I’d like to say thanks to everyone who has written in with kind comments about these pages, and those of you who have corrected me when I have wandered astray. I have decided to end things, more or less, on this blog, while I expand the memories I have on our times in West Virginia and Parkersburg in particular. There are things that I could not talk about in the larger forum of the Internet that I can address in book form. So that’s what I’m doing, making all of this into a real book.

But don’t stop coming to these pages! I still have questions which I will put up here as I go along. I hope you will recommend this site to others who grew up with us or those who came later who might like to see how we did grow up. It’s difficult to keep from writing like an old geezer who rants on about how wonderful a time we had, but really, in so many ways it was a wonderful time.

If anyone would like to read any of my fiction, my books can be found on Amazon. Just click on the underlined text here. If anyone would like to reach me for anything, you can comment here or you can email me at appelworks@gmail.com.

Rest assured, I will be working on this book and I will let everyone know when it is finished.

Thank you all!

 

All you Delicate Flowers out there who swoon when the subject of sex comes up (no play on words intended) time to flip over to another channel. For the rest of you Parkersburgians and 1950’s West Virginians, buckle your seatbelts because we’re talking Mabel Mackey. Well, actually, that makes it sound more exciting than it is. As always, it’s about me, a small, fairly clueless young teenager living in Parkersburg in 1958.

No discussion about sex in Parkersburg during the 1950s would be complete without including the most famous whorehouse madam of that or any other period in Parkersburg. Since I have begun these pages, one of Mabel’s nephews, Roger Mackey, has begun a fascinating Facebook page about his aunt Mabel. I recommend you go on Facebook, search the term The History of Parkersburg WV & its Madam’s and ask Roger if you can join the group.

Roger is a serious amateur historian who has worked hard at hosting a number of Facebook pages about West Virginia, Parkersburg, and the early history of the area. He was recently chosen as a West Virginia “History Hero” by the Wood County Historical and Preservation Society. Roger keeps a fair but firm hand on the sometimes unruly commenters to his pages, and he has thousands of followers who enthusiastically chime in with personal reminiscences that color and enhance Roger’s many ongoing historical topics. He has graciously let me horn in on his pages with announcements of when I put up a new entry of this memoir blog about growing up in West Virginia. All this is a preamble and apology to Roger because I’m about to steal some of his information from his writing about his aunt, the infamous Mabel Mackey. A visit to Roger’s pages will give you the true story of his Aunt Mabel. They can be found here. Thanks, Roger.

If you were a male of any age in Parkersburg in the 1950s you knew the name Mabel Mackey. You might have been too young to know exactly who she was, but simply saying her name would bring on knowing glances, lewd gestures, jokes from the men and giggles from the ladies. As readers of these pages have learned by now, I was a backward lad when it came to sexual matters. If Bobby Huffman hadn’t been a knowledgeable friend to teach me about the ladies, who knows how long I would have remained in the dark about sex. Eventually I must have picked up the meaning of words like Prostitute, Whore, and all the variations describing the sex act and those who participated, especially those who charged money for its many pleasures. But, as we are all aware, knowing the meaning of the word and understanding its possibilities and implications can be two greatly different things. I was probably even more confused than many kids because I was reading novels far above my understanding of the intricacies, both physical and moral, of sex.

I once read a quotation by Mark Twain, who had overheard his wife swearing. He was in the next room when he overheard her, and she wasn’t aware he had done so. He laughed and said to her, “You got the words right, Livy, but you don’t know the tune.” Precisely. I knew the words, I just hadn’t understood precisely what they related to. This is hard to believe in the Internet age when there are no secrets, no act that is not somewhere on your computer screen, in, as we used to say, glorious living color.

If you were a kid, back then, the best you could come up with as far as pornography is concerned, the real mother lode, was to find what I refer to as “roadside porn.” For some reason this was actually fairly common. Usually it meant tattered, rain-soaked copies of men’s sex magazines or on occasion reels of 8mm stag movies, abandoned at the side of the road. How did they get there? Who knows, but if you were lucky enough to find one of these you were careful to hide it from your parents and pass it around amongst your friends. Tattered pages became even more worn. Film was unspooled and held up against the sun, offering glimpses of nakedness and sordid love.

As already noted, just saying the name Mabel Mackey always got a response. The thing is, I don’t ever remember anyone saying something like, “That Mabel Mackey is a bad person.” I’m sure there were plenty of Church Ladies and God Fearing Gentleman who denounced her, if not from the pulpit, from the safety and sanctimoniousness of their living rooms. And I can’t claim to speak of my parent’s friends in this matter, but all I remember is a sort of sly humor when her name was mentioned, and even a mild admiration. The people I knew, at least the adults, seemed to see her as a scrappy businesswoman providing a service and that she didn’t take any crap from anyone, including the police. It was supposedly said by Mabel herself that every time her establishment was raided and the news made the front page of Parkersburg’s several newspapers, (it always made the front page) she experienced a big bump in business.

The aforementioned Roger Mackey has written extensively about how generous his aunt was with the poor, passing out hundred dollar bills to buy kid’s shoes, paying mortgages and hospital bills, and generally being a sort of Robin Hood benefactor, indeed a whore with a heart of gold. I think it’s pretty clear that, as an adult, it would have been far more fun to sit and have a drink with Mabel and listen to her stories than have the finest Sunday dinner with any of Parkersburg’s most saintly citizens.

