the background.  Petula Clark singing "Downtown" or Nancy Sinatra's "These Boots Are Made for Walkin'" always remind me of those nights.

I'm not sure what happened to Dad's pool table, but I believe that Eddie Willett might have gotten it. It was a stroke of genius to purchase it - even for our small house - because years of good times surround it.

The Basement and the Window Dicky Torched

Along with the pool/ping pong table (that made it a little less scary down there), the basement had the pantry items (including the periodic bursting can of botulism), washer dryer, Ruthy's ironing paraphernalia and the old spartan shower that Don Jones finally installed when Ron was nearly out the door to college... (how did we manage 6 people and one bathroom for so long without a shower??) There was also an old wash basin, and a sump pump where the hamster drowned. I was pretty young, but I swear there was a hamster named something like "Sniffles" who often got loose and ran around the house. He liked to hide in the kitchen cabinet with the pots and pans, chewing little holes in boxes that contained kitchen gadgets like the hand-mixer. When his wanderlust led him somehow into the basement sump pump, Sniffles wasn't found until it was too late. He was buried with dignity beside the basketball post in the backyard.

The basement was a treasure trove of stuff. Under the stairs, over by Dad's work bench, in the toy and sports box - and there were things in the rafters, too, just above the pool table. Gramp Foote's old Blue Bird guitar was up there for years. A pair of ancient skis, too. At some point, Dick's toboggan served time in the rafters....I think. When I was in high school, I took a night class in learning to play the guitar, and used the old blue bird as my instrument. Save for a few warped edges and strings that looked rusted, it seemed serviceable enough and I wanted to learn how to play. The sight and sound of the guitar rendered the instructor speechless. After gamely trying to 'blend' with the mellow tones of the more contemporary, well-maintained guitars, I finally stopped taking the class out of embarrassment. 

One of the better Dicky stories involved the basement window over the washing machine. My account may be riddled with misremembered details, but this is what I recall. Once Ruthy was working part time, she was often gone when we were all home on school break. (There had to have been times when she realized being off-site during these breaks was a bad idea). Dicky and Ron were tasked with burning the trash as their chore. This meant taking the garbage pail out to the trash bin in the yard and lighting it in a safe and mature manner. How this was never seen as the makings of a disaster is beyond me - don't most boys have a fascination with matches? This particular day Ruthy was at work or out somewhere and it was winter and cold as heck, so Dicky - King of the Masterminded Plot - decided instead of running out there to the far corner of the yard and freeze while trying to light the trash, he'd save time and light it in the pail at the back door and then run the pail out to the trash as the fire started to light, dumping it in the bin just as the flames took hold. No time a-wasted and barely even having to stop. I didn't see this happen personally - although I would've given all my allowance money to have been there - but I gather when the match hit the trash at the back door, the entire pail went up like a gas-soaked bonfire. He got as far as the first step out the door before having to fling the fireball into the nearest window well. The fire finally doused, tragedy averted - except now the window in the well was scorched and cracked, and the siding just over the well bubbled. Thus the byzantine cover-up began.

It was a good thing O'Donnell's Hardware was a short walk down the road because Dicky forged back and forth to reglaze the window, several attempts were thwarted over some missed detail. (According to Ruthy, on a visit to the hardware store a few months later she had an interesting conversation about the day her boy spent time with them reglazing a basement window.) 

To complete his cover-up that would fool both parents, putting a brand-spanking new window over the laundry work area would draw the eye of precisely those two people who didn't miss much. So he switched the new window with the one near the work bench where Dad stored all his paints and tools, and where a shelf partially obscured the window from view near the laundry area. An entire day of work to cover the mess he made finally ended in success - he'd managed to remove two windows, reglaze one and replace it in the area where it would be least noticeable before either parent returned that evening. 

