Bernie's Chapter

The first son. The second child.

EVERYONE calls me Bernie. I came into this world in the upstairs bedroom of the rented house occupied by my mother and my father, Ethel and Floyd Guild, at 1015 29th Street in Moline, Illinois. The time was fifteen minutes after midnight on the morning of April 11th. The year was 1936. Mom was twenty-five years old and Dad was thirty-two. My eyes were treated with silver by the attending doctor. I tipped the baby scale at ten pounds even. Four days later I was circumcised. I was a colicky baby who cried a lot, but after that, I was a very healthy, very happy, very talkative boy, or so Mom told me. I spoke my first word at age eight months. Appropriately for an Aries child, that word was “Bernie.” My very first memory of life on this planet, possible at around age three, was playing with the rubber buttons on my sun suit. In some distant corner of my mind, I feel myself being bounced on Grampa’s Williams’ knee. I hear the harmonic hum of a red top as it spins on the cool linoleum floor. I see a wooden duck on a stick and wheels with wings flapping and squawking ferociously. But these are only vague, distant memories. I do not remember that house where I was born, but I do have many fragmented memories of my life at our second house at 127 35th Street down by River Drive. So impressionistic are they, in fact, that a poem might be the only possible way to express them. It’s not a good poem, but it tells what I remember. THE

Distant shrill piercing whistle growing louder. Monstrous rumbling black locomotive makes me shake. Engineer in a red neckerchief waves down as I wave up. Train’s “all gone” yet whistles still, but sadly now.

Walking along the railroad tracks beside the warm foundry wall, Grampa holds my hand all the way to kindergarten At McKinley School way up on a grassless dusty hill. He comes back again to walk me home.

We gather coal fallen from overloaded railroad cars, And put it in a flour sack with pretty flowers on it That Grandpa keeps folded in his pocket. We take the coal home to Mommy for her cook stove.

Pretty wild roses between the long straight railroad tracks With bright pink and yellow centers on sparse stems Growing against the crunchy, cold, gray gravel Between sweet-smelling creosoted railroad ties.

On lucky days, we find little shiny six-pointed iron stars In the looming wet piles of cooling foundry sand. Soon safe with all my treasures in my oatmeal box That Grampa says has a picture of his grandpa on it.

Twirling in the warm dewy grass by the picket fence. My fifth birthday party in my red Superman sweat shirt Giggling, dizzy, drunken with happiness Until we all fall down.

First grade learning, learning, learning, learning! First prize for me in the alphabet-printing contest. The teacher told us her mom was the judge. Mommy is happy because she taught me how to write.

Learning the whole Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag Of the United States of America And a prayer to God. We get one Victory Stamp for one dime.

The teacher locks the door on Arnold Because he is late to school, again. “Be quiet when he knocks on the door,” she whispers, But he starts to cry, so we let him in.

We all live together in a big white house. Bathroom way up the steps on the back porch. Daddy teaches me to pee behind the garage. Mommy says that’s wrong, so I try to forget about it, (but I can’t.)

Little red, white, and blue flags on gold-tipped sticks. Sparklers sizzling! Daddy in a new straw boater and clean white undershirt Carries me and Bobby around to see the neighbors.

We tiptoe into the Mommy’s bedroom to see our new sister. Sweet smelling, swaddled, Christmas Baby Carol. Sleeping like a tiny doll in an oval laundry basket, But Grandpa is upset because Mommy’s sick.

After school, Iris is playing Tea Party on the porch, again. Bobby and I take turns on the tricycle Peddling endless circles around the big iron cook stove. Grandpa feeds Baby Carol apple he scrapes with a teaspoon.

Mommy is ironing an apron. Newspapers cover the just-scrubbed linoleum. Mommy goes away and comes home with Baby Delores. And Daddy comes home with ice cream.

New high-top shoes from a little store Where they sell “Guess What’s?” for a penny. Two peanut butter taffies wrapped in wax paper and a PRIZE. Tiny black and white Scotties that can kiss.

A rainy day inside the big tavern across from Riverside Park. Noisy talking, everyone laughing, strong smells. Daddy lets me sit on my own stool, And gives me salty, greasy peanuts from his hand.

Iris shows me a chicken head on a tree stump. Then I throw up. Mommy says, “Well, don’t look at it, then.” But I look again, and I throw up again.

Iris helps me to make May baskets out of purple paper And fill them with sweet Lilies of the Valley That grow by the outdoor faucet. We hang them on the neighbor’s doorknob, then run fast.

A sparkling round rhinestone pin in a trash barrel Down our narrow dirt alley. A treasure to squeeze in my hand forever. But I lost it, and can’t find it.

Every day Bobby and I play in the front yard. We look and look and look at the big river at the end of our road. But Mommy says we must never, never, never go there. But maybe we will, tomorrow.

Home. Four small, equally divided rooms in a twenty-three by twenty-three- foot square, one-story wood-frame house without a basement, that sat on one acre of fertile Illinois top soil on a narrow dirt road in P.J. Mersman’s Acres Addition, just on the outskirts of Moline, Illinois. I think Mom took the initiative for getting the loan for the house to get us kids away from the river and the railroad tracks. I heard she went to the bank and applied for the loan herself. The house and land cost two thousand dollars and included a one-car garage and a chicken coop. The little white clapboard house our Mom and Dad bought for us changed many times in many ways over the years. Almost immediately, Dad raised it up and dug out a basement, then poured a cement floor and laid the concrete block walls himself. He built an arrow-straight, red brick chimney to whisk away the smoke from the new coal furnace. He also dug a well, which drew its water through a hand pump until Dad added an electric pump and holding tank inside the house. About that same time, he had to enlarge the kitchen to get room for that kitchen bench we all took turns sitting on. Later on, Dad built two new bedrooms (Bob and I helped him a little) and added city water, a water heater, and a bathroom to replace the outhouse and the narrow wooden planks that led us all out to it through the springtime mud and winter snow. Much later, he gave it green asphalt siding to reduce the painting and heating costs, and then a brand new garage. Somewhere along the line, the chicken coop became our playhouse. Then Daddy built a work shed when he outgrew the garage and lately the house—now Dee’s house—got its white siding back, along with some fine new shutters in forest green. That was and still is the place we all call home. The best part of life on 39th Street in those early years was the freedom to come and go and to play anywhere our hearts desired. Mom definitely had the right idea there. I have only vague memories of my own first years there. I was only six when we moved in on July 16, 1942. I definitely remember me and Bob, who was five, jumping out of the windows in glee. I can see Mom hanging wallpaper and putting shelf paper in the red kitchen cabinets with the glass-paned doors. I see Grampa and Daddy planting the first garden and digging out the basement and raising up the house on giant jacks, but not much else. I do remember Grampa smelled of minted snuff, and gave pony rides on his knee as he sang songs to us and recited limericks. Soon after, I think, Baby Diana came along. I have a sense that the McFarlands were always intertwined in our family life from our very first day there. I loved Virginia because she was like a second mom and because she was a laugher, and Marilyn because she giggled so infectiously, and Pat because she talked so fast you could barely understand her. I was as mesmerized by Pat’s speech as I would have been by a Martian’s. Long after I grew up in this tiny house with five sisters and a much- appreciated brother, along with Mom and Dad and Grampa Williams, I still sense the closeness of our family when we were all there. Somehow, I never think of us as separate individuals, back then. We were an entity—a unit. A moving amorphous blob of humanity. If we’d been a pack of wolves we couldn’t have been closer or more interconnected and interdependent. We were a family growing up and having fun together and I think that was because Mom and Dad planned it that way. Mom and Dad surely loved kids. And, I loved my life there, dearly.

It’s hard to imagine our old homestead without thinking of the all the things that grew there. Besides the garden and the orchard, who could forget the first shade tree Dad planted? The elm. He called it a Piss Elm for some reason. Before it was big enough, we all tried out tree-climbing, and broke many of it tender branches, but it survived despite our cruelty, somehow. On Dog Days, Grampa Williams did quiet food prep, like shelling peas or snapping beans beneath its shade and the girls staged their activities, on an army blanket there, all summer long. My favorite was either the little lilac bush growing outside the bedroom window with its heavily scented lavender flowers, that felt so cool to the touch, or the pussy willow bush that grew behind the clothesline post. Its silvery soft buds utterly fascinated me. On the other side of that clothesline post, I visualize some stout, bright pink rhubarb sprouting in the spring. Who remembers the row of poplar trees across the front yard, and the mulberry tree across the road, on Britz’s side that made a sticky mess when it dropped its sweet fruit in the gravel? I liked the taste of mulberries, but always got a stomachache because I never knew when to stop eating them. Zinnias. Lots of zinnias in every color—so stiff and dry-feeling. Bachelor buttons, hollyhocks, bleeding hearts, sweet peas, cosmos, and the four o’clocks—“the flowers that can tell time” as Mom would say. Choke cherries, sweet potatoes, “mush” melons, and a few tiny pathetic peanuts were some of the odder crops we grew. Dad made Bob and me mow down the tall weeds in the orchard with a large two-handed scythe we could barely lift and around each tree with a hand sickle. We hated this job because it took so long. Later he mowed it himself with a cutting blade he pulled behind his homemade tractor. We had a bramble of a black raspberry patch out back a little north of the outhouse. After we had picked all the berries there, we’d put on long-sleeve shirts and set out to pick wild raspberries and blackberries with Grampa. He knew where all the good “free” patches were in the woods. We each hung an empty Karo Syrup can, strung with a cord around our neck so both hands would be free for picking. One year, we picked so many blackberries that Grampa sold them house to house to the rich people who lived in Villa Park. And, what was the fauna, you ask? Kids, kids, and more kids!

We tried to play a trick on Mrs. Rohrer. We sprinkled plenty of ground black pepper on a bouquet of flowers and presented it to her. She said, “Well, thanks, kids. Isn’t this pretty? But, I never smelled pepper zinnias before.” Of course, she was supposed to sneeze outrageously like in the Nancy comic strip where a seven-year-old could get plenty of ideas. (Favorite Nancy comic strip: Nancy is eating a grapefruit. It squirts her in the eye. She gets up and leaves. Comes back with a laundry sprinkler and shakes it onto the grapefruit and says, “Take that!”) We would play King of the Hill whenever a construction or landscaping project produced even a small mound of dirt. There was something great about climbing to the top and pushing your competitors down. This game inevitably ended up in a real fight when someone got pushed down the hill too hard and got insulted. Chugs (our name for go-carts) were crude wooden platforms with four wheels—you were lucky if any two matched—featuring a movable two-by-four front axle with rope steering and power supplied by your brother pushing on your shoulders. We drew plans for a racer for the Soap Box Derby, but never built it because the wheels were too expensive, but we did go to the races on 7th Street Hill every year to watch the kids mostly crash into each other or fly off the road at the big curve just down from The Plantation restaurant. We played cowboys and Indians with toy guns in Ferry’s Woods. There were enormous oak trees we could climb and stage our attacks from. Sometimes the Indians would go naked. It was mostly just a game of running and hiding and attacking and making up rules as we went along. Mabel Rosener put an end to this when she found out we were going native because she said she couldn’t afford to have her kids losing their clothes. I lost my new shoes for two days once. Daddy went to the woods and found them. Got a licking for that. These games could get out of hand when we started throwing hedge balls at each other instead of acorns. One kid hit me in the nuts with a giant green hedge ball, and they really ached for a long time. Playing with sisters was an occasional affair and usually took the form of playing House or School or putting on impromptu performances presented in the old chicken coop, which, having had its front wall removed, resembled a stage. This became known as The Play House. It was great for Dress Ups in musty-smelling old clothes contributed by neighbors and kept in a trunk there, and for making up silly acts—can’t remember even one—for our audiences of brothers and sisters and neighbor kids, who sat in the grass out front along the garden’s border.

I kept my green plaid marble bag for years after I was a kid. Mom sewed these longish cloth sacks that closed with a drawstring for Bob and me to keep our winnings in. Bob was very, very good at Marbles. He could skunk any kid. He learned how to aim and thrust his shooting hand forward without going over the line—a skill that forever eluded me. His “shooter” was a bright poison-green peerie. I don’t think he ever lost it to another kid. We had no rules except for going over the line. Everyone playing, placed five marbles in the circle and then took turns trying to shoot them out. You kept shooting as long as you knocked a marble out and your shooter stayed in the ring. If you missed, your turn was over. You could use any size shooter that you could manage. The kids with bigger hands had an advantage, but I don’t think we realized that back then. Marble designs really fascinated me. There were Cat’s Eyes and Aggies made of multicolored real agate. Then, the glass marbles were always white with one-color swirls and were cheap and plentiful. Peeries were clear- colored glass you could see through. Pee Wees were very small marbles, which some kids thought gave a speed and aiming advantage, and Steelies, which were really just ball bearings. Sometimes, if you shot too hard, you could break a glass marble with your steely, which would cause you to forfeit any marbles you had in the ring. This curtailed their use for their weight advantage, but only somewhat, because what kid wouldn’t think losing his ring marbles wasn’t a pretty small price to pay to see some other kid’s favorite marble explode. Everyone had his favorite marble, called his “Baby.” You never put your Baby into play unless it was your last one on a losing day or you were showing off. More than once, we were forced (by their parents) to give back winnings from kids we had suckered into playing “for keeps.”