Did I tell you about the time when as a young, impressionable, teen I was in Mabel’s establishment?

I have talked before about working for several summers at my friend, may he rest in piece, Freddy Klein’s dad’s Mr. Bee potato chip factory. Most of my early days at the factory were spent on the business end of the massive potato chip fryer. Giant trucks would arrive on the loading dock out back and it was all hands on deck as everyone showed up to help unload fifty-pound sacks of potatoes. The sacks were opened and the spuds were dropped in a circular tank where they were spun around and peeled, then it was into the washer and slicer and onto the conveyer belt for their trip into the boiling oil. The hot chips, fresh from their plunge into a vast pool of boiling grease, rolled out, still on on a conveyor belt, under the salter and into the giant metal cans that it was my job to shift when each can was filled. Another responsibility of the “catcher” (me) was to punch a thumb into any of the chips that had formed a grease-filled bubble so the boiling oil would leak out before being bagged. Hot!

The cans we caught the chips in were mostly old and beat up and the lips were sometimes bent out in such a way as to be sharp and dangerous. Often, especially in the beginning, I would cut the inside of my thumbs on this lip and the salt and hot grease would work itself into these cuts. I bore the pain in silence as I was pretty sure none of my fellow workers or anyone in management (that would be Freddy’s dad, he was a one-man management department) wanted to hear that their new little employee was bleeding into the tatey chips. That’s what the product was called, at least by everyone in the back of the operation: Tatey chips. Never potato chips.

Mr. Klein was a good boss. He stayed up front in the office and left the sweaty, salty business of making potato chips to his loyal employees. When I first started, it was thought to be great fun for one of the guys, muscled from years of hauling around giant bags of potatoes, to pick me up and throw me atop the towering stack of tatey chip cans, where I would have to sit, balanced, careful lest the stack tumble beneath me, until someone was kind enough to drag over a ladder, and I could climb down. As you can see, job safety was not really priority number one in those days.

Maybe Mr. Klein recognized my importance as an employee, my growing knowledge of the over-all operation, or maybe someone noticed the blood-stained tatey chips, but eventually I was moved up, or maybe down, to being a helper on the delivery trucks.

The trucks were classic step-vans, the same ubiquitous, boxy white delivery vehicles you see shuttling around every city and town in America. The driver sits in the only seat. The passenger seat is missing, because you’re not supposed to have passengers. So I sat on an upside down tatey chip can, the same kind that cut up my hands. Did I mention that it was Mr. Bee delivery style to drive these babies with both doors wide open, at least during the summer months when I worked? I guess that was so the operation wasn’t slowed down by the driver/delivery guy having to open and close the door. Or maybe it was just so the breeze would cool us down. These were the days before air-conditioning. So while this was good for the company — more efficient — it was bad for the helper (me) who was bouncing and sliding around on an overturned potato chip can, inches away from tumbling out the open door and being smeared across the highway. After awhile I figured out how to ride with my feet jammed up under the dashboard so I was more or less stable. More or less.

There were a half dozen guys that drove all over the surrounding Parkersburg area delivering chips. Some of them ventured far back into the hills to the little, barn-wood, everything-for-sale stores with the coolers full of soda pop and large cheeses on counter-tops sweating under white cloths. These businesses, I soon learned, sold a hell of a lot of tatey chips.

Our main competitor was the Wise potato chip brand. As noted elsewhere, your favorite brand of tatey chip was an either-or proposition, just like much else I’ve been discussing. You were either a Mr. Bee person or a Wise person. Allow me another digression (I know, Dear Reader, that you are muttering under your breath when the hell is he going to get back to the whore house?) The Wise chip was thicker and had a more pronounced potato taste. Mr. Bees were thinner, much thinner, and had a distinctive taste reminiscent of the oil they were cooked in. I have to admit, even though I ate a boatload of Mr. Bees over the years, I didn’t then, nor do I now, think that they were really all that high a quality chip. But back then there was little choice. The words “kettle cooked” had yet to be invented, at least in reference to a deep-fat fried snack product.

Some of the step-van drivers didn’t want a helper. Or at least I was never assigned to them. I usually drew one of two guys. There was a little guy, not little like me but short, who was probably in his early thirties. He had a crew cut (pretty much every male in that age bracket and job description had a crew cut) and wore jeans and a white T-shirt with classic, carefully-rolled short sleeves. We’ll call him Bob. I haven’t the slightest memory of his real name. Bob was very religious, subjecting me to long sermons about Jesus Christ, his personal Lord and Savior, and how a smart fellow like me should be thinking about the salvation of his soul. There were times when I came close to throwing myself out the open door onto the onrushing, unforgiving, black-top highway to spare myself these sermons.

Bob’s other main topic of conversation, which was mostly one-sided in his direction, was his son, who was ten-years-old and addicted to sniffing gasoline from a can, which Bob said, was a popular addiction among children of the time. I had never heard of it, but then, as you have noticed, there was a lot that I had never heard of. Bob would often come home from work and find his son, we’ll call him Bob Jr. slumped over a gas can in the back yard or in the ramshackle shed where the gas was stored. Bob had thought long and hard about this addiction and decided that his son was lacking some nutrient in his system that his body was crying out for and trying to find in the fumes from a gas can. That seemed pretty unlikely to me, but I kept my mouth shut.

