The new members of the Big Red band were given a packet of music – marches — to learn. Many were by John Philip Souza, not much of a surprise there, and others were by composers I had never heard of. These were packaged in small portfolios, around eight inches by six inches, enclosed in a snap package with a clear plastic front, which made them pretty much waterproof. I’ve said that some bands mounted these music portfolios on special music stands strapped to their arms so they could read the music as they marched. We sneered at any band that resorted to this method. Pussies. We memorized the marches. The drills were too complicated to perform if we were looking at music as well. So we, the new boys, memorized the marches. And woe betide anyone who couldn’t play every one of them from memory.

Everyday in the summer we went to the grassy lawn in front of the high school for marching practice. Before going out front, we would warm up by playing the marches in the band room for fifteen minutes or so. If Frank thought someone, a new guy, was faking his way through the music, he would stop the band, point at the offender, and say, “Turn your music over.” Which meant you then had to play the march, from memory, all by yourself, without the psychic and practical help of an entire band around you. These were terrifying moments, and you could get reduced down the ranks for a bad performance. If you flunked one of these challenges, once out of the band room you knew someone was going to kick your ass all the way down to the practice field. I saw this happen on several occasions, so I broke my usual lethargic practice schedule and learned the marches well enough that Frank, who seemed to have a preternatural ear, couldn’t hear me faking my way through a piece of music.

Semper Fidelis, The Washington Post, The Thunderer, El Capitan, are all classic marches that we would play while executing drills. If you listen to recordings of them today, (they’re all on the Internet) one thing you will notice that is common to all of them is the one instrument you can actually hear individually is the damn piccolo. The masses of brass, lead by the cornets and underpinned by the trombones and sousaphones take the lead, with the reeds — the clarinets and the saxophone filling out the wall of sound — and over it all, flitting, dancing, is the piccolo. You don’t need a whole section of them, one will do, just as that music teacher told me years ago in grade school, it is the littlest, but it is the loudest.

There were three broad lawns that stretched in front of the high school down to the street. A giant horseshoe drive arced up and around the front of the school. We practiced through the month of August, two times a day, two hours morning and late afternoon, on the right-hand lawn, as you looked from the street toward the high school. If the first two weeks of the month was a sort of hell because you were getting your ass kicked, the last two weeks were another sort because of the heat. Even though we worked in the morning and the late afternoon/evening, it was still hot.

The grass was laid out with limestone lines exactly like those on the football field. There was a kid who did this, limed the practice field, and redid it every time the rain washed the lines away, or we wore them away by walking on them. Looking back now I see him as a sort of unsung worker hero who probably never got the appreciation he deserved.

The evening practices had a magic to them. You have to remember this was a small town, West Virginia, in the late 1950s. I’m sure there were the usual bad aspects to our life — poverty, inequality, stupidity — but we, or at least I, didn’t seem to worry about any of that. Maybe the adults were worrying about the Korean War, racism, the atom bomb and other societal ills, but we weren’t. Everyone had enough money to live on and even those who had a lot of money didn’t live very differently from the rest of us. The band was a great leveler: you learned your music, the drills and you did your best. If you didn’t, you got your ass kicked. Outside, there was another world, but we didn’t live in it. The social revolution of the 60s had not yet befallen us; we existed in a lovely haze of hot, halcyon summer days, golden evenings and privilege.

There wasn’t a lot to do in Parkersburg. One of the main attractions was the large city park just a block from our house. You would go there to swim in the pool, fish and feed the ducks in the pond (the Second Largest Man-Made Lily Pond in the World, it was said. Really? The question always in my mind was why was it the second largest? Where was the first largest? It was rumored to be in Japan, but no one really knew.) In the winters the pond froze over, and we ice-skated on it, building bon fires, roasting marshmallows and skating until we were exhausted. When we got back home there was always hot chocolate. We picnicked in the park, played on the swings, and climbed the memorial aircraft gun commemorating the dead from WWII. There was a log cabin museum in the park which never seemed to be open. And a band shell where members of the band would sometimes play concerts on the weekends; the townsfolk would bring blankets and sit on the grass and enjoy the music while little kids ran around. There was a small zoo. I related in an earlier entry that one year a drunken hunter climbed over the fence and shot one of the deer and was caught by the cops trying to drag it over the six-foot, chain-link fence. As my friend Butch reminded me after I posted that entry, the fact that the hunter was a city councilman made this crime even more amusing.