We must have been about seven or eight when Bob and I got our first jackknives. Daddy gave us each a small bone-handled pocketknife. We instantly learned to play Mumblety-peg, a pastime in which you balance the open knife on the back of your hand and then, with the other hand, strike downward on the handle so it flips over in a way that makes it stick in the ground. We played another knife game after we played Marbles using the dirt marble circle for a target. (The girls would shriek that we were going to kill each other and run to tell Mom on us.) You’d have thought we were playing William Tell with real arrows. (We probably would have.) The players flip their knifes at the same time (scream, girls!) in a way that they can best control how they land and stick in the ground. When all the knives were thrown you’d rush in to section-off (win) the biggest portion of the circle you could by drawing a straight line in the direction your blade had entered the ground. If someone drew their line in your path before you got there with your knife, you could only claim territory up to their line. So, it could get fierce—all those fingers and knives moving oh, so swiftly. You finished the game by taking one more turn trying to enlarge your stake in the circle. (Billy Johnson was so good at this game.) When this game got overly rambunctious and competitive, we’d show off by jabbing our knives between our fingers as fast as we could as our hand rested on the ground. The girls simply covered their eyes when we did this. We made willow whistles from a four-inch section of a straight branch of a weeping willow tree with our knives. If you pull on it, the bark will slip right off of the twig in one piece. You can then cut a one-inch notch half way through one end of the twig and a corresponding V-cut opening (that will fall over the notch) in the bark, slip the bark back over the twig and have a very shrill whistle. Dad could make one of these with his large pocketknife in a minute.

Imagine for a moment that the adult folks we grew up with as the cast for a stage play. We were surrounded by the most incredible array of “types.” Ethel Guild (Mom): Very fair complected, sometimes freckled, big brown eyes, wore rimless glasses, full lips, turned up nose, fine, bright- red hair, great figure, great legs, well proportioned, soft, kind expression, sweet, quiet voice, somewhat reticent, and moved gracefully. Floyd Guild (Dad): Movie star handsome, well-defined muscular athletic build, shock of wavy black hair combed straight back, dark complexion, tough beard, always clean shaven, regal straight nose, hazel eyes, widow’s peak, thin lips, moved fast and powerfully, very alive, animated and outspoken, with a sharp, clear voice. Ed Williams (Grampa): Roundish, medium height, medium complexion, largish ears, with jet-black, fine hair and eyebrows, sometimes unshaven, stoic, soft body, intelligent-sounding voice, moved slowly and deliberately, sometimes dour, only a touch of gray at the sideburns to the day he died. Virginia McFarland: Slavic knockout, gorgeous, thick, dark reddish- brown hair, perfect figure and flashing eyes, very animated, devilish laugh and fun-loving. Dale McFarland: Tallish, lanky, slow moving, sweet smile, with a soft- spoken southern accent. Tom Johnson: Short, muscled, strong, very gruff deep voice, always well dressed. Ruth Johnson: tall, thin and trim, with a swan neck, and always- coifed brown hair. Doris Rohrer: Short, round, with a sweet voice, always dressed impeccably, always wore high-high heels. Chuckled. George Rohrer: Tall, wide shoulders, leaned forward as he walked, spoke through loose false teeth. John Reichenberg: Short, hatchet faced German, strong muscled body, silent type. Ruth Reichenberg: Spindly legs, huge bosom, big torso, and big widely- spaced protruding front teeth, overly-loud breathless boisterous voice. Mrs. Britz: Sturdy old world stock, strong, solid, tall, hair pulled back tight into a braided bun, organized and neatly dressed. Mr. Britz: Red faced, stout, moved like a whirlwind, large bulging eyes, and unkempt red hair. Oscar Peterson: A short, tiny, wiry man, with a thick Swedish accent; a quiet man of very few words. Jeanette Peterson: Heavyset, slow moving, quiet spoken, very shy, wore a frown all her life. Herb Spahn: Short, swarthy complexion, very course, straight black unruly hair and eyebrows, halting speech and jerky movement. Nellie Spahn: Tallish, curly natural blonde beauty with fair skin and huge blue-blue eyes. Wore bright lipstick at all times. The epitome of a pretty Scandinavian woman. Mabel Rosener: Beautiful perfectly symmetrical face, large brown eyes, dark wavy hair, perfect figure, flirtatious, with a sweet demeanor. Virginia “Sis” Vergain: Enormous well-shaped breasts, light brown curly hair, great figure, slim, scarred arms from picking at herself. Grace Nicholson, Sis’s mom. Large, very tall woman who lived next to the Johnsons. Always carrying food to someone’s house. Drove a car. Do you remember any others types?

When I was about ten, I made friends with Toby Fry, the granddaughter of the Frys, who had the small dairy farm at the corner of 38th Street and 32nd Avenue. One summer day, we were playing Crow (my favorite card game) on their broad front porch when, as can happen on even the hottest summer day in the Midwest, there was a sudden crack of thunder followed immediately by a particularly heavy hailstorm. As the little spheres of ice peppered down, we happily let the hail hail onto our faces and sting our bodies. When it was over, (almost before it started) a thick coating of cold quarter-inch round hail stones was left on the floor of the porch. Mrs. Fry appeared at the front door with a big milk pail and told Toby and me to hurry up and scoop up all the hail and bring it to her in the kitchen, which we did. There, she was rushing around preparing a mixture of fresh cream, (probably double cream from her cows) sugar and some fresh peach slices. This mixture went into a coffee can and a cover was placed on it. Another, larger can (probably a cracker tin) received a layer of the freezing cold hail. The can with the ingredients went inside and more hail was packed all around and on top of it. I remember everyone was rushing around and it was all very quick activity as we worked frantically against time to beat the hail from melting. Mrs. Fry, a buxom, stout, bowed-legged woman, who was singing and laughing and having fun the whole time, poured some rock salt on top of the hail, snapped the lid shut and ordered everyone to the floor of the huge kitchen. There, Toby and I and Mrs. Fry and two other kids who showed up sat with legs spread apart rolling the can to each other. (It got really cold to the touch.) Then, as if by magic to me, the mixture turned into ice cream. We all went back out onto the porch, spoons in hand, sat on the railing and ate the whole thing. Later, Toby and I played doctor in the woods but Iris and one of her girlfriends spied us and threatened to tell on us. I worried about that for a long time. I must say though, Iris always treated me well in general. Mom said that when I came along, Iris was very happy to see me because then she had a permanent and witless guest for her endless tea parties.

Delores used to get me to draw her Hopscotch court patterns in chalk on the sidewalk or with a stick in the dirt. I didn’t like Hopscotch, but I did like Jump Rope, especially Double Dutch when it finished with that flourish of accelerated speed. And Carol taught me Jacks, which she and Dee and Diana could play until the cows came home. This reminds me of how filthy we used to all get playing in the dirt all day. Mom never made us wash up before meals, but she wouldn’t let us go to bed with dirty feet. I think the fact that water had to be carried in from the well in big heavy buckets and heated on the stove may have influenced this decision. Both Bob and I helped with carrying the buckets, though we could just barely lift one with both arms when full. Mom ran a clean house but she often said, “You need some germs to fight back with.” She was right about that, as it turns out.

On rainy days and during the winter we played in the living room and drove Mom crazy with our fighting. I had an Erector set with an electric motor. (I built a Ferris wheel, once.) I had a wood-burning kit that made that wonderfully pleasing aroma of burning cedar wood, a crystal set, that I could sometimes hear faint music on, if I tweaked the whisker on the crystal just so. Once, I learned to paint figurines, which taught me about having the patience to do things right. Bob and I had a set of kid’s boxing gloves, which came out of the box once that I know of because we refused to hit each other, to Dad’s great disappointment. At one point, Bob and I shared a small electric train, which ran on a small set of oval tracks and had a smokestack that you put burning pellets into to create smoke. I spent many mindless hours building little houses with Lincoln Logs to place around the tracks. In the early days, I remember making comic books by cutting out newspaper comic strips and pasting them over old newspaper pages with homemade flour and water paste. I never liked board games much. Too many rules and they took too long, but I did like playing Chinese Checkers with Grampa. Barbara always begged me to make paper cootie catchers for her as well as little square paper balloons made by folding a piece of paper a certain way, then blowing it up through a little hole. My best distraction, by far, was coloring, which, no other way to put it, I adored. Did I color inside or outside of the lines, you’d like to know? If you don’t remember, none of your business, Diana.

Grampa Williams was part of my life for as long as I can remember. I adored him and I am told I followed him everywhere when I was a toddler. My most vivid memory of him, other than his accident, and his dying in my arms, (Remember how I held a mirror to his mouth to see if he was still breathing?) was of him as he sat quietly at the kitchen table listening to the baseball broadcasts on our old Philco radio. While Mom ironed and listened, too, Grampa kept a complete pencil- written record of the game and every player on the little square pieces of cardboard that separated the layers of Shredded Wheat biscuits in the box. He saved every score card. He must have had a million of them. I can very clearly remember hearing the crack of the ball being hit, the announcer’s excited voice, “And it’s a line drive to the far right field!” or whatever, and then the echoey cheering and always the hushed sustained murmuring of the crowd in the ball park. Vivid! Whenever I hear those sounds, it evokes an instant memory of those balmy summer days so long ago and a strong fond memory of Grampa.

I always looked forward to winter because it meant Christmas was coming, and I couldn’t wait for the snow. The more the better. There was a great mystery about the woods in the winter as the white, white snow and the black, black barren trees created a completely new, clean and pristine world. We were doubly blessed with Ferry’s Woods, which began as a little creek and a little dip in the road starting between Old Man Ferry’s and one of his kid’s houses on 41st Street and ran all the way down to Coaltown Road. Geologically, it gradually widened into a huge and deep ravine that meandered west and then south toward the flat land leading toward the Rock River. It was completely forested with great oak trees, stands of sumac, and many hedgeball thickets, which also acted as natural fences. We approached the woods from the corner of 32nd Avenue and 38th Street where there was a small farm owned by the Frys. (Mom got fresh milk and butter there in the early days.) There was a smaller, muddy ravine at this intersection, which you had to cross before you came to the big woods. You approached the big woods through a small grove of strong smelling Sumac, then crawled through a barbed-wire fence. Fry’s Woods were actually used to pasture a few dairy cows, which I was kind of afraid of—especially the bulls, which were known to charge at people. The well-worn path down the hill was also the main sled run. It was very steep, winding, and long. You had to be experienced to negotiate it without going off the path or smashing into a tree. If Mom had ever had a look at that treacherous route, she would have died on the spot of apoplexy. On our sledding outings, Bob and I shared a new Flexible Flyer sled we had gotten for Christmas one year. But we didn’t take turns on it. Instead, we went down the hill together; either sitting one behind the other and steering with our feet, or the safer way, which was to belly flop, one lying on top of the other and steering with our hands. The steering bar actually flexed the leading edge of the sled’s runners in the direction you wanted to turn—but not much. Steering was more an art of shifting your weight than actually steering. The hill offered a ride several minutes long. But to extend it, we learned to guide our sled onto the frozen creek at the bottom to continue our ride as far down the slick ice as we could, until we got to a small pond where a large log stopped our run. It was such a long walk back to the top of the hill that we never did more than a couple of these long runs. All this in heavy winter Mackinaws, two pairs of pants, earmuffs, mittens, and galoshes. No wonder we were in such good shape. This was hard play. These sledding outings in the “Big Woods” were strictly limited to Bobby and me. Too dangerous for girls! For them, we had another, safer ravine. Being a river valley, there’s nothing but little ravines running everywhere throughout Moline. This one was about a block down 39th Street, just behind the Vergain’s 38th Street house but on the 39th street side. It was a great place and was always filled with lots of other kids at the first heavy snow. The sledding runs were on both sides of the little ravine, which was safely free of trees. You slid down either hill in half a minute and climbed back up in five. The really poor kids slid down the hill on their butts or on a piece of cardboard or begged rides. Some daredevils would climb into a cardboard box and someone else would just push them off. They twirled down the short but steep hill and usually ended up spilling out when the box went out of control or fell apart completely as it got wetter and wetter. Some kids tried skiing, but the hill was really too short and climbing back up meant removing the skis. The most fun we had on this hill was with our homemade toboggan. Daddy had liberated an old Shell sign from its gas station. It was one half of a three-dimensional, metal, scallop-shaped shell about three and a half feet wide and about a foot deep. Daddy hooked a pulling rope to it for us. We could comfortably fit three people into it. It had very sharp edges. I remember that. This vehicle was never “Mother Approved,” believe me. It was a wild ride! It was sort of round, so it would spin all the way down the hill. And, loaded with three or more kids, it was really heavy, so it went extremely fast. We just had to watch out for other kids, especially those coming toward us down the opposite hill onto the flat area between the two hills. In this free ride area, you had to negotiate all the other kids and the patches of dead Milkweed plants. (The kind that spilled their gossamer parachutes as they dried. We would open the pods and blow their contents into each other’s face the same as we did with dried dandelions in the summer.) There were so many kids at this hill, that the snow would too soon get worn away, leaving only dead grass and dirt in its place. I can vividly remember my happiness trudging home from these outings, freezing cold, wet, chaffed ankles and wrists, and deliriously tired. WERE WE POOR?