Bob also seemed to think I had some sort of knowledge, maybe because I was young, or at least an opinion that would help him understand his son and the situation. He had asked the Lord what the answer might be, but God was strangely silent on the subject of gasoline fume huffing. The only thing that was clear to me was that, (a) Bob Jr. was probably heartily sick of hearing homilies and sermons from Bob Sr. and was trying to escape into the deadly, soporific arms of his friend Mr. Esso, and, (b) if he kept on huffing gasoline fumes he was going to be dead sooner than later one of these fine days. But there was no way that Bob wanted to hear any of that, so I continued to keep my mouth shut, resigned to the fact that whenever I drew helper duties with Bob, I knew it was going to be a long hard day.

The other guy I rode with was an older fellow named, um, Ralph. As always, I don’t have a clue what his name was. When I say older, I mean he was probably in his late forties or early fifties, but at the time that looked pretty old to me. He was clearly an intelligent guy, had a good sense of humor and didn’t take life too seriously. At first I wondered why he hadn’t moved up to a more professional position in the company but after a few trips in the step van with Ralph I figured it out. Here’s the way it worked.

Ralph and I would march into a bar, convenience store, gas station or other business that carried Mr. Bees. Ralph would take out his pad and write while the owner placed his order. We would hit these places once or twice a week and you’d be surprised how many bags of tatey chips these guys would sell. Ralph would tear the order out of the pad and hand it to me, and I would go out to the truck, jump up inside and pull the correct number of bags, stuff them into boxes, carry them into the establishment and secure them onto the racks while Ralph shot the breeze with the counter guy. I got so I could remember the order without the written slips, and I’d have them up on the racks in record time. I also became amazingly proficient at carrying stacked boxes and in my heyday could balance five large boxes of chips and carry them through doorways using a practiced dip that probably looked pretty cool, if anyone actually noticed. But truth be told, Bob was the really amazing box carrier, able to balance seven or even eight full boxes through doorways and down narrow grocery store aisles without ever dropping or damaging a single chip.

But Ralph never carried a box after I was assigned to him and even though we could have cut an hour off our day when I was really busting my ass, after filling the order and hanging the chips Ralph would send me out to the van where I would sit on my can (tatey chip can) waiting. I figured Ralph was inside pitching increased sales to the owner, or maybe trying to get a die-hard conservative storeowner to branch out and start carrying the radical new barbeque style chips along with the regulars. It was when we got to Mabel Mackey’s place that I finally figured out what Ralph was doing, and why I was sent out to the truck to sit on my can.

Mabel’s establishment was located on William’s Court Alley, a small backstreet behind the courthouse in lower downtown Parkersburg. In the early days, Parkersburg was said to be a rough river town with other bordellos some of which research on the Internet tells me were named the Red Onion, Noah’s Ark, Hawk’s Nest and Little Egypt. One has to wonder what the deal was at Noah’s Ark; two girls of every race and creed?

The actual male fantasy didn’t really focus on Mabel herself, but on her stable of girls. In real life, as I read on the Internet and see from pictures on Roger’s site, Mabel was a matronly, hefty lady who favored high-waisted pants, cowboy shirts and cowboy boots. She was interested in collecting muzzle-loading rifles and handing out money to the poor. The girls, it is said, were brought in from out of town and rotated in and out every two weeks so the choices remained fresh. Which sounds like a pretty efficient, high-class operation.

By the time I was in high school, I’d figured out, generally, the mechanics of prostitute/client transactions. As noted in an earlier entry, there were parts in Peyton Place and other novels that outlined the procedures. You went in the house, and ended up in a room with a whore who told you the price of the evening’s activities. Then you took out your “equipment” and your lady would wash you off with a washcloth in a basin of warm water. If someone on the street corner was telling you this tale, at about this point he would always relate the story of the young, inexperienced youth who never got further than the warm wash-water part before discharging his load and disgracing himself forever. I always listened to this part figuring I would probably disgrace myself at lot earlier than that, maybe even when I was getting out of the car.

A time-honored ritual among young men of my time, and even some of the bolder young women, was known as “cruising the alley.” On a Friday or Saturday night you would cram into a pal’s car, usually four or five of you, and drive downtown, circle around the courthouse and come up the alley, slowly, and if you were lucky there would be some young ladies hanging out the second floor windows, haranguing the crowds outside on foot and in cars, daring you to come on in. Here’s the way I remembered the scene. I’m not saying this was right, I’m just saying this is how I remember it.

We’d head up the alley in the car; the scene seems to be bathed in a harsh yellow light. Streetlights? It all has the appearance and feel of a Hieronymus Bosch painting, more The Last Judgment rather than The Garden of Earthly Delights. (Look it up on the Internet to see examples.) In my memory, the alley is crowded with a line of cars creeping slowly along, and throngs of men on foot, shouting and laughing. Are they all drunk? You motor at a walking speed and finally you’re in front of the house where you ride past and your pals hang out the window and shout at the girls, who if you’re lucky, are wearing bras with no shirts and hollering back and waving. Then you’re past the house, you exit the alley and circle around and do it all again.