There was a curious bunch of men who would hold meetings in the park at least once or twice a summer where they would bring motors, noisy gasoline engines of all sizes, and set them out on the grass and start them up and leave them running for hours while they sat around in lawn chairs and listened to the infernal racket of the popping, sputtering engines. Why? I had no idea, but they always seemed to be enjoying themselves.

At least once a year, usually twice, small carnivals would set up for the weekend. There would be rides and games and carnival workers who appeared very exotic to us, leathery, thin, tanned sly-looking people, men and women, who tried to cajole you into tossing rings, firing BB guns, or pitching ping pong balls into small glasses with goldfish. No kid’s mother was ever pleased to see you come home with a goldfish. If you won one it would surely be dead within a couple of days. No one ever won any of the decent prizes.

In the summer the park was filled with picnickers and extended families holding annual family reunions. There were long covered shelters with end-to-end picnic tables where these reunions were held, much coveted, sheltered spaces because of the possibility of rain. On a summer weekend when a reunion was scheduled a member of the family would be assigned the job of going over on a Friday night and sleeping on one of the picnic tables in a shelter so no one else could grab it the next day for their own reunion. I hated our reunion, the Bush family reunion, mostly because as a kid you were continually besieged by at least three or four hundred (no, I am exaggerating) very large aunts who were all enormously fat with arms the size of smoked hams where the skin of the upper arm flapped heavily, bosoms that threatened to smother you and facial hair that tickled and prickled when they gathered you up and gave you kisses. Acres of country dishes were spread out on the tables with several grills nearby pumping out platters of grilled chicken and hamburgers and hotdogs. The men worked the grills and played horseshoes, and the kids just ran around and around. As much as I hated it, I also loved it.

We went to the swimming pool almost every day in the summer. We had books of tickets, one of which you would hand over to the bored teenager at the entrance who would give you a basket that had a number on a small metal plate and a giant safety pin with the corresponding number attached. You’d go into the appropriate dressing room, change your clothes and stash them in the basket and hand it to another attendant behind a beat-up, wooden counter on the way out. The safety pin was attached to your swimming suit. You would give it back to the attendant as you left the pool, and it would be matched with the basket with your clothing so you could change into your clothes and head home for dinner. We would be at the pool for hours and hours and usually had the sunburn to prove it.

One year when I was very young, my Aunt Mary was in town, and she took me to the pool. Because I was so young she dragged me into the women’s side to change my clothes. There were no cubicles there, just benches with all the women stripped down as they were changing. Beside me, an enormous fat woman, and I mean really enormous, stark naked, bent over to put her suit on and her giant behind was so close to me I was severely traumatized; I told my mother I would never go in the women’s side again, no matter what, and I never did. I went in alone on the men’s side and changed by myself; if a pervert had kidnapped me and made me his sex slave I would have preferred it to ever having to see another fat woman’s ass the size of a Volkswagen bus.

Here’s a city park story.

The summer I joined the band I was fourteen; most of my friends were fifteen. By the next summer, the oldest would have their driver’s licenses, which greatly expanded our roaming range. But this summer we were on foot except when our parents gave us rides to wherever we were going. The city park was centrally located to the houses of our small gang that met there at night on the weekends. We certainly weren’t going to have our parents drive us to the park for these revels, nor did we need them to.

These were pre-mall days. In many ways having malls to drop young teens off is a godsend for parents. They’re indoors, climate-controlled, patrolled by their own police forces, clean, have food and drink and provide all sorts of legal entertainment. The city park, on the other hand, was dark and provided plenty of semi-hidden places for small groups of young men up to no good to gather.

There were usually three or four of us: me, (piccolo); Jim Green, (cornet — his brother Dave was first trumpet and one of the leaders of the band); Steve Telemeyer, (drummer — his brother was first clarinet, another leader); Bill Parker, (drums) and Bill Stone, known as Stoney, another drummer. My closest friend Jake Patterson, clarinet, and my neighbor, the aforementioned Butch McGee, drum major. Not that we ever took our instruments to the park with us. Well, actually we did. One night very late we sneaked over to the park and sat in the dark in the band shell and played marches. No one seemed to notice. Or perhaps they did, the music floating in through half-opened windows, causing sleepers to stir and dream of Friday night football games and marching bands.