I realized being poor when I got only a coloring book and a small box of crayons as my tenth birthday present in 1946. This was the first disappointment of my life. Billy Johnson had gotten a brand new post-war Schwinn bike for his. I decided right then, that when I grew up I would not be poor. “Study hard and work hard and you can be anything you want to be.” “You can have a better life than we had.” “You can be the president of the United States if you want to.” How many times had we been told these three things by both Mom and Dad as we grew up? I once asked Mom if we were poor. She responded with a short “no,” and warned I should never ever ask Dad that question. “You are clean and well fed, aren’t you? You should always be proud of who you are,” was her advice. Mom always said she’d have to wait for one of her kids to get rich to travel the world and have her name up in lights. Then, as she waved her hand upward to point out each of the letters: E, T, H, E, L in the air, she’d give us the far away look of a true dreamer. She taught us all to dream of the things we wanted. One time, Jenny Swanson, who lived across 32nd Avenue from the Petersons, and who was the Principal of Roosevelt Elementary School, had all the “poor children” in the neighborhood into her house for a pre- Christmas luncheon. I got the drift of what was happening and was angry our family had been included. We were a proud family. Though she was well intentioned (and I gladly took a small present from her), I considered this a crushing insult. When I started running with the rich kids in high school, I began to see many beautiful homes, and then I knew that we were pretty poor by comparison. I never considered Iris and Bill rich, but I knew from Bill that ambition got you what you wanted. I always made my rich friends pick me up and drop me off at Holder’s corner so they wouldn’t see our little house. I didn’t realize that I was popular enough with the other kids to have held my own regardless of our modest life at home. Sadly, I didn’t think that way then, though. Foolish false pride! I do regret that insult to Mom and Dad. Daddy toyed with buying a two-story house a few doors up from the Ferrys on 41st Street. I know now it was just “Daddy Talk” but back then it was so hopeful. I decorated that house and designed the garden landscaping hundreds of times in my mind. I remember planning to have some geese to weed the strawberry patches. Daddy’s idea (just talk, again) of moving to Walla Walla, Washington was exciting for the same reason. We didn’t have top sheets on our beds. Even the kids at camp came with top sheets for sleeping out in tents. I love sleeping under just a blanket to this day. But I keep top sheets on the beds by convention, I suppose. The bad cars were the bane of all our existences, but there was simply never enough money for a new one (not that Dad would rather have had one knowing his absolute passion for fixing up junkers.) He could take any engine apart and put it back together blindfolded. Both Bob and I got our automotive and tinkering knowledge from him. I was always trying to get Dad to be neater. We kids were forever cleaning up his junk piles and hiding them behind the garage, but we never could keep up with him. I even made a sign that read: “A PLACE FOR EVERYTHING AND EVERYTHING IN ITS PLACE” and put it up in his workshop. He was very amused by it. You know as well as I do, it didn’t work. We were poor, but I knew I wouldn’t always be poor. And I never blamed or connected our meager means to any failing of Mom and Dad. Somehow we all knew not to ask for things. They did all they possibly could do and I could see that they were both working their fingers to the bone for us. I never doubted their devotion and sacrifice for their kids, and that was that. I only wish I had done more for them later on.

I went to Chicago to visit Grandma and Grandpa Hobson with Billy Johnson and his mom and dad. I must have been about ten. We went to Marshall Field’s for lunch and ordered from a kid’s menu in the shape of a huge giraffe. I bought a toy for Bob—a little roller coaster with tin cars that traveled over the tracks. When we got home, Tom Johnson sat me down and scolded me for not thanking anyone for their kindness. I never told Mom or Dad about that incident. Because he had embarrassed me, I never ever liked Tom Johnson after that, but I never forgot to thank anyone ever again, either.

On Halloween, take your pocketknife and notch the rims of a large wooden thread-spool. Wrap a long string around it. Insert a big nail in the spool hole for an axle. Press the spool against a house’s window or siding and pull the string. Makes a loud and awful racket. In junior and senior high I designed and painted Halloween designs on storefront windows every year. My most memorable effort was a satire on going to the airport to watch the “motorboat races,” which was junior high code for going to the airport to park and make out. I think I painted monsters racing the motorboats. I feared real punishment if any authority figured out the symbolism. But no adult ever figured it out. In fact, it was so subtle no one ever figured it out, except me. One year, someone put watermelon rinds in the Peterson’s chimney because they did not give out treats. They turned off the lights and pretended they weren’t home. We always thought Ray Rohrer or Butch Hannah did it. We heard stories about people heating up pennies before giving them to the kids, and of others greasing their steps with butter so the kids would slip and fall, or of old crabs bringing out a big pan of soapsuds pretending it was popcorn and then throwing it on the trick-or-treaters. Probably all urban myths. I never turned over an outhouse myself, but I don’t know if Bob ever did. Seems like he was always in some kind of trouble, though. I do know he really liked to play with matches. I never went on a hayride because I was too young to have a girlfriend to take. Iris went on many, though. They died out in popularity as horses disappeared from the small farms around Moline. When I was about seven, Iris dressed me up as a girl and took me to a church Halloween party. I remember bobbing for apples and getting water up my nose. Not one person guessed I was a boy because she did such a good job with my spit curls and introduced me as “Daisy Guild.” At least, I think that was the reason.

Poor Sonny Joiner had no dad. He was the same age as I was, and I always really liked him. He was one of those little kids who was always giggling. Everything was a surprise to him. I guess maybe because he had so little in his life. (There’s a picture of Sonny in the camp picture in Bob’s chapter. Sonny is just on the right side of the gate.) He lived in a tiny house with his working mom on Fortieth Street, next door to the Smiths, another family without a father. It was suspected that Sonny was a Peeping Tom. Mind you, I never witnessed this and could never believe it. The girls swore they saw him watching them through the window as they took a bath. They may have only imagined this. If he did so, it was from a distance, because standing close to the house, the clear part of the window is too high to peer into. When the girls told Dad about this, he told them to yell if they caught him doing it again and he’d catch him and give him a lickin’. (Dad was a very fast runner.) One evening (it had to be in the late fall because the gardens were down) at about twilight, Dad was away and one of the girls was taking a bath. Whoever it was (probably Carol) yelled that Sonny was peeping again. I ran out, and sure enough, there he was, running away. At age twelve or thirteen, I was a very fast runner, too, and caught up with him near Britz’s barbed-wire fence. I grabbed him and pushed him to the ground. He went into a fetal defense position with his back up against a fence post. As I started pounding him in the shoulder, I was aware of his breath, both the heat and smell of it. This was the first time I had ever struck anyone in anger. I said nothing and he didn’t seem to resist. He just cowered and started to cry. I instantly felt terrible and was overwhelmingly filled with the most awful remorse. I stopped hitting him and got up. I have a vague recollection of someone urging me to hit him in the face, but I can’t remember exactly who that was, I don’t think it was Bobby. Maybe Billy Johnson or Ray Rohrer. But I didn’t hit him in the face. I let him get up and he sort of just slithered off along the fence toward his home. A few days later, when we were playing Kick The Can at Roger, Gano, and Stevie Smith’s house, Sonny’s mother came to the fence and told me something that will forever haunt me. She told me that the very day I had chased and punched Sonny, he had had an operation on an undescended testicle and that he had fresh stitches down there. She said I could have really hurt him. I did not answer her, because, of course, in those days you didn’t answer back to adults. I don’t know if she ever found out about his peeping, but I never struck another soul in my life. I missed his friendship, which was naturally lost.

I had no early awareness of the threat to our freedom and the deadly implications of the real war. When the war broke out in Europe in 1938, I was only two. Later on, I remember playing with little metal war toys like tanks and planes and guns, and calling playmates “Dirty Japs” while pulling the corners of our eyelids up and making buck teeth, and doing “Heil Hitlers!” with the end of a black comb held under our noses for a short mustache. Late in the war, I remember reading Iris’ (she was about fourteen or fifteen, then) mushy Victory Letters from her older boyfriends in the service and getting caught and tattled on for it. The letters had Disney cartoon characters (like Mickey Mouse riding on a bomb) and some “win the war” slogan and many of the letters’ words had been censored with black lines for troop security. I can still clearly here Gabriel Heater saying, “Oh, there’s bad news tonight,” as he grimly detailed the latest battles and reported statistics counting the dead, wounded, or missing in action on his evening radio program. Grampa had a son (Uncle Lloyd) in action and followed the war closely and often made comment about it to Dad, but Mom, who called Grampa “Dad,” pleaded with him not to scare us kids. When Gabriel Heater said, “Oh, there’s good news tonight,” we were all happy—especially Mom. I did know Uncle Lloyd (who I liked because he used to bring me Superman toys when I was little) was in New Guinea in the Signal Corps in the war. He gave me a Japanese flag that had blood on it and some old Japanese money as well as some U.S. Occupation Scrip money when he came home wounded. One of Iris’ very short boyfriends gave me a pair of his white, bell- bottomed sailor’s pants with lots of buttons and a drawstring, which I cherished and practically lived in. I was aware of the scarcity of sugar and coffee but never made the connection to Hawaii and the war in the Pacific. We were lucky to have ten Food Ration and three Gasoline Ration books in the family. Dad said we never bought that much of the stuff made scarce by the war except gas, anyway. I don’t remember suffering from rationing, though I know Daddy “rolled his own” during the war and silk stockings were very scarce. I can distinctly still see Iris drawing a fake silk stocking seam-line down the back of Mother’s just-shaved legs with an eyebrow pencil as Mom stood teetering on a chair. Then Mom applied leg makeup to Iris’ legs and drew the same lines on her. Victory gardens were new to many but not to our family. We’d had what I thought was a huge vegetable garden ever since we’d moved in. Dad and Grampa were excellent gardeners, but John Reichenberg was considered the best and most often consulted about growing requirements and how to deal with pests. (His solutions usually involved DDT.) John had a large collection of seed catalogs, which everyone borrowed to order their seeds and which we loved to look at to see all the strange things you could grow that you never heard of. Tomato-seed saving and sharing took place in the early days, but later on, we bought new baby plants every year. I can clearly see myself bending over to water them with tin cans full of water scooped from a rusty bucket carried over from the well. We displayed a Victory Garden placard with its large letter “V” as proudly as anyone else did, anyway. Mom also displayed a gold-fringed banner with one blue star on a white square surrounded by red, which denoted to all that her brother was in the war. The scrap drives would have helped get rid of some—if not all—of Dad’s junk, but he said he might need every single piece of it for something and wouldn’t give it up. (I must be a packrat for the same reason. Today, I pride myself on having a complete household, fully stocked and prepared for absolutely any eventuality.) Why we Boy Scouts had Paper Drives, I cannot say. On V-E (Victory over Europe) Day in the late summer of 1945, when I was nine, I distinctly remember standing on the front porch in a misty drizzling rain knowing that this was a big day and feeling a strong sense of pride in America. I tried hard to feel the profundity of the moment but I hadn’t really understood what had been at stake. However, somehow I borrowed the excitement of Mom, Dad, Grampa, and Iris. Mom wanted to go downtown in the car to join into the spontaneous celebration parade that had formed, but Dad wanted to stay home and “get drunk” (though he rarely drank.) I think he was always a little embarrassed that he did not have to go to war because he’d been exempted to take care of his large family by the local Draft Board, while others he knew personally had to go. (He missed both wars: Too young for W.W.I, and too many dependents to take care of for W.W.II.) During the war years, Dad helped the war effort at home by making machine gun parts and tank tracks at John Deere Plow Works, which was converted from farm equipment for the war effort. The lesson I carried away from this was the importance of looking out for Number One. Dad always told us it was important to look out for ourselves first so we could take care of our family, but the country had to come next after that. After V-J DAY, Dad spoke quietly of Japanese atrocities with Mom in one of their quiet early morning breakfast conversations. He didn’t know I was awake in the next room with only a thin cloth curtain between us. As I lay in bed listening, and being only ten, I was mortified at the stories he was relating and decided I would never go to any war. Once, the Royal American Shows, a traveling carnival that came to Moline annually, had an exhibit of Japanese atrocities that Daddy took me inside a tent to see. Really gross black and white photos of dead American soldiers and a few wax recreations of mutilated Japanese bodies petrified me. It was so real. There was even a wax replica of Tojo, the emperor of Japan, who was made hideous with overlarge buck teeth and round black wire- rim glasses. I was petrified. However, to really screw with my head, at that same carnival I swear I saw the pubes of some exotic dancer up on a stage when her skimpy dress blew aside. A carnie barker stood nearby enticing the farmers to enter the tent for a better look. I swear.

When we were about eleven, Billy Johnson got a sad, old, brown and white Shetland pony named Gypsy. She was blind in one eye, had patches of fur missing and was swaybacked and fat. We all thought she was very wonderful though, and that only someone as rich as the Johnsons could ever afford such a luxury. All the neighbor kids gathered around to see her when she arrived. Tom Johnson, who we all feared because of his stern manner and deep voice, stood watching from the porch as Billy rode Gypsy around the peony bushes in the middle of their beautiful side yard. Billy dismounted, and holding his new pony by the rein, invited all of us to pet her. Suddenly, Ray Rohrer, the terror of the neighborhood, came running up from his house in the rear and mounted Gypsy Roy Rogers style by leapfrogging over her rump up onto her back. She whinnied and snorted and Tom Johnson just came unglued. Gypsy went back to the farm she came from shortly after that because, “You kids couldn’t act civilized around her.” To replace the pony, they got Billy an older brother at the local orphanage. Ruth and Tom decided he needed companionship to solve what they perceived as a discipline problem. (Actually, they were just Fascistic about his obeying what we Guilds considered absurd, overly-strict rules.) Trouble was, the trial brother, though he was a nice boy who could make the most realistic crepe paper roses, was well into raging puberty and fell in love with every eligible girl in the neighborhood, so, unfortunately, he was never home to be Billy’s companion. He went back just like Gypsy. No, not to the farm! To the orphanage.