I hated it, not that I ever said so. It was important if you were a teen of that time, especially if you were only four feet tall, to appear cool, though that term was not yet in popular use. The men milling around in front of the house seemed like beasts to me, braying like asses. Stupid, in all the senses of the word. I didn’t know it then, but I do now, that this was the power of sex, able to addle men’s minds and provoke them into ridiculous acts. I went along with the drive-by a few times, though I don’t think anyone else really thought it was all that much fun either. My friends were all smart, good in school, decent kids, members of the Big Red Band. Of course we were always willing to do something dumb, after all, we were teenagers — remember my earlier entry about getting shot at night in the City Park? But, at least for me, the stumbling spectacle of drunken, bleating men lost interest after you had witnessed it a few times.

Back to the tatey chip truck. After a few days helping Ralph, he seemed to decide that I was an ok guy who could be trusted. One day we loaded up the van and headed out around nine o’clock. We made a few routine grocery store stops and then drove to lower downtown Parkersburg. With growing astonishment I realized we were going to William’s Court Alley. We drove to the head of the alley and parked. We went into a bar, which I now think was probably in the Monroe Hotel. Now I’m asking for a little help from those of you out there who know what I’m talking about. What was this bar? It seemed to me to be right up against Mabel’s “house,” but not in the house. Was there a back door where you could discretely go into Mabel’s without joining the crowd of drunken louts in the alley?

We walked into the bar. Ralph climbed up on a barstool as if he’d parked his can there many times in the past, as he probably had. I just stood in the center of the room, gaping around, awestruck, like the dumb rube that I was. Here I was in a real whorehouse bar, and only God knew what was going to happen. After a bit I realized that it looked like most other roadhouse bars we delivered tatey chips to. In the daylight – not that there was much daylight in any of these places – it, and all the other barrooms, seemed kind of run-down, dusty and a bit forlorn. No neon, no jukebox playing, no crowds, and certainly no painted women in skimpy outfits.

A door behind the bar opened up and a sleepy-looking woman came through, pulling a bathrobe around her. Except in wasn’t a bathrobe, it was a Japanese Kimono of the type called a Happi Coat. (I just looked this up, that’s how it is spelled.) It was the kind of robe that you see whores wearing in the movies. Or at least that’s what they wore in the movies of my day. The woman was young, maybe in her late twenties, and she had short brownish blond hair done in what at the time was called a Pixie cut. And she was really pretty. Really really pretty.

She said hello to Ralph, they obviously knew each other, went behind the bar and poured him a shot of whiskey without him asking for it. Ralph introduced me and she gave me a sunny smile. Instantly, I was in love.

Ralph got out his order pad as the lady rummaged around behind the bar and began ordering bags of chips. It took a few minutes to pull me back into reality: we were here to sell potato chips, not gape at attractive young ladies. I could not bring myself to think of her as a whore. It was ten o’clock, or thereabouts, in the morning, too early for thoughts of whores.

“Want a coke?” she asked me. Sure I did. She filled a glass and slid it across the bar. Ralph finished his shot, and she poured him another. He gave me the page from his order pad, and I went out to the truck.

Dear Reader, you can see how my brain has recorded this event, minute by minute. Each shiny, lapidary moment, bright and clear, luminous even in this beat-up old barroom, seems engraved upon my very soul. Talk about the power of sex.

I hauled the chips back inside, and the beautiful lady took them and stored them behind the bar.

“You want a pickled egg?” she said, gesturing at the big two-gallon jar of Penrose pickled eggs. A pickled egg? Is there anything less sexy than a pickled egg swimming in a suspicious cloudy liquid? I shook my head.

She gave me a long look and a sly smile. “It’ll put lead in your pencil,” she said.

Lead in my pencil! I looked at Ralph. He was laughing at me. I got the impression he’d knocked back a couple of more shots while I was out in the truck getting the bags of tatey chips together. Maybe they even talked about me: yeah, he’s a good kid. Kind of wet behind the ears, though. Yeah, well, he’ll grow out of that.

Lead in my pencil! Was she actually talking about what I thought she was talking about? Was I really standing in this dim barroom having a conversation with a prostitute about MY PENIS? Was this the high point, sexually speaking, of my young life, eclipsing even the pictures of dead naked women in the Carnegie library? Yes! God, yes!

I realized that now both of them were laughing at me. I’m glad it was kind of dark in the barroom as I’m sure I turned beet red. Ralph slapped the bar, shook his head, said goodbye to the pretty girl and we left. Did she give me a little wink as I waved goodby? I like to think so.

After that I realized that Ralph had been having shots in all the bars we stopped at while I was out in the truck, from first thing in the morning to the last delivery of the afternoon. From then on, he no longer hid this day-drinking from me, and I didn’t say anything about it.

The next few weeks I was teamed up with Preacher Bob, a great disappointment to me. I began every day hoping we’d be going back to Williams Court Alley. Then Ralph stopped showing up for work, which was another crushing blow, and it was time for summer band practice so I had to quit my job.

But I had my memories, which I built into elaborate fantasies, which fueled my imagination then and for many years to come.

Which, I have to admit, fuel them even now, on occasion.

Oh, you old biddies who cluck your tongues at Mabel Mackey’s name, don’t talk to me of the evils of prostitution, don’t shake your heads, don’t give me your false piety, your scorn. All I know is what I think happened years ago; all I have is my memory.

Here’s what I know for sure:

I have seen the lady of the house, and she was beautiful.

End

This is the last entry on this site about my Life In the Big Red Band. In a few days I’ll write one more post about what the future holds for this memoir.