Within two or three days of the torched trash incident, Ruthy had him cold. Seems the window he moved into the laundry area had a spray-painted circle where someone accidentally overshot a can of spray paint above Dad's work area years before. That spot now was on the window above Ruthy's work area. All his efforts that day to hide the results of his pail-turned-molotov-cocktail fell apart on that one little detail he neglected to consider: that the moving paint splotch would be at least as noticeable as the brand new window. What I remember most about those days is that Dicky was a guy who sought solutions, plotting them out in the most interesting and intricate detail....and usually to cover his tracks. There was never a dull moment with Dicky in the house!

The Change Pot

Dad's idea of a fun day

(click on the link above)

Hey, does anyone know where Dad's coin collection ended up??

Those days when Daddy brought home the coin collection from his work's coffee fund were always dreaded, for me certainly - and I'm assuming for Jeanne, too. It was usually on a Saturday, and the dining room table was set up for either Jeanne or I to sort through the dimes, nickels and pennies to add to Dad's coin collection - taking all day, it seemed. The windows to the world outside were right there, too, taunting us.....

It was his collection, his hobby, in theory anyway. He did bring home the coins, and he did provide the collection books. He had a ready excuse that his eyesight wasn't good enough to see the tiny dates, so he needed sharp youthful eyes to pick out the details. Now that I'm roughly the same age he was when he did this I can attest to that eyesight issue...but it never occurred to me back then to buy him a magnifying glass.

I believe he would hijack the coffee fund at work to sort through for a rare find... the coffee must have been cheap because there were A LOT of pennies to sort through. Not that I should complain - the sorting did add to the list of chores I had to come up with each week in order to earn my 10 cent allowance, which I proceeded to spend on penny candy at Whitakers, or a 10 cent comic book. A penny for every chore. By about 7 or 8 pennies, I had to think long and hard about what I did to earn 10 cents. Changing the television channel for Dad (the time before remotes!), telling Dick and Ron that dinner was ready, and answering the phone were stretching it to 10.

A coin collection wasn't just about separating them into piles by denomination or finding the right dates to insert into the collection slot. We had to see where the coin was minted (small letter under the date, usually) and the material used - and I think we had to count them, too. There were other anomalies that needed attention, too, but I'd have to think long and hard to remember them. The monotony of sorting through the coins was interrupted by the occasional find, but once the books were mostly to fully filled the finds got harder and harder. And a "find" could be dashed by getting that little minted letter wrong. There really was no way to cheat through this process. We were given a certain amount of coins and our time spent sorting through them was monitored - so no cheating. Swishing through the coins and calling it a day wasn't allowed. Daddy was clever when it came to knowing the tricks a kid would use to get through the task quicker. He may have been a pro at dodging the occasional chore and new the tricks of the trade.

The smell of pennies en masse and the feel of my fingers after handling them for hours - what a treat for a Saturday or Sunday afternoon! Hey, what did you do this weekend? Counted pennies! Good old Daddy.

Someone somewhere may just be benefitting from our youthful labors. Maybe Dad cashed them in years ago. I kind of hope so.

WWII

I found Dad's eulogy the other day with a bunch of old photos. It detailed more about his trajectory from Iowa farm boy to the war overseas than I had been aware of.

According to the eulogy, Dad served in the US Army in the Army Air Force with the Fifth Fighter Squad. "He was one of the mechanics who kept the squad in the air, and as such, he was always on the advancing edge of the war to liberate Europe. He proceeded with the liberators step by step, mile by mile, from Ireland to England, England to North Africa, North Africa to Sicily, Sicily to Corsica, Corsica to Italy. He served for 3 years, and according mostly to what Ruthy told me, he contracted malaria and eventually lost most of  his teeth to decay from those years. Those were the physical scars he brought home.