Ours was a world of bicycles. Bikes were our life in the Forties. I never had a new one, but I made mine look new by painting it over and over. I’m sure it looked hand-painted but I thought it was just fine and I loved it to death. You may imagine the kids with new bikes probably lorded it over us, but kids weren’t like that in those days. Daddy taught me to ride my bike in less than ten minutes on the dirt road in front of the house and bragged to John Reichenberg, who had been watching us from his rutabaga patch, that I was the fastest learner he’d ever seen. What Daddy didn’t know was that I had taught myself on Iris’ bike by hanging on to the tomato-ripening shelf on the north side of the garage. Bobby would just give me a push to get me started as I let go of the shelf. Next, I’d fall over. Eventually, I got it. I never bothered to tell Dad I’d been practicing. We were in heaven whenever they regraveled our roads, because we could spit rocks by starting our bikes out with a powerful first peddle. You’d get one peddle all the way up, stand up on it, and then really lunge downward quickly with your stronger leg and take off with rocks flying. Stopping in the gravel was more dramatic and a real art form. You would brake and let the back wheel slide out in a circular motion, putting your stabilizing leg down to the ground at the very last possible moment. This made a great noise and gravel sprayed everywhere. When you got good at it, you could turn your bike completely around and end up facing in the same direction you had started from. I easily learned to ride without holding the handlebars, but I attempted standing up on the seat only once (like Ray Rohrer could), and ended up with a knee full of gravel. We never really went very far from home on our bikes. We did ride up to Fredrickson’s Market on 23rd Avenue to get Mom a pack of Marvel cigarettes pretty often. We never got extra money for a pop or candy; just the twenty cents for the pack of cigarettes. A penny apiece. They never refused to sell cigarettes to kids in those days. Didn’t even need a note. When Mom’s “cigs” went from twenty to twenty-two cents a pack, Mom said she was going to quit. Right. I was allowed to ride my bike the mile or so to Coolidge Junior High School. There was a sea of bikes in huge bike racks out back. No need to lock your bike because none was ever stolen. I dreaded riding my bike back home though, because I had to go by the Forrester’s two huge police dogs, who always chased me and barked ferociously. I tried to find a way around them, but that was the only route I could take unless I lifted my bike over several fences and walked it through the ravine in Ferry’s Woods. I used to keep a pocketful of kitchen matches, which I’d light and throw at the dogs because I’d heard animals feared fire. They didn’t even notice. Finally, Dad went over there and complained that the dogs bit at me and ripped my good pants. Forrester said he needed the dogs to protect the stacks of soda pop he stored in his front yard for his distributorship. Dad told him if he didn’t keep the dogs tied up he’d put rags on the wheels of his car, and the dogs would break their necks when they chased and bit them. The dogs were fenced in after that. Sometimes we would ride our bikes at night in huge groups. This made Mom a nervous wreck, but Daddy always said, “The boys have to sow their wild oats, Ethel; leave them be,” which I never understood; but he said that a lot, especially when Mom said no to a new adventure Daddy would be planning for Bob or for me. To appease her, Daddy got me a bicycle light that ran off a little generator connected to the front wheel rim. The faster you went, the brighter it shined and when you stopped, it would stay lit then fade out in a minute or two. I also had four different bells and a treasured ooga horn on my bike’s handlebar. The carrier in the back was for giving rides, and I never put a basket in front because only girls did that, or so the bike myth went. Some kids put playing cards where the spokes would strike them to create a motor-like sound. Daddy made mine of thin steel bands, which were very loud and convincing as a motor, but eventually they had to come off when they started to wear through the spokes. Bob’s bike had a chain guard, which I envied. Mine didn’t. I can’t remember how many pairs of pants got chewed up in the chain, but thinking about it reminds me of the image of all these young boys walking around with their right pants leg rolled up. Some of the wimpier kids had a metal band that fitted around their trouser leg to hold it away from the chain.

Ray Rohrer and I were unlikely friends. I was a quiet kid just trying to please everyone. Ray was a real tough acting kid who could cuss like a man. We went bike riding together often, and he would brag about all of the bad things he had done. He told me his front tooth was broken in a fight he had with a big kid from Villa Park. Later, I found out it was broken when he fell off his bike. He was the quintessential loudmouth. When he was around he was in charge and dominated all the conversation. He had a much older brother, Dick, who still lived at home and was always bossing him around, so I guess he was just getting even by acting tough with everyone else. He loved to tell dirty jokes, which I didn’t understand at all, but I got a lot of my sex education when he explained them. He also showed me my first “eight-page bible” featuring Popeye and Olive Oil. I was astounded by what I saw. Once we went to the big woods behind Swanson’s on our bikes and rode along the creek, carrying our bikes where we couldn’t ride. I was exhausted and wanted to go back, but he said to stop being a weeny. We were nearly to Coaltown Road, when he showed me his hideout—a cave in the side of the hill in which he had installed a floor made of flattened-out cardboard boxes. There he produced two corn-silk cigarettes he had rolled in newspaper, which you wet with your tongue before you lit it so it burnt slowly. I tried one. It was really strong and burst into flames at one point. He also taught me to cuss which amused him no end. I think he hung out with me to make himself look tougher by comparison. I liked and admired Ray Rohrer’s toughness but even more so, his badness.

Dad never wanted anyone to get hurt on his land and was very cautious when others came over to visit us or to work with him or to use his tools. This is not to say many of the projects he himself initiated were not sometimes dangerous. But when others came over, safety was always his first concern. That’s why we were all amazed when he proposed his idea on how he was going to build his new garage. Dad just assumed all the neighbors would come over and he would have a garage raising like an old barn raising. We walked from house to house, and in his most charming manner, promoted his project, set the date, and promised a big ham dinner to everyone afterwards. The only one he didn’t tell was Mom—until one day before when he brought home this huge ham. She was really upset because he was expecting over twenty people. Virginia had to scamper around to come up with the rest of the food and help Mom prepare it. Virginia was skeptical, as I remember and warned Dad (she was never intimidated by him) in her inimitable way when she said—only half kidding, “Floyd Guild, if we make all this food, there better be someone here to eat it!” And darned if he didn’t pull it off just as he had planned it. A fine garage was built in a day. A sad footnote to this story was that George Rohrer, who had helped build our garage on that day, tried the same thing a year later but nobody came, not even Daddy, so he built his garage all by himself. Daddy unashamedly noted that George’s garage roof sagged in the middle and ours was straight as an arrow. Some’s got it. Some don’t! Daddy’s garage soon boasted a forge with a hand-crank bellows, which mesmerized me as its fire glowed white hot and spit red and yellow sparks. He had both a wood-turning lathe and a metal turning lathe, several grinding wheels, steel and brass-brush burnishing wheels, a table saw, a band saw, a jig saw, and a drill press. He was an excellent arc welder who could make neat, perfect welds. He also had an acetylene torch for gas welding and cutting metal. He could make all the parts he needed for his inventions right there in his work shop. Bob and I, and the girls as well, spent hundred if not thousands of hours watching him fix and build things in that garage.

Of all of Daddy’s inventions the tree sprayer was his pride and joy. The chassis was from an old Willys car which he cut down with his acetylene torch, then fastened all the parts together with his arc welder. We were always warned not to look directly at the welding arc or the sparks, but we’d peek anyway. How could we resist? (Today, welding fumes have been associated with causing scleroderma.) He reconfigured the transmission to carry larger tires because I think he wanted to be sure it would have enough power to go up a hill with the sprayer tank full. A hundred-gallon drum was eventually replaced with a huge wooden spray tank that came from King’s Apple Orchard. Dad built the pump for it from parts. It made a horrible racket when the tractor and the sprayer were running at the same time. The whole thing sort of jumped around and vibrated. He wore a mask when he sprayed, but he almost always got drenched in either DDT or Malathion. I got drenched more than once, too, I know. He had hopes that all the neighbors would pay him to spray their orchards but he never got up the nerve to ask them. Otherwise, the sole purpose of the contraption was to spray our orchard of a dozen trees with the greatest of ease. Even Oscar Peterson, with his small commercial orchard, got along just fine with a hand-pumped sprayer. Daddy’s sprayer was way overkill for sure, but I know how much he loved building it. We also used it as a tractor to level the dirt driveway when we first graveled it. I remember Dale McFarland telling me he could have done it faster with a shovel. Dale just didn’t get it. Daddy swore his way was less work. This was arguable, because as I drove the tractor Daddy guided this huge two-handled metal scoop (that only a very strong man could have managed) attached with a chain behind the tractor, shouting out to go faster or slower or, “Stop, damn it!” at the top of his lungs. Of course, everything Daddy did drew a crowd. They came to see what he’d do next, or maybe they were just watching and waiting to see if he’d kill himself. We also dug the ditch behind the garage, where we dumped the used washing machine water, the same way. Occasionally, later on, when Dad worked in the experimental department at Deere’s, (where he invented at least four important devices for tandem plows, plow lifts, and harrows. And sorry, no royalties in those days, just a, “Gee, thanks, Casey.”) he’d bring home a tractor for a day or two in the spring to plow our truck garden. He’d go to work as usual, leaving the tractor at home. I (and maybe Bob) would take the tractor around and plow the neighbor’s gardens for five dollars. I am vague on this, but we must have never gotten caught, because, if we had, we would have surely been murdered. We had learned to drive the tractor and maneuver the plow when Bob and I planted a half-acre of popcorn on McFarland’s empty lot. I remember I plowed many other gardens that year (with Daddy supervising, of course) that my right biceps became huge from lifting the plow up at the end of the furrow runs (where you turned around), and lowering it again at the beginning of the next furrow row.

The Peterson’s were old-fashioned Swedish disciplinarians who brought their children up in a world of fear and threats in what Mom called, “Old World ways.” Mrs. Peterson was a dour, moody lady who moved her large body very slowly and said little. Mr. Peterson was a tiny guy with a thick Swedish accent who worked from morning to night in his little orchard. If we spilt our milk, Mom would say, “The darn milk spilt itself, now we have to clean it up,” and that would be end of it. Not at the Petersons. An immediate horrific slap in the face was Mrs. Peterson’s response, as we watched in terror when her daughter Eileen broke a plain drinking glass on the sidewalk. We were never allowed in their house. The kids were forced to study for so many hours a day or take a beating. Their choice. Somehow, Eileen grew up to be the sweetest person you could imagine, but I think the harsh rules made both boys a little troubled, especially Billy. He was a very complicated kid who delighted in bullying and teasing other kids. He was nice to Bob and me because he lived so close and feared trouble from his father, or worse, from ours, if he were to taunt us. However, I came to really not like him. When we were, maybe, ten years old, he decided to kill some kittens with his BB gun. The kittens were in a rusty old burn barrel when he called Bob and I over to watch. I was so mortified that he would really kill the animals that I ripped the gun out of his hands and ran away with it. The sharp sight on the barrel ripped his palm wide open as I whisked the gun away. He was my enemy after that because he couldn’t tell on me without getting a beating for threatening the kittens. I was actually proud to be his enemy because he was so mean to everyone. We really got back at him one day when Bob and I were walking through his strawberry patch in a tremendous rainstorm with him. The patch was so muddy and the mud so deep that he got stuck knee-deep and couldn’t move. We just left him there and didn’t tell anyone.

The big kid in Daddy loved fireworks. He’d bring home a big brown paper bagful every Fourth. We could hardly wait for it to get dark. These were the timid sort of fireworks meant for kids. There were fountains that spit and hissed out red and green fire, and sometime an expensive one or two that spewed gold stars; red, green, and gold roman candles that got pretty high in the air; naturally. sparklers; and a couple of pinwheels which Daddy tacked to the clothesline pole. They made a furious whooshing sound while throwing off incredible sparks but petered out before you knew it. We went to the public fireworks display put on by the Moline Daily Dispatch in Soul Bowl in Silvis. We laid on the hillside surrounding the playing field to watch. Mom made more oohs and aahs and mmms than anybody, and we all wished they’d go on forever, but they were always over way too soon. Sometimes we caught chiggers in the grass there. Daddy loved ladyfingers. He’d unravel the interwoven fuses of these chains of tiny Chinese firecracker so they’d last longer and light them one- by-one with his Lucky Strike cigarette. He’d hold one between his heavily callused thumb and forefinger and light it—not at all to the delight of Mom. The trick was to squeeze it, so that when it exploded, the explosion would exit through the end instead of the sides, which would have burned your fingers. Both Bob and I were encouraged to try this as Dad bragged that only he could perform the stunt. We both burned our fingers, but he’d just say, “Now, I suppose your going to tell me that hurts,” then laugh his head off. One year, he got in trouble with a neighbor whose kid tried this trick and somehow burned his face a little. Dad never stopped performing his trick, however. Bobby and I loved one-and-a-half-inch firecrackers and devised a way of propelling small cans into the air with them. We’d find a round snuff can with a snug-fitting lid and poke a hole near the base, stick a firecracker inside, pull its wick out through the hole, replace the lid, set it lid-side-down on a fence post, light the fuse and run. We got some of them thirty feet into the air. It usually ended when, overzealous for height, we put too many firecrackers in and blew up the can. Dangerous, what? Once, Bob blew up a model plane he’d made. That was neat. Herby Spahn had a fireworks stand up on 23rd Avenue for a few years. He’d make several trips down to Saint Louis, Missouri, and come back with his car loaded to the roof with every manner of fireworks. (If that car had ever caught fire—CABLOOEY!!!) His stock included every firework imaginable, including skyrockets which cost as much as five dollars each, and Bob’s favorites, the whistling Bottle Rockets we called “Buzz Bombs” that went “zzzzzzzt!” and suddenly stopped and fell back to earth, and the ever- dangerous M-80’s. There was a chicken-wire fence between the customers and the goods tables to prevent stealing and for fire safety. Herb would give us a few freebies if we “hung on the fence” acting as shills to bring customers into his roadside tent. I think I liked the foreign-looking graphics and colored tissue wrappers almost as much as the fireworks themselves. I was fascinated by Snakes and the putrid smell of them as they grew into a long gooey ash that left stains on the sidewalk for generations. I long for home fireworks still, but unfortunately our brilliant politicians, who want to save everyone from their poor stupid selves, think otherwise. CAMPBELL’S ISLAND

The Campbell’s Island Bridge is approached via the road that goes by the Illinois State Hospital at Watertown, Illinois. Campbell’s Island itself is just off the shore in the Mississippi River. In my memory, it is small and heavily wooded. It had, then, about a dozen typical nondescript Illinois river houses on a road that made a neat loop around it. Harry and Bessie Means lived there for a while before they took over managing (and living at) Camp Mansur, the Boy Scout Camp. I must have been eight and Bob seven years old or so when the following incident happened. I swear this is true. It was one of those insufferably muggy Midwestern summer nights. Dad said, “Come on boys. Were going for a ride. (I don’t believe he ever told Mom just where we were going when we took off on an outing. She’d just tell him to be back at certain time for meals.) He put his .22 rifle in the back seat with a box of shells and we all sat up front as we always did on our never-ending outings. We seldom knew where we were going or when we would come back. But that night we were off to Campbell’s Island. We crossed the short bridge and drove up the dark, tree-lined dirt road to the Means’ place. Daddy told us to stay in the car, which he never did before, and grabbed his gun just as Harry came out onto the porch in an agitated state. We had a peaceful life, so behavior like this was really strange to us, and we instantly got the heebie-jeebies. Bobby told me to go listen at the screendoor, which was up a pretty long flight of outside steps. Up I went, but I was afraid to go to the top for fear of being caught in the porch light, which was intensely bright. And there, faintly, I heard Daddy say they had to shoot him. I panicked and ran back to the car and told Bobby they were going to shoot a man and dump him in the river. We were petrified and rolled up the windows and sat in the stiflingly hot car. Through a dark space between the house and the garage, we thought we saw Daddy and Harry go out a side door, and head toward the ink-black river. There was a distant report of a rifle. The droning racket of the crickets stopped, then after a moment, resumed. We saw Daddy and Harry come back directly and go into the house. Daddy came back out to the car a little later with a strong smell of whiskey on his breath. He asked us why the windows were rolled up. I didn’t know what to say or feel. I accepted that Daddy had killed someone and that is was for a good reason and never said anything about it. A long time later, I overheard Harry Means talking about the time he had to put down his hunting dog, and that Daddy had helped him. I never told this story to anyone until I was an adult because it made me feel so stupid.