 

One of the trips my first year in the band, fall of 1959, was a bus trip to some small high school with a ramshackle stadium, and, probably, a hapless football team that was destined to be steamrolled by the juggernaut that was the Big Red football program. I have forgotten what the school was named or where it was, but I remember their stadium as being sad, old, and beat-up. Of course no stadium looked as good as PHS in those days. In the next three years we never went back to wherever this was. I wonder if it was because of what went on with the band after the end of the football game.

We were forming up on the cinder track, getting ready to go on at halftime. We were down at the end of the field, a good distance from the sparsely attended ramshackle bleachers. There was a chain-link fence that separated us from a dimly lit parking lot. As we were waiting, a gang of around a dozen young men sauntered up out of the parking lot, scattered along the chain link fence and started yelling at us. I can’t remember the threats and curses of the time, but it’s a safe bet the word “queers” was somewhere in there. Frank said something to the head drum major, and he whistled us into formation and attention. Frank gave us an “eyes front,” so we weren’t looking at the gang. We knew better than to break formation or say anything. We waited. We ignored their taunts. Frank stood in front of the band.

A loud clang rang like a brass bell as a rock struck one of the big sousaphones. Frank came trotting back beside us at the fence. The following conversation took place. Maybe not in these exact words, but this is the way I remember it.

Frank: “What do you guys want?”

These guys were what we called greasers or hoods, a term I’ve explained earlier. They weren’t high-schoolers, were probably drop-outs, but they weren’t really functioning adults yet either. They had hood hairstyles, long greasy hair swirled into pompadours or the ever-popular buzz cut. They wore hood clothes: leather jackets, white T-shirts, cuffed blue jeans and heavy black boots. James Dean-style hoods.

Gang leader: “We want to kick your queer asses.”

Frank: “We’re not interested. We’re busy.” He glanced over at the field and saw that the home team band was finishing up whatever pathetic drill they had put on, (they were the sort of band who allowed girls as members and carried their music on their arms) and that we needed to get into place behind the goalposts. He turned away and trotted back toward the front of the band.

Clang! Another rock hit a sousaphone, and Frank went into full Teutonic, V-2 rocket mode. He ran back to where the hoods were.

“OK,” Frank yelled at the leader, “You want a fight? You’ve got it. We’ll meet you back here after the game. You’d better round up some more guys, because we are going to kick your asses. Right here! After the game!” He whirled around and blew his whistle and the drum major blew his and the drummers got us marching to our position. We did the drill and went back to the sidelines where the rest of the football game played out. Nobody talked about what Frank had said. He stood off to the side by himself, which is where he always stood, dealing with his fingernails as always, but you could tell he was really pissed off. The game ended. Frank came to the front as we were getting up from our chairs.

“Leave your instruments, we’ll get them later. Form up on the track and get into position. Some guys want to fight us, so we’ll fight. Nobody throws rocks at the Big Red Band. The older guys will tell you what to do.” He walked over to the cinder track and waited.

This was pretty thrilling. Good thing I couldn’t see myself — there I was, this tiny kid putting his piccolo down and turning to one of the older guys. A few of us gathered around him (clarinet) and he gave us a demonstration. The rest of the guys were huddled in small groups.

“Take off your belt,” the older boy said. We wore what is called a Sam Brown belt. The always helpful Wiki tells me it was named for its inventor, Sam Brown — what a surprise — who was a soldier who had had his left arm cut off in a sabre fight and needed a way to keep his blade from clanking around when he was running into battle, one-armed. What typifies the belt is a smaller belt that runs from left to right over the shoulder, which allows the waist belt to hold up any amount of equipment that you want to pile on. The main part of our belt, the part that goes around the waist, was four inches wide, white, and had a very large, square, brass buckle in the front. I see from videos of today’s Big Red Band the belts now have two crosspieces over each shoulder. The older guy showed us how to wrap the belt around your fist so that the belt buckle ended up on the knuckle portion of your hand. That way when you punched someone the buckle did some serious damage, especially if the prong thing happened to be sticking forward when the punch was thrown. Let it be noted that belts of this type could also be usefully employed in a fight by swinging them overhead and smashing them into opposing faces, but we, the band, did our fighting in close formation and didn’t have room to swing anything without possibly hitting our own guys.

I wrapped my belt around my tiny fist and was inordinately proud. I was a warrior, going into my first battle. The drum major whistled us into close formation, four abreast, on the narrow cinder track.

Being the drum major of the band was an extremely important position. Traditionally, the DM is, physically, a big guy. Historically, and by that I mean back in history, part of the DM’s job was to preside over any flogging that had to be done, not that there was any flogging being done in the Big Red Band. Just ass kicking. That year, my first year in the band, our drum major was really tall (especially when I stood next to him) and really tough. He wore one of those beaver fur hats, the sort that the guards at Buckingham palace wear only white, and he carried a long, heavy baton, which he could use to beat the shit out of people. With the hat, our guy stood around eight feet tall. Picture him at the front of our Big Red phalanx as we marched into battle.

We had to exit the stadium, which by now was largely empty, and make our way around back to the dark parking lot. I’m sure that Frank was hoping for a certain amount of discretion on our part, as what we were about to do would surely be frowned on by any authorities. We were in a really hick burg; who knows what side the cops would be on? Even Frank wasn’t about to take on guys with guns.