I wish I had spent more time with Dad talking about his service, but it seemed he wasn't one to speak of it much. The year or two before he died he did show me a box full of letters home Grammy Coolley kept, and I read every one of them while visiting one summer with Justin. I have a lot of photos of places he was stationed and post cards of landmarks that indicated Dad saw more of Europe than most people I know, albeit in a way none of us should ever hope to. His letters home were an interesting mix of mundane camp life - asking for the ingredients for fudge so that he could mix up a batch in his helmet over a campfire to share with the boys - to redacted info on where he was and what he was up to. One of the few letters to mention Ruthy he spoke of the girl he had met in NH as having joined the WAVES, and therefore he longer wanted anything to do with her. I think being a WAVE - a navy girl - was considered a big finger in the eye to an Army guy. But it seems somewhere along the way they figured things out, judging by the cheesecake photos Ruthy sent him.

Wishing I could add more to this post regarding his service, but I do know that he kept in touch with a the WWII pilots who entrusted their lives to his skills as a mechanic. That in itself says volumes.

Trigger

Ron riding Trigger (notice the ears are laying back on his head which is never a happy sign) and the corncob bin in the background

I'm going to suggest that Trigger was a bay American Morgan - one of the earliest horse breeds in the US, according to Wikipedia. I don't know this for certain. I do remember he was a pretty horse with a white stripe along his nose and white socks. And he was one of the best part of our weekly Sunday trips to Gramps (aside from Ruthy's fried chicken, potatoes and banana cream pies), at least for me. I'm not sure what Trigger's age was when he died, but he was still around and avoiding the saddle and harness with youthful vigor when I entered college. The day he died, Dad told me it was the first time he saw Gramp cry. I never saw Gramp ride Trigger, so the two old guys had a companionable bond that apparently went beyond horse and rider.

Back in those days when we headed to Gramp's and after we all choked and coughed out the dusty remains of the road once we got there, the focus was on the "timber" and the hunt to find Trigger. He probably saw the dust cloud from the car rounding that last corner and took to the back 40 as fast as he could. We'd usually locate him as faaaaar back in Gramp's land as possible, out past the groves of poison ivy and bramble thickets. Only if we made it past those obstacles and had a suitably delectable treat would he finally resign himself to the bridle hidden behind someone's back. For the record, I don't think we were fooling him with the hidden bridle. And so began his long, slow, resigned trek to the barnyard to get saddled up for the afternoon.

All in all he was a good sport, sort of. Gramp's barn had metal roofing that came to a point at the corners about 7 or so feet off the ground in the barnyard. It was jagged and sharp, and could double as a makeshift guillotine. The reason I know this is because it was the place Trigger picked up his pace in order to attempt to knock his riders (or their heads) off. He'd stroll lazily, mildly around the barnyard and just when the rider was lulled into relaxing their hold on the reins, he'd pick up the pace and aim for that overhang for all he was worth.

The only one who seemed to have command of Trigger was Dad - when he rode him, Trigger didn't dare aim for the head-lopper.

Grammy Foote

When I think about Grammy and her visits to Des Moines, I remember mostly that I didn't much like her, and the feeling seemed mutual. (What I saw as proof: She would routinely give away money - paper money for Ron and Dick, change for Jeanne and I got the pennies from the bottom of her purse.) From earliest memories she and I were going at it. Once when I was about 2 or 3 we had an old desk phone that sat in the living room. It was big and heavy and white and I was fascinated by it. I'd pick up the receiver and hold it's heft in my small hands and listen. Sometimes we had a party line and you could hear conversations from strangers. Grammy sat in a big old easy chair across the room and would knit or darn socks, but always with an narrowed eye poised on "little Ruthy", or later "Bert". (I was the only one she could boss and she never seemed to know my name.) I'd pick up the receiver to listen, then realize that Grammy was in the chair right behind me. Sneaking a look over my shoulder, I'd see her glaring at me willing me to look at her. Once she caught my eye, she'd do the for-shame pointer fingers slide then make like she was snapping an imaginary

 bone in half.  She probably could have been a ringer at Charades because non-verbally, I got the message. She was never bested either - Ruthy caught me once sticking out my tongue at her from behind the kitchen doorway (I apparently thought I was hidden), and when Ruthy looked in through the dining room door, she saw Grammy giving me an impressive raspberry right back. 