When I skipped fourth grade, I ended up in the classroom of Miss Carlson, an ex-nun, who was fired after one semester because she failed to teach us any lessons. Instead, she had us spend the entire semester making papier- mâché marionettes. (She also took some of the kids for rides in her airplane—this, in a time when few women even drove—without the school’s or the parent’s permission.) The puppets were for a show we were to give at the end of the semester. I made a farm boy puppet from built-up-layers of sculpted cigarette papers and library paste. The little limbs and hands and feet were carefully jointed. We painted the hands and face and then lacquered them. This all took months to do. Mom made a little pair of overalls and a red shirt for my marionette. After Miss Carlson’s folly was discovered and she didn’t appear at school one day, we all decided they had whisked her off to jail. She never came back. All I know is that the school confiscated all the puppet stuff, and I never got mine back. Those bastards!

My school years are so well documented in the family scrapbook I don’t need to say much about it except that (SURPRISE) I did not adore school. I could hardly wait for summer vacation, and when it came I wished it would never end. School was hard and running around barefoot and playing wasn’t, I guess. I have no idea why I felt this way. I was a good student because Mom and Dad keep telling us an education was the route to a better life, so I just toughed it out, but I never ever liked it that much, ever. If I were in charge, I’d let kids run around with their shoes off until they were ten, and only then send them off to school.

In sixth grade, when I was eleven, I broke my arm when I fell while trying to play Crack The Whip before I had really learned to ice skate. It didn’t help that my first pair of skates were used girl’s figure skates (in white, yet) instead of hockey or racing skates. Dad had to pay seventy-five dollars to get my arm set. Later, he tried to get the fire department, who were responsible for the upkeep of the Riverside Park ice skating pond, to pay, but they wouldn’t. He never complained to me about the cost and told me he was sorry I broke my arm. He said he thought we had learned pretty good before he left us alone at the rink that night. I think he felt sort of responsible, but, even so, I still believe leaving kids to figure stuff out and to make their own mistakes is the best idea. I know he believed that, because he knew toughing it out would strengthen us, and I’m positive it did. The news squiggle about my accident in the Moline Daily Dispatch stated I had “fractured” my right wrist, which didn’t sound sufficiently severe to me. They should have said it was “broken” so my friends would be more fully impressed. But I did get lots of brownie points for crafting a three-dimensional map of the Yucatan Peninsula with my left hand for sixth grade geography class. I merchandised that one into an A-plus. It was probably the green ricrac palm trees that did it!

ART

High school set me on the trail of art. I was as good as the rest of the family at art but no better, really. I think I may have just liked it more. It was in twelfth grade that I decided art would be my life work. You all know how all that turned out.

THE PLAY’S (ALMOST) THE THING

I enjoyed being on both sides of high school productions by doing the sets and also taking an acting or singing part. The pinnacle of my acting career was performing in a play called “Cuckoos on the Hearth” without knowing my lines. In fact, only one person in the cast knew her lines reliably. The rest of us simply faked it by making up our lines while Miss Rosenberg, our panic-stricken drama teacher, stood in the wings trying to figure out when we’d finished each act so she could ring down the curtain (and probably petrified that she was going be fired for her incompetence.) The play was a long complicated mystery thriller, so making it make sense, as we made up our lines, was a challenge. Afterwards, the girl who memorized her lines broke down and cried because she had been forced to change her lines to accommodate the rest of us who all thought it was a hoot, and, arrogantly I suppose, never even considered we might be making fools of ourselves. One other thing I remember about the high school drama stuff was a classmate named Herman Zimmerman, who became the Production Designer for all of the Star Trek TV shows and movies and sequels. He was the only kid I knew who ever spoke with an affected theatrical English Mayfair accent in high school. He got the lead in everything, played the violin, sang beautifully, and got straight A’s. You can imagine what the athletes thought of him. One of the most talented, respected, and richest guys in Hollywood, now. Classmate Maynard Swanson became a Federal Judge and Don Swenson became the Governor of Tennessee, though he never made the honor society. No one else from our class reached fame except for Stan Leech, who became Mayor of Moline, of course.

In 1952, at age sixteen, I got my first car to drive to Moline High School. My ’36 Chevrolet. The robin’s egg blue was my idea but Daddy never top- coated it with clear lacquer so it was a totally bizarre matte flat looking thing. Because it had no parking brake, I couldn’t stop or park on steep hills, so I had to plan my routes accordingly. The seats were filthy and tattered. I bought brown and white houndstooth check mesh seat covers with my own money because the seats were so embarrassing to me. But it did run okay; Dad saw to that. We’d buy “a dollar’s worth of gas” to cruise around Moline. I drove it to Chicago with Herman Nelson, my best friend in high school, one New Year’s Eve. Without permission, of course. I learned to drive on Dad’s homemade tractor and on a long car trip to Brainerd, Minnesota to Grandpa Dan Guild’s funeral with Dad and Bob in 1947, when I was only eleven years old. The only condition was that if I wanted to drive, I had to agree to drive half of the way. I remember that. Thing is, I wouldn’t go over bridges. I’d pull to the side and refuse to cross. Our loving daddy said to his courageous son, “God dammit kid. Move over,” and he’d get out, go around, get back in and drive over the bridge. But once across, he’d make me take the wheel again. Tough love! Coming home, I drove over the last bridge because he refused to. “Okay, we’ll just sit her forever,” I can recall him saying that like it was yesterday. I was sure we were going over the edge and we’d all drown. Bobby just sat in the back and laughed his head off as I white-knuckled my way across. I still have bad dreams of losing control of my car on bridges. Strangely, given my fear of water, I have never learned to swim. When I finally applied for my Driver’s License (no test, back then) and paid my twenty-five cents at the U.S. Postal Station (just a little booth in Schlegal’s Drug Store in Highland) I had already been driving for over four years. In Driver’s Ed, I was allowed to take the “Road Time” off after the teacher saw I could drive. I can’t remember how the ’41 Ford came into my life. Was it a trade- up from the ’36 Chevy or Bob’s and my car together (like many things we shared) or was it always Bob’s car, and in my mind I wanted it to be mine? Can’t remember. Anyway, the car was black with lots of chrome and a radio. A hundred fifty bucks—like new! I loved that car. It finally brought a modicum of car respectability to Guild family transportation.

Found out I had a 149 I.Q. (Frank insists this is simply not possible.) Won a poetry contest with a really juvenile poem about a clock. Won the Senior Fine Arts Award for Art. Was in 6 plays. Graduated just 21 days after my seventeenth birthday. Managed not to get arrested. Pretended I was a “Hood.” (Bought a pretty long switchblade knife.) Did a lot of stuff Mom and Dad would have killed me for if they’d known I did it. Graduated Honor Society in top 10 of my class of 300. Wrote a comedy review for the ADC Fellowship show. I was never aware of social class until high school. I learned there were kids much richer but also many much poorer than we were. I was aware of the Korean War and happy to be too young for the draft. I was terrible in PE (though I tried hard) but truly excelled in art.

I sometimes regret not having gone to college right after high school, only because I’m curious if I might not have become an architect. A subtle lesson I learned going through school is that you can make people like you by being nice to them. I worked hard to make my teachers like me which paid off in more attention and better scholastic achievement for me. As Mom so often said, “It doesn’t cost you a dime to be a gentleman.”

In 1953, when I was about seventeen, there was a ferocious rivalry between Moline and East Moline guys. This reached very dangerous proportions for my best friend, Herman Nelson, and myself when we got East Moline girlfriends. We heard these guys were looking for a fight with Herman because he’d stolen some hood’s girl. Herman, who was very tough acting, (and had a real DA haircut and wore real Aviator sunglasses and black engineer’s boots) stepped right up to it and walked into the Chocolate Shop in East Moline and announced himself. He was immediately escorted to the alley and beaten up. The three other members of our gang—Sig Eckburg, Jerry Edlund, and Bill Adams—and I were waiting outside in my car when Herman came running out with a bloodied nose demanding we speed directly to his house where he got his .22 pistol. He said he was going to go back to shoot the guy who, “broke my freaking nose.” We were on the way back with the gun, when we all talked Herman into going to the hospital to get his nose fixed so it wouldn’t heal crooked. That did it. His vanity about his looks was much stronger than his need for revenge. We never went back to the Chocolate Shop and Herman dropped the girlfriend, though the guys came looking for us at the Hasty Tasty, our hangout in Moline. I remember, one night, we had to hide under Herman’s car until they stopped cruising around waiting to catch us.

In the early years, Daddy wore heavy, black leather high-top work shoes and white socks except when he dressed up. He usually wore blue chambray shirts and black covert work pants and occasionally suspenders but usually a black belt with a silver military-style buckle without an initial on it. He sometimes wore only a white undershirt vest for a shirt, even on outings in hot weather—I think, maybe, because it showed off his muscles. Daddy had a perfect mesomorphic (athletic) body. Perfectly proportioned body-to-limbs, and well-defined muscles. Anyone looking at him would call him a strong man, which is very comforting in a father. Some of his muscle came from lifting the heavy steel plowshares into the tempering furnace eight hours a day. But some of it came because he was not afraid of any physical work. He’d come home from work and work some more, sometimes very late into the night building something in his work shop, or welding, or turning some metal replacement part on his lathe. His industry gave us our life. Hard work was his life. And, when he stopped working, he started to die, which is all too often the case. When he dressed up in a suit to go out, he was a knockout. He would comb his great mop of long, wavy, jet-black hair straight back as usual, but he’d use hairdressing, a kind of thin oil, which he kept on the dresser. It smelled like roses. When he prematurely grayed (at a very early age) he looked even more dashing. Sometimes he’d go a day or two without shaving saying , “I’m giving my beard a rest.” Mom would finally say after only one day, “Floyd, aren’t you ever going to shave, again?” “Maybe I’ll just grow a beard,” he’d taunt, then go directly and shave off the stubble. More than anything else, Daddy liked to “get a rise” out of people. He took a great chance of being scorned in this, but his happy nature and good intentions always won everyone over to him. This, even more than his candor, made him such a compelling character, and the fact that he was also our dad, was even better. I think he was a hero to all of us kids. We sure liked him, I know that.

It wasn’t until the early seventies, when women were encouraged to reevaluate men’s traditional role in marriage, that Daddy’s authority in family decisions came into question. Now, the woman’s movement is a good movement, which I support wholeheartedly, but after Daddy’s death, some of the girls—and possibly Oprah Winfrey—worked mother over pretty good and tried to get her to revisit her history regarding Dad’s self-appointed authority in terms of the new women’s rights movement. I’m guessing Mom played along with the girls, but I don’t think she ever bought it. I say this because, later on, during one of her long summer visits to California, Mother told me Daddy’s authority never did come into question for her, although she mentioned the girls had taken a hard line about this. “What’s the use,” Mom said. “He’s gone now. What am I supposed to do? Be mad at him? We each had our jobs, and that was that. He was your father. He was a good man and he never hurt a soul in his life.” Those last words were the same words she had said to us kids in the hospital only moments after Daddy died. I could feel that she still believed it, and even better, wanted me to. For me, Dad’s relationship to Mom never came into question, either. He was a hero for taking care of us kids and Grampa and Mom. Being a boy kid, I did not question Dad’s unilateral decision-making power. If that wasn’t fair then, that’s one thing, but it was the way marriages worked. That was his job, I thought, and Mom’s job was different and neither had anything to do with equality. Sharing in the care of all of us was , after all, their prime motivation in life. This was proven over and over and over again. What a fine world it would be if everyone did only that. Dad’s independent actions and unilateral decision making was the norm for responsible men in his time. End of story. If you want to look back on that and call it wrong by today’s standard, go ahead.