Today, what we were about to do would be considered insane, especially because the gang we would be going up against would be armed with street weapons featuring names like Glock and Beretta. Back then there were knives and whatever clubs could be picked up along the way.

One of the many things that struck me as we went about getting ready for the fight was how calm and matter-of-fact everyone was. The new guys kept their mouths shut because they knew they had nothing to add and everything to learn by paying close attention, and the older guys acted like it was completely familiar and nothing to get excited about, as if they had made these preparations many times before. And perhaps they had, I didn’t know, this was my first year. As always, everyone seemed perfectly confident that the band would prevail.

Picture it. We were drawn up in a solid, tight formation, red uniformed phalanx. In front was the head drum major, an eight-foot giant wielding a long metal pole. There were a couple of slightly smaller drum majors just behind him. And by his side was our stone-faced, very pissed off German leader, Never-Throw-Rocks-At-My-Sousaphones, Frank. Frank tossed out a command, “On the rim.” The drum major lifted his baton and brought it smartly down and the drums began the cadence.

“On the rim” meant the drummers used the wooden rim of the drumhead, rather that the drumhead itself. This was employed when we wanted to get someplace fairly quietly, but still needed the cadence to stay in step. It produces an odd sound, and on this night, lit by the stadium lights behind us and headed for a dark parking lot, it sounded like the rattle of old, dry bones. Our shoes crunched in unison on the cinder track. Other than these two sounds there was complete silence.

As we approached the lot, we saw the gang appearing out of the shadows. They had indeed called up some reinforcements. Twenty or thirty of them were walking slowly toward us. Some of them were carrying baseball bats and lengths of wood. I was scared shitless but marched along in step with everyone else.

Frank nodded at the drum major who blew a long, very loud blast on his whistle, and the drummers switched from the rim to the head of the drums. After the ominous clacking of the rims, the effect of the massed drums was thundering. I wish I could have stepped aside and just watched this sight: the solid band of red-uniformed young men, belt-wrapped fists, the roaring of the drums. I’m sure it was impressive. Even now it gives me a slight chill remembering it.

After standing their ground for about five seconds, the gawking gang melted away back into the darkness. In another five seconds they were gone. The drum major whistled us to a halt, and we stood there, in the dark, at attention, in complete silence. After a minute, Frank said, “At ease. Go get your instruments and get on the bus. It’s over.”

And it was.

Here’s a lesson about Frank Schroeder. He was never a friend to any of us. He was hard man and took no crap from anyone. He would kick your ass if you screwed up. He demanded as much perfection as he could wring from 80 high-spirited, young men. And he got very angry when anyone threw stones at his sousaphones. You may not have liked him, but by God, you feared and respected him.

 

Stop! Warning! The following blog entry contains material of a sexual nature! Those who continue reading will find tales of the sexual education of a twelve-year-old boy. Evidently, this is way too hot for some of you. My last entry, which included the word “sex” in the title and told of the widespread reading of the novel Peyton Place among the mothers in Parkersburg WV, was too much for some of you. I received shocked! comments and Roger, the keeper of the blog about several early WV history sites, where I had put up a notice of the blog entry, was told it was porn and had to be removed from his site, which he did. I am so proud to have been kicked off the Internet for being Too Hot To Handle. I spoke to Roger, a prince of a man, really, who told me he just figured I had been hacked by a porn site so he took the notice down. Roger knows this is not unusual because he has to deal with these porn hackers all the time, so he was right to take it down. But really, people, anyone who actually read the entry would have found it to be pretty tame stuff.

Not so this next one. So let me repeat, if you are offended by material of any level of a sexual nature, please, click back to a site where you are comfortable. If, on the other hand, you want a laugh or two, venture on, faithful reader, and join me 65 or so years ago in The Carnegie Library: Den of Iniquity!

The Carnegie, as we always called it, (“Mom, I got to go to the Carnegie tonight!”) will forever be remembered as a place of refuge and wonder to me and many of my generation in our town. Wiki tells me that 2,509 libraries were built on grants from Andrew Carnegie, and the one in Parkersburg, West Virginia, was a beauty. It always reminded me of an Egyptian temple, one that might have a giant Sphinx nearby and be manned, (womanned) by slave girls dressed in Egyptian slave-girl garb. The librarians actually wore standard librarian clothing, and they were always nice, especially after they figured out that you were a smart little bugger who was reading way beyond his age level. Once you established these bona fides, they were happy to recommend adult novels and let you take home as many books as you could physically carry.

The library as refuge. There was some unwritten law back then that said if a child wanted/needed/demanded to be driven to the library (it was too far to walk) any available adult had to take them. When we were younger, and my mother didn’t have a car and dad was working out of town, we would take the bus and she would go with us. But this was only during the day, usually on the weekend. When we were older and we had two cars, mom would drive us after dinner, drop us off and pick us up a couple of hours later. During that time we were expected to research whatever topic we were working on, check out pertinent books and any novels that caught our fancy, and work at our papers on the long communal library tables. Of course we did this — we actually did — but there was a lot of off-topic exploration as well.

For me, the Carnegie was a hot-bed of sex.

