A Broken Arm and Left-Handed Palm Trees

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.