My most viscerally remembered connection to Dad was his sharing a handful of peanuts from the penny vending machine at the gas station with me and Bob. Another was sitting close to him listening to our favorite radio programs and waiting for Mom to call us to supper. Such a happy feeling. Also, watching him tinkering for thousands of hours made me want to grow up to be like him. I dreaded hunting rabbits with Daddy. I purposely missed all my shots. Daddy always followed up. Red blood on the white snow and the sight of the rabbit still quivering sickened me. Iris was also an excellent markswoman, hitting beer bottles on a fence rail with a .22 at fifty paces—a real Annie Oakley. Bob was a good shot, too. He caught the hunting bug, I didn’t. Worst punishment: A razor strap spanking (one or two swats—never more) for walking home from school all alone, in a “Blizzard of the Century.” I took the shortcut and trudged though Ferry’s Woods ravine in three-foot-deep snow. Took me three hours. Mother was hysterical when I finally arrived home quite proud of myself. The razor-strap hung on a nail on the back porch next to Daddy’s canvas hunting vest (with all those little pockets for the bullets.) We saw that strap every time we went out. Smart move.

In Minnesota, while we were visiting Grandpa Dan Guild’s grave and pulling weeds on what was to become our last trip there, one of Dad’s crazy sisters, our aunt Myrtle, said, “Let’s dig him up, Floyd, and see what he looks like.” Not a joke, she meant it. If she’d had a shovel, she would have. Creeps! Daddy adored all his relatives in Minnesota. He was very close to his mother and father. Our grandfather Dan was a quite dignified man. I finally realized he was my grandfather in our 1947 trip to his funeral, when I was eleven. Grandma Olive Guild was sweet and adored Bob and me. I remember eating a lunch with her one day. We had fried egg sandwiches and she asked me to cut hers. She said I did it perfectly, although Daddy then scoffed at me because I had cut it directly in half instead of from corner to corner. I thought she was beautiful and tall with pretty hair. Daddy had about seven brothers and sisters and many cousins around Brainerd. I don’t remember them very specifically except Gertie and Myrtle and one of the aunt’s husband whose back was covered in long black hair, which amazed me. I know they were always surprised to see us. I’m sure we just went there unannounced and stayed with them and slept in the attic and ate their food. I remember eating cereal with warm milk right from the cow at Uncle Clarence’s farm and seeing the bright greenish-blue glowing swamp gas and the brilliant swirling Northern Lights that were so bright in 1947, and getting a million mosquito bites and going fishing a lot. But I had no idea all the people we saw were Daddy’s grown brothers and sisters. DADDY’S GIRLS

I think Daddy couldn’t bear to think of his sons-in-law taking away his precious daughters. He was always extremely protective of them. Maybe he knew some men couldn’t be trusted. It seems to me he just hated to see them get married because, then, he wouldn’t be the center of their lives anymore. He never forgave Bill for marrying Iris so young. But as they grew to be old men together, they came to like each other, I thought. He was very grateful to Iris and Bill for all they did for the family in hard times and with special problems Daddy could not solve himself. This was hard for him to admit, but he told me Bill was a good man more than once. In many almost funny ways, Dad made each of his sons-in-law prove their worthiness of each daughter’s hand, but I leave those stories for my sisters to tell. Only Don Bonney ever passed the manhood test (by being a Marine hero, I’ll guess) without having to prove it on the spot. Lucky him! Neither Dad nor Mom ever spoke about marriage or sex with us kids that I can remember. Didn’t matter to me. I doubt they could have added that much. In the country you get that stuff in the backyard pretty early, anyway.

The trips in the car with Bobby and Daddy were probably very significant in our socialization. When we’d get in the car, Dad would tell Mom when we’d be back but never ever tell her where we were going. The girls were rarely included in these trips, though they always wanted to go along. This was Dad’s way of getting us away from “all those girls,” as he put it. It was definitely a guy thing. These little trips were often daily and they had only one theme. Junk. Hugh Chase was Dad’s horse-trading partner and best friend, and we liked him because he often gave us each a whole cold bottle of Kayo, a sweet, weak carbonated chocolate soda, whenever we arrived at his house. He and Daddy would then either trade stuff, often as wildly divergent as guns for furnace parts, or go somewhere else to trade with some other guy. Sometimes there were elaborate three and four-way trades. The upshot of all this bargaining was: Did Daddy get the best of the other guy in the trade? Well, did he? Yes, definitely. And then, retelling how he did it, he’d laugh his head off. We met a lot of people this way. And they were always glad to see Dad because he would always kid around with them. He called everyone “Good Looking” until he could remember his name. He’d bait them with a wild story and get them going and then laugh at them because they fell for it. His laugh was so infectious they’d start laughing, too, even though the joke was on them. I never saw anyone get angry with Dad. He was a charmer.

Guilds have none. Sue Guild, who was like my sixth sister, gave us the hardest time about this and brought this famous Guild trait to the fore. “You Guild’s have the biggest egos I’ve ever seen. Every one of you. It must have been something in that well water.” But it was always in fun. Of course, we are the greatest ever, so you’ll just have to live with that if you’re not a Guild.

SO, WHAT’S IN A NAME?

Why do we say “Guylld” instead of “Gild”? Is this because of the British origin and some old-time weird pronunciation of vowels? Don’t know. Do you? I always say Guild rhymes with “wild” or tell people to just say it like in the song: “Bewitched Bothered and Beguiled,” which would work for Barb and Bob and Brian as well.

Bob and I caught ringworm during an epidemic created when the GI’s brought it back from South Pacific after W.W.II. Some kids permanently lost their hair to X-ray treatments given at an Iowa City clinic. Dr. Louis Arp tweezed off our ringworm scabs, which fluoresced under black ultraviolet light, and applied a blue salve weekly. Dad tried every fungal salve of the day and came up with his own cure in “Kerodin,” an athlete’s foot medicine. This became the standard treatment as soon as doctors Louis and Henry Arp heard about Daddy’s success in curing Bob and me. Daddy suffered from permanently stinky feet until he killed his own fungus with “Spiro Powder,” much to everyone’s delight. Daddy had malaria, which came and went. I remember how much he suffered from one bad bout. He took quinine pills for it. He would be sweating so bad the blankets would get wet and yet he’d say he was freezing with the fever. It was awful. We were warned that “Night Air” was the cause. I guess they didn’t know about the anopheles mosquito, yet. Gramps had rheumatism—he sometimes called it lumbago—that acted up in damp weather. “It’s going to rain. My rheumatiz is acting up,” he’d say. I cannot remember ever being sick as a child. Later, Mom told me that she thought Iris and I were the strongest kids because we were never ever sick. She also told me that when we were very young, and Bob came down with whooping cough, she made him spit in all our mouths to make sure we’d all get it at the same time so she wouldn’t have sick kids—one after the other—all summer long. Everyone caught it but me, but I got quarantined to the house all the same. I do remember having measles, and chicken pox, however. I guess Mom didn’t count these as being sick. Dad told us that, when he was a kid, they pulled out teeth by tying one end of a string to the tooth and the other to a door knob. Then, someone opened the door and the tooth was yanked out. It was probably just a Daddy story but he threatened to do it to us on occasion. I had a tooth out with gas, once, when I was twelve. As I went under, I saw a spinning blue merry-go-round floating over a deep blue lake. I can still remember it. It disturbed me at the time because I thought the merry-go-round would always be in my brain. I was right. It’s still there. When the other kids lined up to have their tonsils out—all on the same day—I was too busy with school activities, or so I said. I was really afraid of the ether because of my wild experience with the gas. I finally had my own out the day before Kennedy was shot. I was at home sitting on my sofa eating potato chips (can you imagine salty chips a day after throat surgery?) when Walter Cronkite came on with the news the president had been shot. Do you remember where you were? On at least three occasions, Mom ran the sewing machine needle through her index finger. She said that if she did it five times she was going to give up sewing. Odd that she’d allow herself to anticipate doing it twice more. I still cringe to my toes thinking about those accidents. Mom’s whole sunburned back skin pulled off in one piece after a long day at Rock River. She never, ever sunbathed again. Carol told me I would scream at the sight of blood, but I am in no way squeamish today. Give me gore, I don’t care. Think she’s wrong about that. I was bitten on the lip by a dog (to whom I would not give his stick) at an age too early to remember, but the scar is still there. I can’t remember which, but one of the girls (I think Carol) had scarlet fever, which was a most serious illness. But she got well. We all believe we won’t get cancer because of all those fresh and home-canned vegetables we ate as kids. Maybe we’re right. Once Mom had a very painful bursitis in her shoulder and Dad made her tough it out by sitting in a rocking chair. It was unbearable to watch our mother suffer and I didn’t like Dad doing that at all. I so prayed that Diana’s leg would get well. I loved her so and thought she was so brave to stand the pain. The thought that she would lose her leg disturbed me so much I prayed to God every night to fix it. Diana’s illness broke my heart. I think it broke Mom’s and Dad’s and everyone’s heart. It was the worst thing that ever happened to our family. But Diana sure turned out good, anyway. Her little girl courage (and that ever smiling little face) made this family tragedy bearable. We owe her.

Daddy could witch water with his divining rod, which he made from a forked willow branch. He held onto the forked part with each hand and the long part would be drawn to the ground like a magnet when it was over water. It would really vibrate. He helped me hold it and it really did move. “Willow is a water-hungry tree. That’s how the rod works,” he told us. Later in life I learned there is some scientific proof of the truth of this. Anyway, he found the spot for the well just outside the kitchen door on the other side of the driveway. Wasn’t he lucky to find it so close to the house, so we wouldn’t have too far to carry the water in? Daddy decided not to dig a typical well. Usually the hole is dug and shored up with planks; then a continuous course of bricks is laid bottom to the top as the boards are pulled out. His great idea was to make these huge cement rings that were three feet high and three feet in diameter with about eight-inch-thick walls. He made a form and poured concrete into it, let it dry, removed the form, and continued pouring until he had cast a dozen of them. It seemed to take him most of the summer mixing the concrete in a cement mixer. Bob and I had great fun using the rings as forts and for hiding from Mom and the girls. Then his real genius took over. He set the first ring where the well would be, climbed inside with a shovel and started digging. By carefully undercutting around the base of the ring as he dug, the great round concrete ring sank into the ground. When its top had descended to ground level, another ring was set on top of it and the digging continued. He had to put the dirt into a bucket when the well started to get deep and Bob and I would pull it up on a winch until that became too hard, and then the neighbors came over to help—probably Dale McFarland and Tom Johnson. When he finished “Floyd Guild’s Well”, as it had become known, it was thirty three feet deep and very secure from a cave-in, which had happened to Tom Johnson’s brick well. Happily, there was one ring left over which we rolled down to the orchard where we played in it forever. This project was considered a “SAFE” project by Mom’s standards though she always warned Daddy not to fall into the well as he descended the ever-longer and longer, narrow homemade ladder into it. Because of the construction, the ground water seeped in between the bottom rings very slowly filling the well and producing sparkling-clean water. But Mom would have had a heart attack if she’d known that Dad and Dale lowered me into the well just before Dad hit water. It was a hot day and I had no shirt on. A thick rough rope was made into a crude halter. I was not scared, for some reason, as Dad and Dale lowered me slowly down. The rope really hurt my back, and it was very cold in the well and I started to shiver uncontrollably. When I got to the bottom, I looked up and just as Dad had promised, I could see the stars in the sky in the middle of the day. It was the thrill of my life. But there was a catch. I was sworn to a pact of father-son secrecy on threat of the razor strap if I ever told Mom. I told her late in life and she claimed she knew it, but I don’t think she did, though Bob may remember that day.

“Oh, yeah?” Dad’s favorite response to anything. “Jesus H. Christ” when he was frustrated. “God damn it” when something he was working on went wrong. “Little Snippers” for kids. “Mother” for Mom. “Good Looking” for any guy whose name he did not know. “Well, I’ll be god-damned son of a bitch!” upon hearing incredible stories. “Red up” for cleaning up, as in “I’ve got to red (ready) up the garage.” “This (whatever) needs a new one.” For anything that was too worn to be fixed. “Pigeon blood” for soy sauce, which Mom never used. Daddy swore a lot like most men, but I never once heard him use an Anglo- Saxon vulgarity. What he called drivers who annoyed him: “Pigeons,” “Halfwits,” or “Slack- jawed.”