She liked to put puzzles together and took sides when Jeanne and I would bicker over the puzzle pieces. I don't know about Jeanne's memories, but I often remember losing those battles after a swift kick in my bony shin by one of Grammy's orthopedic shoes under the card table. A lot of puzzles were assembled by force when Grammy would get sick of searching for pieces and resort to jamming a random puzzle piece into an open slot.

I was a bit grumpy when she hijacked my cat, Smokey, though. She always had her sewing bag on the floor next to her and Smokey made it his hiding place to sleep unmolested. He was off-limits if he was in, on or near her and at age 10, I didn't take kindly to that. She loved Ron and Dick who could coax shrieks of laughter from her when they ran through the living room in skivvies on their way to the bathroom. She sang and whistled all the time, however it seemed she'd sundown around dinner and float into sadness. Her mind was locked quite often in the distant past when she was newly married and living in Reeds Ferry. There was always a fear of falling, pain in her knees and her diminishing connection to present day. Having her in the house on those occasions she'd visit for a month or two, I learned to respect her in a manner that seemed ludicrous at the time. She wasn't just a feeble-minded old lady, she had a history rich in past events and people. Stories of Scotland would be something I'd enjoy hearing right about now, but I don't recall her ever speaking of those years before landing in the US to work in the mills. And work she did - she was 11 years old when she went to the woolen mills in Manchester.

 I love that Grammy Foote took off her glasses for this photo. Not sure if Ruthie told her to or she wanted to look more glamorous :)

 Here's how I remember her best, with glasses and her poor stiff knees. She must have been in so much pain during those years when she'd have to waddle about. I don't believe she could even bend her knees at all.

Gun Men

This pre-dates me by about 4 years, but I always loved this photo of Ron and Dick as cowboys with their big old rifles. Westerns were huge in the 50s and 60s - even after I was born I remember shows like Bonanza, Gunsmoke, Have Gun Will Travel, The Rifleman. I can even hear the hollow timbre
 of the speaker during those black and white shows as they played on the old console television we had. Remember when the tv would blow a tube and Daddy would make that young guy, Kenny Lange, who worked in his shop come by and fix it? He knew every television we had through the years like the back of his hand. I remember him coming by days before Ruthie and I finally moved east.

When I was very young, we'd pile into the station wagon and go to the drive in on SE 14th to see westerns like Stagecoach, Twelve O'Clock High featuring John Wayne or Jimmy Stewart. I was usually in pajamas and would pass out before the second hour somewhere in the far back of the car. My memory isn't clear on who all would be there, but I'm thinking I remember at least Jeanne, Dick and Eddie Willett.

It's not hard to see how awesomely authentic these two lawmen were in those days. Dick looks like the little brother who emulated everything his big brother did and said. Were those bb guns Red Ryders like Ralphie's in a Christmas Story? 

And hey, who doesn't remember that yarn patchwork throw and that itchy gray couch??

Rainbow Girls

Jeanne may remember being forced to join the Rainbow Girls as a pleasant experience that fostered a sense of community among young teenaged girls....but me, not so much. By the time I was frogmarched into the Rainbow Girls, the Masons had built their lodge in the field across from the house - and everything that went on there could be seen from the dining room window. That meant that on any given Weds night when Daddy would invariably ask "Hey, isn't there a Rainbow meeting tonight?", I couldn't just say no and get away with it. Believe me, I tried. It wasn't just the awesome bride of Dracula dresses we had to wear, either. This dress I wore was the second one I had during my time with the Rainbows. The first was the dress Jeanne wore - the same one that Ruthie wore before her with considerable alterations. By the time that dress got handed down to me it had yellowed in the armpits and the netting was brittle to a point where I looked like a zombie prom queen in it. I remember Jeanne describing it as looking like the inner lining of a casket and she was RIGHT! Ruthie finally decided to upgrade the look after I was in Rainbow for a year and made the dress I have on in this photo. I loved it with its empire waist - but the sleeve that always seemed to be shorter than the other was something that dogged her. My arm length varied from one arm to the other arm unpredictably like the Marty Feldman character's hump in Young Frankenstein. 