Our families stretched across the social strata; they knew each other, but didn’t really socialize. The band was the only connection for the adults. Jimmy Greens father ran a dump truck, dirt-hauling business and was rumored to have spent many years traveling across the United States in carnivals before creating his trucking empire. The Greens lived in a new one-story house that was unlike the older homes that the rest of us lived in. His mother was young, and even we, callow youths, knew she was very beautiful. Jimmy’s father was tough and took absolutely no crap from his three boys. Or, we were afraid, his beautiful wife. The oldest brother raced stock cars on mud tracks. Sometimes we went to see him race, and everyone in the audience hated him and booed him, but as far as we were concerned, he was a hero.

Steve Telemeyer’s father was a respected doctor. They lived on a beautiful, tree-lined street of stately homes. We never saw his father, and his mother seemed to exist only in the semi-darkness of their brick home: quiet, frail, delicate. She always seemed faintly amused at our group of boys.

Bill Parker’s father was the head of one of the sprawling chemical plants that lined the Ohio River near our town. He was a big-deal kind of guy, but was hearty and helpful, willing to drive us when he was free, a wonderful father who bought me my first decent steak. More on that later. Bill’s mother was a tall lady, privileged, aristocratic (for West Virginia) probably bored, another mother who observed us with calm bemusement. We liked her. Jake lived fairly far out of town though I was at his house often; more on his parents later.

My mother was much closer to my friends than these other ladies, a sort of den mother who was always willing to pitch in on whatever project — no matter how whacky — we had thought up and needed help executing. She could also be counted on to feed anyone who happened to show up at mealtimes.

I was surprised at one time, back then, when we thought up a really twisted stunt and enlisted her help and she pitched right in. In fact I’m still surprised at it.

Easter was coming. One of the Parkersburg traditions was the annual Easter egg hunt in the city park. As a child attending, in previous years, I had noticed that most of the eggs were snagged by aggressive parents who raced into the park at the given signal, children following, sometimes far behind, and scooped up all the obvious eggs and handed them over to their kids.

That year, the first year in high school, I came up with a plan. I believe it was Stoney and Jake who joined me in this endeavor of revenge. I decided that we three would pose as Easter Egg “Police.” Armed with clipboards, we would go up to every adult we could find grabbing eggs ahead of the children and take their names and addresses, telling them that the city would be sending them a ticket in the mail for breaking the rules of the hunt. I told my mother we needed three clipboards, told her what we intended to do, and asked if she could get them for us. She heard me out and decided it was a funny idea and went out and bought the clipboards and pads of paper for them. Not once did she say,” Someone is going to punch you in the nose,” or, “you’re going to get into trouble.” She just handed over the clipboards the night before the big egg hunt.

The next day, armed with the clipboards, we headed over to the park. There were probably 50 or 75 kids and adults, all formed up around the band shell, waiting for the starting bell to begin. Around us, in the nooks of trees, beneath bushes, nestled in the grass, were the plastic eggs that held small plastic trinkets. A public address system had been set up in the band shell. The announcer, I believe he was a dj for one of the local radio shows, whipped the crowd into a frenzy, called down the count and the egg hunt was on!

And the adults did what they always did.

We did what we had come to do.

Me. “Excuse me, sir?”

Man with small child in tow: “Yes.”

“Did you just pick that egg up from underneath that bush and give it to your child?”

“Well, yes.”

“Do you know that’s an infraction of the rules, which clearly state that the children are supposed to find the eggs on their own?” I tap on my clipboard as if I have a copy of the Official Rules right there.

“I was just helping her.”

“I think it was quite clear that you found the egg, not the little girl. Isn’t that right, little girl?” The little girl hides herself behind her father’s leg.

“I’m going to have to take your address. The city will send you a ticket in the mail.”

Silence.

“What is your name and address, sir?”

Here’s the crazy part — every adult actually gave us their names and address. We each corralled five people and the result was the same for each of us. The adults looked sheepish and trotted out their names and addresses without any more prompting or whining on their part. They’d been caught, and by God they would suffer the consequences. After five people each we called it quits, partially because we had proved our point and shamed the adults who were snatching up the eggs, and mostly because it didn’t cause any fuss at all and soon became boring. Can you imagine pulling a stunt like that today? We’d have been shot, stabbed or beaten by every “wrongdoer” we approached.