MOM

Mom couldn’t quite control me as I was growing up. I got more spankings than anyone else did, except maybe, Bob. She said, “You were my hardest but you grew up pretty darned good anyway.” I think I made her proud of me—eventually. Worst threat of punishment other than the traditional, “Wait until your father gets home.” was, “I’ll send you somewhere where they’ll make you mind.” Banishment! The most terrifying prospect. I always behaved awhile after that one. The most comforting childhood moments with Mom was calling her to my sickbed just so she’d be close. I have fond memories of her combing my hair with water to get me ready for school when I was little. My saddest moment with Mom was when she cried when I left for California. I wanted to say something to comfort her but I couldn’t think of what. I felt so guilty about going so far away from her. This is what Mom said about my not getting married: “Don’t wait until you’re an old man.” What I said, “Don’t worry, I’ll give you plenty of time to get a new dress.” Wasn’t that just so smartass? What Mom said when I asked her if I should tell my brother and sisters about my personal life: “Why would you bother? They don’t tell you about their private lives, do they?” I think she didn’t want to be forced to discuss anyone’s private life with them, ever. I sent Mom and Dad money every payday all my working life. Sometimes only twenty-five dollars, but always something. I knew they were proud of me and I did everything to make them more proud, which actually kept me very competitive and challenged in my work. I was far happier for them than for myself when I won some honor or got a promotion in advertising. Some measure of payback for all their hard work and sacrifice, I suppose. That process made my life very rich and interesting, so they definitely get all the credit. When I was sixteen or seventeen, I used to sit alone with Mom in the kitchen at night. The other kids would be watching TV and Dad would be out in his workshop. I remember she often had a snack—usually a small sandwich like ham or Spam or corned beef and her last cup of coffee with cream for the day. It was a quite time and I could hear her false teeth clicking. She would talk quietly to me about more serious things. Nothing really personal like feelings, of course, but different than conversations in front of the whole family. I felt very privileged and very special for the adult nature of these talks. I can remember her talking about Grampa and what he meant to her. She really missed him after he died. And how she worried about Diana, and how hard Dad had to work to keep it all going. But never ever a complaint of any kind—never, ever. I learned a lot about family problems when Mom and Dad had high-level- decision conversations in the kitchen when they didn’t know I was listening from the davenport in the living room. Daddy would make proposals and Mom would comment. Often he would agree with her assessment and follow her wishes. I feel he really listened to her and wanted her input on important issues. These were definitely problem-solving give-and-take conversations and not at all the same as Daddy’s unilateral pronouncements displayed in front of the whole family. As a kid, one of my most sustaining memories is of setting next to Daddy on the sofa listening to the radio serial shows and waiting for the supper call from Mom. She’d time it so we’d get to hear our last radio serial. The aroma of dinner would be really heavy, and then she’d say, “Okay, you guys. Come and get it before I throw it out.” She said exactly that same thing every single night. She never had to say it twice. We anticipated every meal she made because they were so delicious and we were hungry. We were never allowed to eat between meals because, “That’s what makes you fat,” Mom said. In this memory, I can hear Mom’s true and actual voice of those days. But sadly, today I can hear the timbre of Dad’s voice only as it was much later in life. Mostly in phone conversations, right after I had moved to California. His voice from younger days is no longer in my memory banks. Don’t know why that is except maybe because he’s been gone so much longer. I can, however, hear Dad whistling and singing songs in the car when we were little. I was always acutely aware of how hard Mom worked when I was a kid. You could see the wear on her face at the end of a long day especially whenever a serious problem was occurring at the same time. Her hair, being so fine, would most always be wilted by day’s end. As we got older, she worked even harder to keep up with our growing needs for clothes and counsel and unimaginably huge quantities of foods. Jesse McFarland, Dale’s brother, told me, “Your mom is a saint and the hardest working woman I ever met.” He also said he’d get married only if he could find a woman as good as our mom. This stuck with me. (We kids wished Jesse would marry Iris because we thought he was so handsome.) I was not as aware that Dad was working so very hard, too. I just took all his efforts for granted. Mom’s abiding neutrality in the affairs of her grown family members is something from which we can all learn a lot about integrity, if not loyalty. I never ever heard Mom tell a lie, and I never saw her give one iota less than equal love to each of us. I wish my own life had been as pure and generous. I will forever regret I never got the chance to tell her how much we owed her for those lessons.

There was a certain kind of learned prejudice in Grampa and Daddy. They both knew limericks and songs that discriminated against minorities and occasionally performed these for us kids. (I will not repeat the lyrics I remember here, believing some things just need to “die out,” though I remember them all word for word. Mom was very specific when she told us kids after these events that no person in the world is better than any other person. She gave this speech often and always out of Daddy’s earshot. I think it neutralized those songs for me and along with my own serious problems of being discriminated against, and my liberal education, I feel I am not a prejudiced person today. I’m not sure whether any prejudice was intended or not, but when I was about eight or nine, Daddy took me to the LeClaire Hotel in downtown Moline, and walked me in. Halfway into the lobby, he stopped me and rotated me by the shoulders until I was looking at a black man shining someone’s shoes. The black man had his back to us and did not see us. I was just dumb- struck by his color. Suddenly the man turned around, and with a big friendly smile said, “Would you like a shoe shine, young man?” I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I had only seen white people before. I couldn’t answer. Daddy just said, “Okay, let’s go.” I think he just wanted me to see the man. Nothing more was said, that I can remember. But that was a long time ago. Occasionally I’d hear Dale McFarland complain that black men were coming up from the south and taking many of the jobs at the Farmall plant where he worked in mechanical maintenance. The Swedes and Belgians were everywhere in Moline and I think they took a lot of abuse from people who preferred to think of themselves as “Just Plain Americans.” There were cruel references to their intelligence but I don’t remember the sayings, luckily. One may have been about a Swede being a monkey turned inside out, or something. I hope that all prejudice ends with our generation. I like the saying “No one is free until everyone is free.” About says it all.

Coming of Age. Dad drove me down to Urbana, Illinois, to Robert Allerton Park, a spectacularly landscaped and huge old estate built by its namesake for his betrothed who bolted at the altar and broke his heart. He never married and eventually gave the whole place to the University of Illinois. I went there because I had been selected by the Women’s Club of Illinois for a week of art classes to be given by some of the art leaders of the day. I was sixteen years old. An art professor art teacher from the University of Illinois, Robert Raushenberger, was the most important one to me because I learned something I used all my life from him. This is what I wrote down about it and saved to this day: “To create art you have to be able to see the beauty in the world, and then capture what you’ve seen so others can see it. That beauty, when presented through your art, is Truth, and that truth will be known by anyone who looks at it.” The trouble was, as he told us all this, he was showing us some of his own very abstract paintings. I thought they were beautiful, but they were not about anything I could identify. What in the world was this man talking about? I found out the next day when I carried an ordinary rock from a path to his lecture and aimlessly played with it as he spoke. He took that rock from my hand, looked at it, and saw a whole universe in it. Softly, but tersely, he spoke of its texture, its color, its relationship to the light, and abstract associations the rock made him think of, like the time he picked a piece of loose gravel from the wall of a tenth century English castle. Then he said, “It’s very simple. Everything has beauty if you can see it. How to see beauty is based on the association you make with what you see.” Observing beauty is every artist’s secret skill. After fifty-some years of practicing “seeing,” a walk anywhere is explosively rich with artistic possibilities. I am so grateful to have lived my life with this skill, though sometimes the beauty instills an awe of life within me that is so wonderful I can barely stand it. I’m still trying to learn why that is. Maybe it’s because I fear that is what I will miss the most when I die. It was a pyrotechnic week, artistically. I made two great friends, one boy, and one girl, and wanted it to never end. When Dad came to pick me up, he took one look at me and asked in his always-blunt way, “Did they forget to feed you?” I had lost weight and was extra tan. How could I possible explain to Dad that we had stayed up all night several times that week walking the miles of beautiful trails of the estate just being arty, admiring all the statues, the architecture, the sunrises, the gorgeous gardens, and all the while talking about being artists. It was all so thrilling. How could I tell Dad his son, Bernie Boy, had been immersed in beauty?

This is a dumb remembrance, but it shows Daddy at his best. He wanted me to learn to swim, so he took me to a weedy bank of the Rock River, put a little pair of muslin water-wings on me, and threw me in. I went right to the bottom where I was sure I would die. When I emerged, he grabbed me and I started to cry, which made him very upset. He carried me out of the water because I wouldn’t let go of him and he said, “Well, son, I guess you’ll never learn to swim.” I never have. You got one chance on that kind of stuff with Daddy. Too many other things to do and other kids to attend to. Swimming, being a prerequisite, ended my advancement to becoming an Explorer Scout even though I had earned over twenty merit badges and loved Scouting.

Iris’s era, more than mine. I don’t remember too much about Forties culture except that, after the war, a War Surplus Store popped up in Moline. Daddy was in heaven. More junk—cheap. Bob and I got a small periscope. We didn’t now what to do with it, though. No fences to peer over in our neighborhood. But we found one use. Sis Vergain was the fantasy of every neighborhood boy due to her huge magnificent breasts. So the periscope was going to be our entrée into Peeping Tomism. We planned to watch her undress, but she never left the shade open even a little. What made us think the periscope would make a difference in not getting caught, I cannot imagine. In the Forties I sent for a picture of Jane Russell in “The Outlaw.” It was an eight by ten glossy picture of her posing in a haystack in a skimpy outfit. I think I thought it was not right to have the picture but I wasn’t sure exactly why. I kept it hidden in my dresser drawer, though.

PENNY’S

I saved all the money for art school, from my salary and significant sales bonuses from selling shoes at J. C. Penny’s. I seem to have been a natural salesman. You know, I’d tell the lady four BS things about the shoe and one BS thing about how beautiful her feet were. You betchum, Red Ryder, I saw some beautiful feet all right! When I had saved enough for tuition and a little rent money, it was time to say good-bye to chicken and noodles over mashed potatoes and say hello to…

Day one was a doozie. I was sitting there starring at this huge, naked, black male model who had earlier made his appearance up on the riser in a homemade jockstrap crudely fashioned from what seemed to be and old hand-crocheted lace doily. It was so inadequate in covering him, the instructor told him to “Just take that damn thing off.” Confronting the nude artist’s model was incredibly difficult for me. I became more self-conscious by the moment. I was desperately trying to be cool like the other students, but I just couldn’t. I forced myself to refocus my gaze somewhere beyond the model. It landed directly across the room, where, within the large circle of artist’s benches, sat a young man with short black curly hair and the longest eyelashes I’d ever seen. Now, instead of starring at the model I was starring at him. He winked at me without smiling. I didn’t even blink. Instead, I looked down at the blank sheet of ivory-colored newsprint before me as if studying my drawing. Art Learner, the young, lanky, soft-spoken instructor, ordered the model to change position. Twenty art students noisily flipped their pads to a fresh sheet and immediately started drawing. These were quick sketches so you got exactly one minute to capture the essence of each pose. The model turned away from me, twisted his body and struck a contorted but artful pose. No relief for my anxiety. Now I was pondering his big naked butt. In no way was I ready for all of these feelings. Adding to my distraction, was the beastly heat and wilting humidity of that July morning. Every window in the art studio had been opened, allowing the cacophony of Monday morning traffic on Michigan Avenue to rise up these four stories and additionally crowd my anxiety into a dizzying intensity. If I were a girl, I would simply have fainted. The boy across the room, now completely bemused by my anxiety, motioned for me to follow him as he put down his charcoal and smudge stick and dismounted his bench. He looked shorter when he stood up. He was trim, almost buff in his pressed jeans and crisp white T-shirt, also pressed. Outside, in the hall, he leaned against the wall placing one foot there behind himself for balance and offered me a Newport, which I took, though I’d never smoked. I accepted a light from his elaborately engraved Army- issue Zippo. I sputtered and he laughed. He knew I was just off the farm, and he knew that I knew that he knew. What I really didn’t know was how to hold the cigarette. “Byron. Where you from?” An introduction without a handshake and a question. “The Quad Cities,” I said, keeping the cigarette as far from my nose as possible. I could have said Moline but somehow that would have sounded hickish and definitely smaller. “Dearborn, Michigan. You do have a name?” “Bernie. How long have you been going here?” My own answer and a question. He told me most of the guys at Ray Vogue, as was he, were on the GI Bill, fresh out of Korea, and said he’d been there only a month. He mentioned he had a room just around the corner across from the Cathedral. We heard the teacher order another pose change just before he, too, stepped out for a smoke and lighted up a ways from us near the Dutch-door sales counter of a little art supply store operated within the school by a distinguished black gentleman named Hayward. Learner complained of the heat as the two men began a quiet exchange. Byron glanced at the teacher and leaned close to me and whispered, “Learner’s not gay.” A little pause, a deep knowing look directly into my soul and then he said, “Wish he was.” It certainly would have helped if I understood what gay meant but I had never ever heard this word before. I replied with plain dumb confusion, “What?” “You know... queer,” he said matter-of-factly. “Oh. Oh, yeah,” I got it, all right! A bolt of lighting zapped through every circuit in my body. I could never be cool. I always talked too much and constantly said the first thing that came into my head. But I knew at that instant I had to be cool. And I knew I had to shut up. I just stood there smiling and he smiled right back. “If we’re gonna be fabulous artists, we better be gettin’ back in there. Wouldn’t want to waste Uncle Sam’s money, heh, heh,” he chortled. He was obviously enjoying himself and having fun, and I was smitten by the way he had over enunciated “fabulous” in a sort of grandiose, or grand dame, or Dorothy Parker manner of speaking. “Want to come to Charmettes for lunch? I’ll introduce you to the girls from Canada. They’re a hoot.” “I have to look for a job. I have exactly one week of rent money left. When that’s gone, I might have to go back home,” I said. “And just give Mrs. Ray your tuition? You’ll find a job. Don’t worry, I did. In one day,” he said encouragingly. “I didn’t pay the tuition deposit until this morning, and she gave me a little lecture on how the tuition always has to be paid in advance. She was nice about it, though.” “Yeah, she’s in it for the good of art. Like hell, she is! I’ll take you to lunch, okay?” Byron looked younger than I did. Of course, he couldn’t have been, having done a full hitch in the Army. Up close, I could smell his powerful cologne. He was about two inches shorter than I was and carried himself a lot more gracefully than most men. It wasn’t until he started talking and gesticulating that you’d know for sure, though. This worried me, but I liked him a lot. He seemed to have his stuff together, which was way more than I could say. I never actually sensed that I was in over my head at that point. Big ideas had propelled me this far, though I really had no plan or even a clue on how to accomplish them. This was definitely a figure-it-out-as-you-go deal. Go to Chicago, enroll in art school, then get a part time job so you can stay there and not starve. Seemed simple to me. Totally naive. What little money I’d saved from Penny’s mostly went on the five-hundred dollar tuition to Ray Vogue Schools. Then I had foolishly spent half of my precious rent money on three outfits in a fit of self-doubt disguised as wanting to look cool in art school. A pair each of pink, black and white wool pegged pants I could alternate with my new black, pink, and white shirts—all with Mandarin collars, no less. All these outfits had to go with my heavy blue suede wing-tips. I’d told myself I’d find a job in time to pay the rent. How the heck could I have known jeans would be the official uniform of art school? But just look at what had happened. I’d met my first new friend and I discovered, that very same day, I could actually draw as well as anyone in the class, which wasn’t all that great, really, but it gave me hope. I just assumed everything else would take care of itself. Ahh, youth.