My favorite memory of Rainbows was the one night when hell froze over. Daddy was a stickler for Rainbows and making sure I went to EVERY. SINGLE. EVENT. NO. EXCEPTIONS. This particular winter's evening I got called out of the main sanctuary - an interruption in the inner workings of the meetings that was mostly unheard of. In order to call someone out of the room, a series of Rainbow rules had to occur - the three raps on the outer door, three responding raps on the inner door, etc. etc. Once inside we didn't get to just leave, we had to maneuver a labyrinth of ancient ritual. This night, I was told that my mom called and that I needed to go home RIGHT AWAY. She had to promise a life was in danger to wrangle me free. Panicked, I ran across the parking lot to the house and found Dicky and Ruthy there grinning at me. Daddy was away on business, and Dicky had driven down from ISU to take us to see Gone with the Wind, which was showing at one of the downtown theaters. When he found out I was at Rainbows, he talked Ruthie into calling over and getting me out on a fake 'emergency'. HOLY CRAP - that wasn't done in our house, and most certainly not when it came to the Rainbows!! I was in heaven. I had never seen the movie Gone with the Wind until that night and it remains to this day one of my very favorite movies because Dicky, probably without even thinking about it, rescued me on that one evening in more ways than just to see a movie. 

There are a number of memories of Rainbows that are better off forgetting from those days, but none more cringeworthy than the time I was initiated into the group by being kidnapped in the middle of the night out of my bed by the older girls. Every other initiate got a heads up from her mom and was abducted wearing her best pjs and amazingly good hair for having been dragged out of bed. For years Ruthie would apologize out of the blue for not preparing me for that midnight rousting. The reason for her apparent (and yes, well-earned) guilt was that at 13, I was at my very, very most awkwardly pathetic. I grew seemingly 10 feet in that one year between ages 12 and 13, and most of my clothes had yet to catch up with that growth - none more so than my old nightgowns. When I was kidnapped out of my bed, I looked like they'd dragged me from a cardboard box in an alleyway. At the temple, all the other pleebs looked like they just stepped out a Sears catalog, complete with lipgloss. One look at me and my nicely coiffed abductors felt they at least succeeded initiating mortally embarrassing one of us properly. To make it even more enjoyable, we couldn't alter our appearance until after the Masons and Demolay boys came by later to make and serve us breakfast. 

......I remember not speaking to Ruthy until I went away to college. 

Bath time in the kitchen sink

Believe it or not, I remember this photo being taken. I remember bathing in the kitchen sink, but I also remember taking baths in the tub with Jeanne. I'm sure Jeanne loved that I was able to share that experience with her! This photo always evokes a particularly vivid memory of being bathed in this sink one afternoon when the Cherrys landed on the doorstep....Coralie and every kid making up her brood at that time who wasn't school age - at least 3 of them at any given time, anyway. Ruthie ran to the door to answer it, leaving me in the sink looking pretty much like I did here in this photo. I was somewhat aggrieved  to be seen "narked", much less narked in the kitchen sink, so I groped for whatever I could to spare my modesty before anyone could see me. I found the wash rag that had been used to bathe me and spread it across my chest at the same moment that Kent, who was my age, came running into the kitchen. The Cherrys were not known for standing on formalities when visiting, and Kent wasn't about to break custom. He made a beeline right to me in the sink and stood gaping at my little wash rag-covered décolletage. He asked what I was doing in there with a wash rag on my chest, and then, without waiting for an answer he took off to find something more interesting to investigate.