When we got back to my house and told our story, my mom had a good laugh and declared it a successful prank and served us all a slice of her famous chocolate pie with whipped cream. She didn’t actually whip the cream, but squirted it out of a can, which was a fairly new product for the time. We called the whipped cream “Fuff” because of the sound it made coming out of the spray nozzle. As in, “Would you like some more Fuff on your pie?”

We had another slice of pie and told the story again and laughed. I believe my mom laughed the hardest of us all.

That’s the legendary Mr. Mason in the middle, between his two brothers. You can’t see his wooden leg.

There’s a lot of water in West Virginia. Grandma and Mr. Mason always lived near creeks and rivers. Sometimes the creeks — Grandma pronounced the word “crick” — were small to tiny, the sort that could be dammed with rocks by small children and hunted for crawdads, minnows and tadpoles. We would keep our captured prey in big quart Ball jars, and they would live longer than you might think until we forgot to change the water and they would die. We watched many a tadpole turn into a frog. There were bigger creeks where you could wade across though the rushing water which might come up to your knees and threaten to knock you over. And not just threaten; it would knock you over and coming home totally soaked was not unusual, or cause for much concern from any adults. Then there were the rivers, the wide, deep slow ones and the rocky rapid ones. I don’t remember anyone having a boat, even a rowboat, but you could go swimming and fishing from the shore. My mother loved to tell stories about living for several years as a child on a houseboat down on the Ohio River.

The one thing these various iterations of running water had in common was a propensity to flood, to overflow their banks and creep up on us until they were, often, at our doorstep. Or in the house.

We were visiting Grandma when several of these floods occurred.

In Beatrice, it became obvious why the house was built on brick pillars. I remember these pillars as being giant — at least twenty feet tall — but surely that’s a matter of a child’s imagination. In the Beatrice days, I was less than two feet tall; everything seemed giant to me. They probably were six or seven feet high, but not high enough, evidently, as I remember someone pointing out to me on the wallpaper where the water had come up inside the house during past floods.

My memory of the Beatrice flood is tattered, fragmented, fluttering images, muted, the colors muddy shades of sepia, like remembering a stuttering old foreign film I might have seen years ago and only dimly remember. The rain came, torrential, for several days as the river behind Grandma’s house — the Internet tells me this was probably the Hughes River — overflowed and began creeping up the flat field behind the house. Or at least this must have been the case, because my first real memory of the event was of my sister and I, holding hands, crossing the swinging bridge in front of the house in a line behind the adults. Two men were carrying an old sofa that usually sat on the front porch. It’s still raining. We trek across the dirt road in front of the house and slog up a low hill. On the top of the hill, the sofa is put down facing the house and the rising floodwaters. We all sit on the sofa, in the rain, and watch the water rise.

Could this be true? I’ll have to ask my sister.

The memory of the flood at the Walker house is clearer as I was older when Grandma and Mr. Mason lived there. We would drive to Walker at least several Sundays every month, every season except winter. I think of that drive, as a child, as taking a long time, but it was probably only a half an hour away from Parkersburg, or a bit longer because it was on dirt roads that cut through the mountains and hollows. (Pronounced “hollers.”) My sister and I loved going to Walker when we were kids. When I was older it wasn’t as much fun. I once spent a couple of weeks there by myself when I was in high school or junior high after a bout with Scarlet Fever, a disease you don’t hear much about these days. I’ve pointed out elsewhere that antibiotics, which can now quickly cure Scarlet Fever, were not as prevalent in West Virginia in those days as they are now, if they were available at all. I was really sick with a high fever, red rash and coated white tongue that is the signature of this disease. After the worst was over – it was still quite possible to die from this disease — it was decided that I would be sent to Grandma’s to recover in the fresh country air. I remember these couple of weeks as me lying on an old army cot in the sun, reading many science fiction books. By then I was an inveterate reader, so I appreciated the reading time, but with no other kids around it was pretty boring.