Byron, who’d gotten a job in the art department at Dr. Scholl’s was wrong. I couldn’t find a job anywhere. Not that I knew where to look, really. The want ads were too scary because I didn’t know my way around this huge city. Just looking at the map made me nauseous. And the public transportation seemed extraordinarily complex. The wrong subway or elevated could take you miles out of your way before you realized it. I decided to brave the streetcars. I’d get on a different line every day, get transfers, get on and off looking for a job in the retail stores along each route. The final rent for my half of the North Side apartment I was renting with Sig Eckberg, a high school chum, came due. I was down to five dollars in my pocket and I was supposed to buy the meat for dinner that night. Then it happened. I took the Clark Street Car all the way out to Granville Avenue from downtown. On my last stop of the day, I landed a job selling shoes in a family department store run by the Winsberg’s for a dollar twenty-five an hour and the exact hours I needed. If I ate my lunch on the elevated after class, I could get out there by one and work until closing time at seven plus all day Saturday. Forty hours a week. Fifty bucks a week. Plus twenty percent off on clothes. I could buy those jeans I needed. Mr. Winsberg gave me fifty dollars in advance after he saw me sell one lady five pairs of shoes that very day. He asked, “How did you do that? “I told her five bullshit things about the shoes and one bullshit thing about what nice feet she had.” I said. “Are you sure you’re not Jewish?” he asked. With the name Bernie, I was often mistaken as Jewish in Chicago, but I just smiled. Shortly after I started at Winsberg’s, I met Bertie Davis, who worked there part-time. Her husband, who manufactured pin-setting machines, had recently died and to make ends meet she offered me room and board in her nearby apartment. That really helped shorten up all that travel time. And she was a hell of a cook. Bertie was a severely girdled-in shapely woman of sixty who dressed in skin-tight skirts and silk blouses like she was thirty. She wore more makeup than I’d ever seen on any woman before. She’s the one who taught me how to drink. We started my eduction with Brandy Alexanders at a visit to her daughter’s where I met her son in law, Tom Brown, who worked as copy chief for the famous Leo Burnett advertising agency. He suggested I get into advertising. To see if I had an aptitude for it, he took me through a copy of Life magazine and made me guess what the selling strategy was behind every ad in it. I’d guess wrong, of course, then he’d correct me. It was an eye opener. I had no idea there was a planned scheme to sell to people in ads. I was instantly hooked on the idea of becoming an art director. One look around the Brown’s home told me advertising paid off. After we did the whole magazine, he took me out for a spin in his vintage MG. He gave me the wheel and I cranked that puppy up to one-hundred and ten miles per hour, and we were both swacked on Brandy Alexanders. It’s amazing I remember a thing. Now I was set up. I was in school with a strong career direction and loving it, working at something I knew I was going to like, and I had this terrific new friend, Byron. We did everything together. We went to see foreign movies, to art galleries, and to the beach, and he taught me how to cook. Turned out he was from a large Catholic farm family of thirteen. His parents visited him often and reminded me of our own family a lot. I returned home every chance I got on the Rock Island Rocket. When family members came to pick me up at the depot, I was never happier. Later, I drove home in my new Vauxhall, but the train was my favorite because it was so simple. I got to relax and pull myself together and watch the Illinois scenery go by as I sped homeward thinking about all that was happening in my life. My social life in Chicago was exciting and scary, even daring at times. But I lived through it, somehow. Art school sustained me in every way. I loved the arty people and their Bohemian ways, and I learned to love art. I spent every extra minute I had in the galleries of the Art Institute studying the Paul Klees, Picassos, and Kandinskys. Byron instigated several large art parties during our two-year hitch at Ray Vogue. He’d rent a hall, hire a band and then sell tickets just to cover costs. These were always heavily promoted by our art school clique which included Byron, his roommate, Jim, myself, Donna (a tall foulmouthed redhead from Canada,) Karen (who was secretly going out with a black musician,) and Joanne Posnac, (whose father sent her new clothes every single Monday morning from his department store in Atlanta.) We talked openly of all matters: sexual, artistic, philosophical, and social. We knew about reefers but didn’t smoke them. We were artists, after all; not musicians. I formed all my liberal ideas with these friends and quickly embraced them because they allowed me to accept my own life. All the people around me accepted me for who I was. Period. It erased all those feelings of being second class I had had in high school. My own prejudices melted away as I met and enjoyed the company of a diverse universe of artists. Gay and straight, all colors and all social levels united by art. “No one is free until everyone is free.” I have no idea who first said that to me, but it was so hopeful and so full of truth that I never forgot it. I heard it to mean that if you prejudge someone or oppress them, you are the slave of the injustice you bring to them and can never know true peace yourself. I have never had any moment of feeling inferior in my adult life. I know the meanness of prejudice and discount it instinctively. I think because Mom and Dad loved me so much, and because my brother and sisters have always been so close that I’ve felt, somehow, protected from harm, always.

FCB

It was September of 1954. On the very day I thought I’d had enough art school, I walked across the street from Ray Vogue Schools to 120 Erie Street to the offices of Foote Cone and Belding and applied for a job as an art director with the feeblest of portfolios that contained a chalk illustration of a man’s shoe and string painting. I hadn’t the slightest idea about how an ad was made. To my surprise, I was hired. I started in the mount room, and at six months I was suddenly assigned my first account, Armour Chemicals. I don’t know whether it was out of frustration or just a lark to assign me to a stubborn, difficult client who had refused to approve five previous layouts for a particular assignment, but the head art director, John Bruenig, a roundish, kindly older guy, and Marvin Potts, the bombastic head of the art department, sent me out with a layout pad under my arm and instructions to go to the client’s office and keep making layouts until he bought one. My very first ad assignment ever. I had no idea what I was doing or what was required. I arrived at the Back Of The Yards office of Ed Wilson with a very young account man, Dave Ofner, who later became CEO of FCB, and a young copywriter, Alan Kurtzman, who was no older than myself (eighteen) and who had written the copy for the ill-fated ad to be saved by me. The client sarcastically greeted us with, “Well, well, looky here. If it isn’t Mr. Foote, Mr. Cone, and Mr. Belding.” Not a very good start, but I made a layout he liked and we came home heroes. I worked in the Chicago office for five years on everything from Hallmark Cards to Dial Soap. I was the first FCB art director ever to be allowed to work on a TV commercial. In those days, producers and copywriters made the commercials. When they realized TV wasn’t just radio with pictures, art directors finally got in on the act. The first commercial I did was animated. It was called “Mr. Oops” for Dial liquid dishwashing detergent I liked everyone, and I felt nurtured and respected. I won an art directing award for a Chicago Tribune poster my very first year. It was all very warm and fuzzy and I couldn’t have been happier. IN THE ARMY— NOT

I had just turned nineteen. It was April of 1955. Of course, the army wanted none of me. I fell somewhere between the Korean War and the Vietnam War in eligibility-for-the-draft age and so they were letting people out for any reason at all. When interviewed by the physician, I simply did not pass muster. 4F. It was over in less than three minutes. From the draft board on LaSalle Street in the Loop, I walked back up Michigan Avenue the mile to my office at FCB, sat back down at my drawing board and continued working on a layout like nothing even happened. I threw a party that night for everyone at work with the money that had been collected for me as a going away present. Everyone was very happy I didn’t go; especially Mr. Fairfax Cone, who had big plans for me. “I want you to go to San Francisco and help save the office,” he said. Then he added, as I sat before him awestruck or maybe just dumbfounded in my little Brooks Brothers suit and silk tie, “If you don’t like it, just call me and I’ll send you a train ticket to come home.” You know how most of the rest of that turned out.

SAN FRANCISCO 1961— I arrived alone at the San Francisco Airport on one of the very first jet-propelled passenger planes on New Year’s Day, 1960, after a huge farewell party in Chicago. It snowed in San Francisco that day, which it hadn’t done in one hundred years. I couldn’t believe it. Sunny California was supposed to be a given. Rick LaCroix, who I had been living with in Chicago for five years, joined me a day later because he had to stay behind for the movers. I had met Rick at Kitty Sheon’s, a small bar located under the el station at Grand Avenue in Chicago and moved in with him on my twenty-first birthday in 1957, shortly after a false move with Byron to a too-fancy Lakeshore Drive apartment I couldn’t afford. I moved into Rick’s small apartment at 257 Hampton Court before we moved to 55 Surf Street where we stayed for a couple of years. In San Francisco, Rick found an apartment at 180 Beaver Street out near the Castro, which was just a mundane Irish working man’s neighborhood in those days. The apartment was new and had a view of San Francisco Bay. An auspicious start fueled by a huge raise in pay. The next day I bought a brand new white 1961 Volkswagen convertible for $1,200.00 and was treated—to my horror—to a lesson in hill driving by the car salesman. Rick loved to travel and loved fine arts. Our life together was filled with parties, the beach, opera, ballet, travel, art galleries, and Broadway shows that we religiously flew to New York to see. All this travel, art, and theatre helped me tremendously with my art direction. It was a true liberal arts education of the most practical and enriching kind. I could put my observations to instant use in my ads and commercials. This not only brought the world of art to life for me, but it gave me a big edge—and a tremendous advantage over the ambitious competitors confronting me as I moved up in advertising. My first trip to Europe was on FCB. I had been in San Francisco only a few months when I was called upon to do a Renauld of France sunglass campaign in Paris, and a Beauty on the Beach suntan lotion ad in Cannes on the French Riviera. Need I say that I thought I had died and gone to heaven? I traveled with Bob Leefeldt, an account executive who was married to the heiress to the Portland Cement fortune. He was so grand, a true bon vivant, a fountain of information about the “Good Life.” He took me to the finest restaurants and on side trips to antique shops and even out to Versailles, which he personally showed to me as if he owned it. Bob taught me to work harder to get some of that life.

Some places I’ve been to over the years: London, Paris, Cote de Zur, Italy, Germany, The Netherlands, Denmark. In Africa: Kenya, Tanzania, Ethiopia and Uganda. Greece. Islands of the Mediterranean: Mikinos, San Torini, Rhodes, and Crete. Istanbul, Turkey. Canada, Alaska, and Mexico. Puerto Rico, Haiti, Granada, and many other islands of the Caribbean. Japan, Thailand, China, and Taiwan. Hawaii twenty-five times.

My one true love above all else. I’d rather be sitting drawing up architectural plans than anything in the world. More than writing, more than cooking, and more than art directing. I have remodeled four houses of my own and six for other people. My first house at 248 Day Street cost eighteen thousand dollars in 1962. Rick’s father lent us the two thousand for the down payment. I fixed it up and put in a garden and sold it for thirty-two thousand. I parlayed the cash into 333 Laurel Street in 1965, fixed that up too, and sold it for fifty-five thousand. Sausalito came next. Bought it for sixty-nine and sold it six years later, in 1973, at the peak of an inflationary spiral for three hundred thousand. I put my profit into various investments, realized I was rich, decided I would no longer take crap from anyone at work ever again, and bought 373 Cumberland Street for a mere one hundred and eighteen thousand dollars. And here I sit today. The joy of these houses was in owning them, remodeling and decorating them, and along the way learning a lot about my dream profession: architecture. To this day I love, love, love to drive around San Francisco studying and just enjoying all the architectural details of the old houses.

Rick and I lived together for about sixteen years before we decided to go our own ways. Later, in 1988, I met Larry Savitz, a nice Jewish boy, while on a cruise with Rick in the Caribbean. Larry lived in Miami at the time. Larry was a graduate of Penn State in Hotel Management and ran a large restaurant in a luxury retirement home in San Francisco. He sang at a professional level and had zillions of friends, including a host of deaf friends, which is why he and I learned sign language. Larry lived with me only a short time, but it was a wild and crazy period of my mid-life. We did a lot of night clubbing and disco dancing and had big parties and went on many cruises. My best-remembered times with Larry were our trips to Aculpolco, where Larry’s Uncle Irv, who once owned much of the property the Atlantic City casinos are built on, had a Hindenberg-sized condo with a beach view and a year-round staff of servants. We got to use it whenever Uncle Irv wasn’t there. Very wonderful. Larry lived with me until 1982 when he returned to his family home in Philadelphia. I’m so sorry to say Larry died there of AIDS in 1993. Everyone should have at least one Larry in their life.

Larry introduced me to Frank, who he had known in Florida. Frank moved in with me in 1983 after attending art school. Frank is from a family with twelve kids and was raised in Lancaster, South Carolina, West Virginia, and Florida. He is an avid reader (especially science fiction) devours books and is a talented writer. He is also obsessed with—or possibly possessed by—computers. Lucky for me, though! Frank is a stay-at-home kind of guy. Frank worked at FCB as a copywriter for a while. We got teamed together on several accounts. One of the highlights of my ad career was art directing some ads and commercials that Frank had written, especially two of the C and H Sugar stories: The one about Lanoa’s store, where the little boy pays for his cookie with a marble, and the one about a kid trading a whole wagon full of puppies for a stalk of sugar cane. We got to go to Hawaii to produce them. Our insane South African director tried to rewrite Frank’s commercials, which turned into a hairpull, but we prevailed and came home with two beauties. In 1994 we went to Italy, where we devoured every art museum in sight. We want to go see all the art in Paris next. We just can’t get enough art. Frank has finally found a way to make computing his life and is getting his Bachelor of Science degree and studying web design. He will be good at it. Frank and I are well matched intellectually, can make each other laugh, and get into lots of interesting arguments. Mostly, he won’t let me get away with any BS. He calls me on every single thing. Can you imagine doing that to a Guild? And, I guess that’s all I’d better say.