As I said, the architecture of the building was more King Tut than the usual Roman Empire influence in public buildings. You walked up broad steps and entered the main room where Nefertiti, er, the head librarian, presided behind a circular kiosk surrounded by a high counter. My memory is of always having to hand my slips in by reaching high and sliding the slip toward this looming lady but surely at some point I must have been tall enough to, more or less, conduct my business without the librarian having to loom over the counter to speak to me. But maybe not. There were marble staircases on one side of this front area that led to an upstairs that was mostly used for storage and was off-limits to the general public. We never went up those steps. God knows what sort of library hi-jinx went on up there.

As you circumnavigated the center island and walked to the back of the large room, you came to the area where the books were shelved. It was four stories high beneath giant glass skylights, the floors made of thick, misty opaque glass panels and accessed by a massive wrought iron spiral staircase that projected, Nautilus-like, up through the center of this vast atrium of knowledge.

The standard drill was you went to the card catalogue, (oh, how I could go on about the wonders of the card catalogue, a resource now sadly missing from libraries everywhere) looked up your subject and found books that hopefully pertained, filled out a call slip with the little pencils that had no erasers they provided, the same pencils handed out at miniature golf facilities, turned your slip in at the desk and someone, apprentice librarians, not the Head Librarian, would go and retrieve your books for you. This waiting period was profitably spent perusing the newest popular novels that were shelved around this front room. When you received your books, piled on the counter with your call slip, you hauled them to the table where you set up camp. You then either studied them and took notes, or you leafed through them to find those that would be of the most use to you.

When I was a little older, and after having established myself as a solid, honorable, book-loving child, I was allowed to roam the four story stacks on my own.

One magnificent evening, I don’t remember how old I was – old enough to care – I started up the spiral staircase. This was the only such staircase I had ever seen, and because the steps varied in size, small where they attached to the center pole, wider at the outer edges, it took a certain amount of concentration to climb them. Not a lot, I wasn’t an idiot, but enough that you had to pay attention to where the handrail was, where you were putting your feet, always checking upward to see where you were going. On this glorious night, I looked up and realized I could look straight up the dress of a high school girl who was ten steps or so ahead of me. And I mean all the way up her dress. I almost fell down a couple of flights of stairs.

I was shocked and had to fight the immediate urge to peer back up at the sight . At the same time I was shamed by the fact that I not only could see the young lady’s underwear, but by the overwhelming urge to do so, forever, or until she found her floor and moved off the steps. Is there any sexual imperative greater for a young pubescent male than to see young women in their underwear? Well, seeing them without their underwear, yes, but that slightly frightening possibility was some years in the future.

I went about my usual library business that night, but my time at the Carnegie was changed forever. I was smart enough to understand that I could not spend my hours there skulking up and down the stairs every time I saw a young woman in a dress headed to the upper floors, that I would surely be found out, arrested and taken to jail, or sent to the dreaded Pruntytown. Pruntytown was a correctional facility in West Virginia where they sent kids who had fallen afoul of the law. Every kid’s mother had said at one time or another when you had done something wrong, “Keep that up and you’ll be sent to Pruntytown!” A visit to Google tells me that Pruntytown still exists and is home to 369 minimum and medium custody male inmates. In my day we envisioned the facility to be filled with children who had been sent there by their parents because of intractable criminal behavior such as looking up girls’ skirts and generally not obeying the rules. In my mind it resembled etchings and lithographs I had see in old books about Victorian insane asylums.

But I must admit, if I was just happening to be headed up the staircase and there just happened to be a female ahead of me I would take the opportunity for a quick peek as I was making sure of my progress up those difficult stairs. Sure, I knew I was risking a two-year stretch at Pruntytown and public humiliation, but it was worth it.

The next brick in the shaky edifice of my sexual education was found again up those same library stairs, on the fourth floor. No one ever went to the fourth floor, or hardly anyone. I don’t know why I was up there that first time, probably nothing more than book curiosity, the drive to see every book that was available to me. But it was there, one day, when I was browsing for nothing in particular, when I pulled out a large medical book on forensic medicine. I probably took it down because I didn’t know what the word forensic meant.

It turns out that it meant that this was a book filled with pictures of dead people, victims of accidents and homicide, and by golly some of them didn’t have a stitch of clothing on. Usually these deceased had some visible disease or wound, but more times than you might imagine, these were minor disfigurements that could be easily ignored, what with all the nakedness to take in. It was pretty easy to just pretend that these were normal everyday people, women — I wasn’t interested in the men — who had simply crawled up on a coroner’s slab, naked, to take a nap.

Surely the most influential photograph was that of a woman’s vagina, complete with a thatch of bush, in Bobby Huffman’s parlance, (if you’ve forgotten, see Entry #9, aptly titled Naked Ladies) that totally blotted out Bobby’s best efforts with the Sears catalogue and a piece of tracing paper. The picture was striking in its detail, and I looked at it, astonished, just as I would be astonished the other three or four thousand times I would climb those stairs, take the book down and furtively stare at it on that lonely fourth floor of the Carnegie Library. Thank God no one ever came up there to see what the hell I was doing, for if they had done so I would have been immediately sent to Pruntytown and locked up for the next ten years in the sexual deviant’s wing. The caption stated (this must have been the forensics’ part) that the vagina was that of a woman who was a prostitute and thus an example of the stretching and general looseness that was sure to afflict the body parts of women in that profession. Since I had never seen one in an unstretched condition, I had nothing to base an opinion of this one on, but it looked perfectly fine to me. What the hell did I know? I wish I could say that I was repulsed by this experience, but if I did I would be lying. One thing I’m pretty sure of is that the editors of that book were full of crap when it came down to the whole stretched diagnosis. I think they just wanted to put a dirty picture in their book in the hopes it would increase sales.