The flood I remember was years before this. The Walker house was small, two bedrooms on the first floor, one bedroom upstairs, kitchen and dining room. The flood was before Mr. Mason had installed indoor plumbing, so there was no bathroom, just the privy outside the house. We got our water from a red hand pump outside the kitchen door. Every time I used that pump I remembered Mr. Mason’s joke and being pissed on by the cow. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you need to go back and read the earlier entries.

The flood. Night. My sister Sandy and I were in the downstairs bedroom, our parents upstairs. I am sleeping. My sister shakes me awake. She is standing beside the bed and says, “Allen, wake up. Do you want to come outside and watch the flood?” I had no idea what she was talking about, so I said no. She walked away, and I heard her sloshing through water. I looked over the edge of the bed and saw two inches of water on the linoleum floor. I could make no sense of this, so I went back to sleep.

The next day the water had receded from the house, but, sure enough, just beyond the yard where the dirt road used to be there was now a new, fairly large river. I don’t remember anyone being particularly upset; men and women like Grandma and Mr. Mason took events like this in stride. These things were acts of nature, unavoidable regular occurrences, part of country life and would soon pass, as they always did.

We sat on the porch, watching stuff float by in the river — outhouses, trees, drowned cows with all four legs in the air, chickens on floating branches, dogs and cats on debris — while life went on pretty much normally. There was no electricity, but there wasn’t much electricity nor the need for it at the best of times. The outhouse in the side yard was high enough to remain functional and firmly grounded. The pump worked. Grandma was able to cook on the woodstove as usual. Mr. Mason rocked in his rocker on the porch and shaved strips off his wooden leg. Just another weekend at Grandma’s.

These two flood memories…

The first flood, Beatrice, may be some sort of false composite cobbled together in my mind from stories I heard, but I am fairly sure about the Walker flood. What strikes me is that when I’m gone, (dead) and my sister is gone, (dead) that these memories will be gone as well. I am aware that this is another of my hopelessly banal conclusions, platitudinous and startlingly unoriginal, but it keeps gnawing at me. These are pieces of a past that my children will never experience. Does anyone care? Are they of any worth? These memories tell me that we now make too much of the small discomforts that come of heavy snows, electrical outages, minor flooding, oh no! the Internet is out! — our modern small disasters. Back then folks took the time to sit and watch the dead cows float by, knowing that the water would soon recede and life would go on pretty much the way it had before. The continuum… well… continues… doesn’t it? Maybe they lost some stuff, but they didn’t have much to loose in the first place, so it didn’t bother them very much. I feel a musical theme or themes coming on here: first it’s Annie singing Tomorrow, now it’s Janus Joplin singing Freedom’s Just Another Word, and in the end of Gone With the Wind, Scarlett O’Hara standing in the barren field and announcing, ‘Tomorrow is another day.”

I have warned you before, Dear Reader: If you are searching for complex philosophy, soaring images and deep thoughts, look not to these pages.

I have only stories to tell.

I warned you right up front that this memoir was going to have its R or even X-rated moments. This is one of them. If you’re easily offended, cover your eyes…

Back to Bobby Huffman and his trick with the Sears and Roebuck catalogue. This was pretty nifty. He would take a piece of tracing paper, or any sort of thin paper, lay it over a picture of a woman in the underwear section of the catalogue and trace the outlines of the model’s body and face. He would carefully draw nipples on the breasts then heavily pencil in the area between the model’s legs. When he removed the paper from over the catalogue, he had a nice drawing of a naked woman.

Here’s the way the conversation went when he showed me this trick.

(Bobby does the tracing then holds the resulting drawing up for me to see…)

Me: “That’s pretty good.” (Pointing to what Bobby has heavily penciled in.)    “What’s that?”

Bobby: “That’s her bush.”    (Long silence.)

Me: “What’s a bush?”

Bobby: (Looking at me as if I’m a child. Which I am.) “It’s hair. All women have hair between their legs.”

Me: ! ! ! !

What I have been trying to get around to with this talking about the Sears catalogue is… that when my parents bought anything, including musical instruments, that’s where they went, the catalogue, even though this probably did not ensure the finest quality. But it was a piccolo, and I was in the fourth grade; how good did it have to be anyway?

So I became a piccolo player. I’m sure my father was mystified. As I mentioned earlier, he had been a trumpet player in high school and had regaled us with stories from his experiences in the band. One memorable story was when his high school band marched down the street and came to a bridge, the marchers would deliberately beak step so that everyone was simply walking. The reason? If the band members stayed in step, the resonance of the synchronized marching feet would cause the BRIDGE TO FALL DOWN! Once again, the sheer power of the marching band was revealed to me. I knew that someday I would participate in this godlike magnificence.

I never actually practiced my instrument much because I hated practicing, and I never really had to. All my life I’ve had an affinity for musical instruments; you can hand me pretty much anything and after a bit I’m able to play the first few bars of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, which really isn’t all that hard. Besides, in those early years, everyone around me in grade school and junior high who was honking into and sawing away at an instrument was pretty terrible. Most of them would give up before they got to high school.

After the first month of high school band practice, I was no longer getting kicked in the ass very often. I had memorized all the marches and didn’t need to look at the music, though there was still plenty to learn about marching, in particular the sort of strict military formations and complicated maneuvers – drills — that we performed. We learned at least the rudiments of ten different drills, any one of which would be performed at half time during the Friday night football season, either at home or away in other towns around West Virginia. Some drills were fairly simple, and some were diabolically difficult. There was one, called Providence, that halfway through the band would split up in four cadres, march out to the far corners of the football field then come back into the center with all four units meeting head on and flowing through the ranks like water through a riverbed of rocks, hopefully to exit out of the X structure unscathed. All while staying in perfect step, with all lines perfectly straight while playing a march and keeping an eye on everything going on around you and planning for the next turn, about-face or wheel that would be coming up. The first twenty or thirty times through this maneuver resulted in absolute mayhem in the center as someone inevitably missed a mark and ran into another oncoming player which avalanched into the entire band slamming into someone else. We were told it was named Providence because if you escaped the center alive you thanked providence.

There were technical aspects to marching that we repeated over and over until they were ingrained in us. To this day, 55 years later, I sometimes catch myself adjusting my step so I will be in synch with the person walking next to me. If you get kicked in the ass enough, some things become part of what Mark Twain used to call your “permancies.”

Our band employed a 22-inch march step, eight steps to every five yards. Years later this would be extended by most bands to a 30-inch step, five steps to five yards. Today military bands are mostly a thing of the past; the fashion has become step length that varies with whatever tune is being played, dance moves embedded in routines that are certainly not drills, but masses of performers going through elaborate show routines that are as far from military style as you could get. If we had seen one of these performances in our day, we would have been unable to even comprehend what these bands were doing. This type of marching has become ubiquitous and is based on the show bands that evolved out of the historical black colleges and universities. A great example of this style is showcased in the movie Drumline, a wonderful little film with a predictable but affecting storyline. The dance moves and music of the bands in the movie is modern, but anyone with old-time experience in a military band will recognize the rigorous, competitive, physical traditions that have been passed down from my day to today. People are still getting their ass kicked, or some version of hazing, in the quest to be the best, even if it’s a best that would cause our old, fingernail-cleaning leader Frank, to spin in his grave.

Somewhere along the line, in the eighth grade, I bought a flute, or rather my parents ordered me a flute out of the Sears catalogue. It was an instrument that several years later Frank would sneer at and insist that I should tell my parents that I needed a real instrument purchased from the music store in town. You’d think that my Sears and Roebuck flute had been made by the John Deere tractor people in their off hours. Now that I think about it, I bet Frank received a kickback on all the business that was sent to the music store, which was called Deitz Music as I remember. Though maybe Frank was right, maybe a Sears and Roebuck flute was like a Sears and Roebuck sport coat, slightly off. Not that I could tell any difference.

The music store in downtown Parkersburg was a great place. Oddly enough, it always reminded me of the old-time grocery and sundry stores near wherever my grandmother lived at the time, in the country. Her houses were small houses that I remember as big houses, on dirt roads, no indoor plumbing, just an outhouse that always stank and sometimes, harbored big blacksnakes. A six-foot blacksnake was always a surprise when you had to go and opened the door to the privy and found one curled up on the wooden seat.

I guess this is as good a time as any to talk about my grandma. This will take awhile.