I thought of this photograph years later when reading a biography of the great Victorian art historian, John Ruskin. (born, February 8, 1819; died January 20, 1900) I can almost hear you readers out there sitting up straight and leaning close to these pages, puzzled expressions on your faces, wondering where in hell I’m going with this comparison.

At the age of 30 Ruskin married a childhood friend, Effie Grey. Some years later they divorced and had the marriage annulled. The marriage was unconsummated and Ruskin was accused of “incurable impotency,” by his wife, which he denied. Effie Grey gave this explanation for their non-consummation. These were her words. “… that he had imagined women were quite different to what he saw I was, and that the reason he did not make me his Wife was because he was disgusted with my person the first evening 10th April [1848].” What this means is on his wedding night, Ruskin walked into his bedchamber, took one look at his naked wife and almost fainted.

Up to this point, Ruskin’s experience of naked women came only from what he had seen in classical sculpture and painting, in which women were represented with no pubic hair. Remember, he was one of the world’s greatest experts in classical art. When he saw Effie’s pubic region with her natural hair, he was repulsed. And never wanted to have anything to do with her again. Some people dispute this explanation, but most experts agree this is probably what happened. Especially since Effie said so herself. When you take into account that some years later Ruskin fell in love with a ten-year-old girl, it makes even more sense. Fortunately, he didn’t marry the ten-year-old.

My memory, when I read this about Ruskin, flew back to that particular graphic photograph in the medical book, and I thought if Ruskin had ever seen such a thing he would have immediately been struck blind and rendered insane. As for me, I can detect absolutely no overt effect on my psyche, then, over the years, or now. But I still remember it, don’t I?

After this momentous discovery in the library, my sexual education lagged for a number of years until the summer I joined the band. A carnival had come to town, not one of the small ones in the city park, but a big rip-roaring carnival with a giant (to me) Ferris wheel, many scary, vomit-inducing rides, a freak show and lastly, a girly show. The carnival was there from Monday through Saturday and since it was in a large field not far from my house we walked over there a number of times during that week. After taking in the usual sights – the freak show had a bodiless, lady’s head on a table that could carry on a conversation with her viewers, and a bunch of sad animals – a two-headed snake, a two-faced kitten — that were housed in cages that would get them convicted on cruelty to animals charges today. My friends and I would walk by the entrance of the girly show and were told that we were too young to go in. Laughter and loud cheers came from this infamous tent, and strip tease music blared. We knew if we could just get inside we would finally get to see that holy grail, a real, live, naked woman.

On the last night of the show, word was passed around that the girly show would hold one more performance, and the girls would be stripping down to absolutely nothing. But the biggest news was that the guy who sold the tickets at the entrance was no longer concerned about the police busting the operation for allowing minors in. After the last show they would take down the tents and be out of town before the cops could round anyone up. All he wanted was our fifty cents. And he got it.

The tent was pretty full, all men, and it was clear that we were going to have to squirm our way to the front if we were going to be able to see anything at all. I was with my friend Rusty, and we accomplished this maneuver without much trouble. No one behind me was worried about being able to see over me, (Rusty wasn’t much taller than me) so they let us through to the crowd to the edge of the stage.

The last show of the night turned out featured one lone dancer. Maybe she had drawn the short straw and been sent out for this one last performance while the other ladies packed up and prepared to move on.

I don’t remember what the music was, but the dancer shimmied out onto the stage, four feet off the ground, and began dancing around. She wasn’t wearing much, just a bikini bottom, so there wasn’t much tease in the strip. Really, is there any man who really enjoys the long, slow, strip act of a “legendary” performer like Blaze Star? No. Men want to see naked women, and the crowd I was standing with was perfectly happy to forgo the foreplay of a tease.

The lady took off her bikini bottom, waved it overhead and the crowd cheered; this is what they had paid fifty cents to see. She paraded around the stage, bent over, pushed and pulled at her flesh (in a fetching manner) and gave everyone a good show. She was attractive, in a naked sort of way, blond, and shaved, which was a plus in my book. I was happy to see the goods when they weren’t shrouded the way they were in Bobby’s tracings and the photo in the book at the Carnegie library.

As she pranced around, she suddenly seemed to notice Rusty and me at the edge of the stage, leering up at her. I can only imagine what she thought. From up there, I probably appeared around ten years old, and Rusty didn’t look that much older. So she saw us, and crouched down about a foot from my face. It was a revelation, in all senses of the word, to me, which I think she could clearly see. Then she swiveled toward Rusty, who was leaning in close with a maniacal grin. Suddenly, she grabbed his glasses off his astonished face, rubbed them on her lower parts and plopped them back on his nose. The crowd went wild.

I was worried that Rusty might find this somehow, what? Barbaric? Crude? That he was being made fun of? Was he angry?

Nope.

He had the biggest cat-that-ate-the-canary-grin on his face that I had ever seen. The lady stood up, gave a quick bow, and trotted off the stage. The show was over.

As we were filing out of the tent, Rusty turned to me, peering out from his smeary lenses, and said, awe and wonder coloring his words,

“I’m never going to clean my glasses again.”