Grandma was terrified of snakes…

In the last entry I ended by saying that we bought all of our clothes at Sears and Roebuck, which was not a good thing, especially for my sister. I became acutely aware of this clothing problem about the same time I joined the band: my freshman year in high school. I also joined the debate team, which accepted me into its august ranks not because I was smart, but because I was unusually articulate, could tell stories and make people laugh. Also, the captain of the team was in the band (clarinet) and heard me telling stories and making jokes. Which is a role that little guys often assume: joker. In olden days I would have worn a hat with bells on and played the mandolin while I sang songs and told jokes to the lord and master.

At our first public debate in another West Virginia town — I believe the topic was on labor unions and the Taft Hartley act — I experienced a moment of brain freeze that I have never experienced before or since. Well, it happened once before; I’ll get to that in a minute. I was speaking, reading my notes off our carefully printed three-by-five cards, and I came to the word prohibit. I stared at the word, but I had no idea how to pronounce it. No idea at all. I knew what it meant; I just had no memory of ever saying it before this moment, even though I had, of course, said it many times and was quite familiar with it. I gave it a few feeble stabs. Pro-hi-bit. Pro-hibit. People in the small audience looked away as I tried to pronounce the word. After a few tries I stood there in silence, staring at the damned three-by-five card, blushing furiously. I moved on, shamed forever, struggling through the rest of my minutes at the podium and sat down beside my partner, the aforementioned captain of the debators who had graciously put me on the team and taken me under his wise wing. He pushed a slip of paper toward me. I picked it up and read it. He had carefully written, in large block letters, the word: Pro-hib-it.

I knew that! Why could I not say it? Mortifying. But not as mortifying as what would come a few days later.

May I draw your attention to the photo at the top of the page? That’s me wearing The World’s Ugliest Sport Coat and my White Buck shoes minutes before heading out to take part in my first public debate as a member of the Parkersburg High School team. Sure the coat doesn’t look too bad in black and white, but you had to see it in its maroon glory to get the total effect. Before every momentous occasion of this sort my proud parents would take a picture of me in front of the living room mantel. Now this mantel is of a normal height, meaning a regular-sized person could put his arm on it and lean comfortably on it. My size in relation to it shows how small I was.

After this first debate, the captain of the team took me aside (my face flushes with embarrassment again, even now) and very kindly told me that my maroon and black-striped Sears sports coat was very nice, but that a championship debater (we won the state title every year throughout my four years of high school, and I went to West Virginia University on a speech scholarship) would normally dress in a black or dark grey suit, white dress shirt, black tie and black dress shoes. At least I got the white shirt right but, in general, with my striped Sears jacket and bright white shoes I’m pretty sure I looked more like a clown in the circus than a serious debater concerned with the complicated details of the Taft/Hartley Act. I’m also sure that before I got in the car to go to the debate my mom probably inspected me and said, “My, don’t you look spiffy.”

How could we have been so clueless?

After receiving this gentle but mortifying advice about my clothing, I told my mom what the captain of the team had said, and, as always, without a word, she collected her purse and off we went to Dils — the upscale department store in town – where she bought me a nice black suit, white shirt and subdued tie. And there was no complaining about not getting a 10% discount, at least not to me.

We always had a bunch of Sears catalogues. My friend Bobby Huffman (he lived down the street; his dad was killed in WWII) showed me a neat trick you could do with a Sears catalogue.

Since Bobby’s father was dead, his mother had to work full time, which left Bobby free to roam the neighborhood from dawn till dusk and get into trouble. He was the Huck Finn of the neighborhood, and even though he was always causing some sort of ruckus, all the adults looked out for him because he had no father. One day – this is not the trick I’m going to tell you about in a minute – Bobby took a couple of us kids inside and showed us how to make a fried baloney sandwich. He was very nonchalant about it, as if he made one every day for lunch, which he probably did, but the idea of a kid being able to operate a gas stove without supervision was unheard of. We were in awe of his audacity and skill.

Bobby never talked about his dad being dead, and in fact none of the men who were in the service ever talked about it, at least to us kids. Remember, this was only six or seven years after World War II. Playing war was a big pastime for us because we had a lot of actual war gear that the dads brought home. There were Nazi helmets, bayonets, lugers with the firing pins filed off, a couple of M-1s with the bolts removed, flags, pieces of German uniforms, all of which we’d pick up or put on and head out into the streets and alleys, running, shooting and hollering. It was great fun. I don’t think anyone ever gave a thought to how this might have made Bobby feel because his father perished overseas. He never mentioned it if it bothered him, and of course we kids never gave it a moment’s thought.

My father had not been in the war. He and my mother had my sister and they lived in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where my dad worked in the steel mill. He drove a train, and in a box of old photos there was an 8 x 10 photo of him sitting in the cab of a giant locomotive, his arm resting on the edge of the window, smiling for the camera. I was very impressed with this picture, and felt his job was at least as important as being an Army man and killing Nazis. Evidently the government felt the same way, exempting him from the draft. I wish I knew where this photo was now; I spent hours looking at it as a child.

The only kid whose father I knew had been in the shooting war was my friend Butch McGee, who lived three blocks away. This was considered the outer limit of our close neighborhood, so Butch didn’t play with us as much as the kids who lived on our actual street, Maxwell Avenue. Butch’s father was crippled, and walked, haltingly, with a cane. We all thought he had been shot by a Jap, but it later turned out that he’d had a stroke at the end of the war. He was the only father in the area who was home in the day. He would sit in the darkened house, smoking, only occasionally saying something to one of us kids. It must have been terribly boring for him, but it never occurred to us to stop and talk to him more than just a hello though I think now that he would have appreciated being involved in some of our schemes.

Butch told us how he would tag along after his dad when he would struggle down to the local store to buy cigarettes. When he got his change, Butch would wait expectantly for him to go through his coins. If he found a dime – they had Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s portrait on them — he would curse and throw it on the ground, whereupon Butch would snatch it up for his own. Butch’s father hated FDR, though I don’t know why, and never thought to ask. In high school Butch became one of the drum majors in the band.

Death, either of adults — in the war or of natural causes — or children, was never much on our minds. There was the polio plague that haunted those years, but with polio you often didn’t die, you were just condemned to a lifetime of laying in an iron lung where you read comic books by turning the pages with a stick you held in your teeth. We often read stories in Life Magazine about these plucky boys and girls who lived in iron lungs and how they made the most of their confined lives. If you didn’t end up in an iron lung, polio could still cripple you, and you had to wear complicated braces on your legs and walk, painfully, with metal crutches that fit on your arms. My Aunt Belle was one of these people, though she was an adult. She was enormously fat and Uncle Oke, his wife Jane was her sister, would sometimes drive her over to our house where the enormously difficult task of hauling her up our front steps and onto our porch was undertaken by Oke and my dad. She would swing her useless, pale, stick-like legs out the door of the car and hoist herself up on her precarious, clacking braces and sticks, and I would groan to myself, knowing there was worse to come when she got to the small hill of steps that ran up to our front porch. This was one time being small was an advantage, as everyone seemed to wordlessly understand that I should stay far away from this excruciating undertaking. First of all, I would have been absolutely no help, she must have topped out at three hundred pounds once you added up all the metal that was attached to her body, and, secondly, had she fallen on me I would have surely been killed. Oddly enough, or at least oddly to me, she was actually a sunny sort of person who could carry on a conversation just like everyone else. I guess I felt that polio would have withered her mind as well as her legs, but this was obviously not so. Getting down the steps at the end of the visit was just as arduous and fraught with danger. She didn’t come to visit very often.

In general, the adults who lived on Maxwell Avenue were young, in their thirties, and most of them had young families like ours. Death among us was pretty random, though I guess most death, except for the aged, is always pretty random unless you live on a superfund site. Yes, that’s another one of my pithy and unoriginal observations: death is random.

One summer day a girl who lived further up the street was hit by a car at the end of the block. There were a lot of sirens and all the kids were called home where we had to spend the afternoon on the porch, knowing only that a little girl who we knew only slightly had been killed. Of course Bobby Huffman, who didn’t have to sit on the porch, ran up and looked and reported back that her brains had been splattered all over the street, which may or may not have been true. Then a year later a good friend a few houses down from our house, a girl the same age as my sister, caught some sort of rare tropical disease — her skin turned very dark and the moles on her arms turned even darker and she died. I don’t know how she could have caught a tropical disease, West Virginia was about as far from the tropics as you could get.

As noted, we didn’t think about these deaths much. I don’t know about our parents, but we kids didn’t worry about much of anything.

Oh, yeah, Bobby Huffman and his trick with the Sears catalogue. We’ll save that for the next entry.