An except from my unpublished autobiography

1950-1952 Shelby, Ohio

The Scrappy House

In 1950, Daddy was transferred to Ohio. You might wonder what the USAF had to do with Shelby, Ohio. During WWII, a large number of equipment and supply depots were built, scattered all over the country. The idea, I guess, was to decentralize the military supply system so that it was less vulnerable to attack. Anyway, after the war there was a large supply depot in the middle of the cornfields outside Shelby, Ohio.

We lived in two houses in Shelby. The first house, the “Scrappy House,” was really substandard accommodations. It was out in the country, at a rural corner in the corn fields. The place was really rundown and drafty, cold in the winter – there was no insulation.

Daddy says the house was built by a local entrepreneur from GI surplus plywood glider crates from WWII. We had a big snow in the winter of 1950/51, and the snow would blow through the gaps in the walls and doors and pile up inside the house.

I remember a surprising number of things from that time:

·                Watching the corn harvest across the road, with the harvester sucking up the corn stalks and shooting the corn into a following wagon.

·                My mother making cranberry sauce from scratch in the kitchen. I remember listening to the berries pop in the boiling water.

·                Christmas morning, 1950. I slept in the living room because there wasn’t any other place for me to sleep. I awoke way early on Christmas morning and could see a giant teddy bear by the tree that wasn’t there the night before. I remember lying there for an eternity before everybody else woke up. That Christmas, Daddy wasn’t home with us. I have no recollection of that, but he says he spent Christmas week in a hospital alcoholic ward going through detox. Right after he got home, we moved to Earl Avenue.

·                Snow Cream. This was a confection made from freshly fallen snow, sugar and vanilla flavoring. I remember Mama going out the back door with a saucepan and bringing it back full of clean snow.

·                Getting my mouth actually washed out with soap for something I’d said. I don’t remember what I said, but I sure remember the taste of that soap.

·                Lying in bed at night, in the living room, watching the passing car headlight beams shine through the seam between the walls and ceiling of the house. I was sleeping in a glider box, for chrissakes!

·                Visiting the military police station on the depot where Daddy worked and getting a genuine military police badge. I wonder what ever happened to my badge.

·                Mice in the house. I remember a dinner being interrupted by the snap of a trap behind the refrigerator.

14 Earl Avenue

The second house was downtown in Shelby. We moved there right after Christmas 1950. It was a big old two-story wood-sided town house, with a sort of tower in one corner. It was painted yellow. We lived in only a part of the house. 

Things I remember from this time:

·                Halloween – I was a clown and Daddy was a hobo and we went to a costume party at the church and we won a prize. Mama had done drama in college and she made the costumes and made us up. She’d taken a hatchet to a pair of Daddy’s old shoes. She made him up with burnt cork.

·                Daddy working in the detached garage, in the rain, building Sheila a dollhouse. Was something dad’s do for daughters – I did it myself some 20 years later.

·                Pissing off the next-door neighbor when I sprayed his freshly waxed car with the hose. Hey – I was only trying to help.

·                Getting my first dog - Homer. He wandered up one day, and we kept him for a while. I got to name him. Mama wondered if the name derived from the Greek mythology stories she had read me – I said no. “Homer” got the name because he had found a home. He didn’t get to keep him long, though. Our landlord didn’t want us to have a pet, so we had to give Homer away. That broke my heart. I can still see that landlord – a short, fat man with a round face and a little mustache, always wore a hat. To a four-year-old, he was evil personified. My folks didn’t care for him either – he actually gave me a snare drum for Christmas. I have no idea why he did that – the most obvious conclusion was to drive my parents crazy, I suppose.

·                Mice in the house. We had mice in the house. I could hear them scurrying around at night – in the walls and ceilings and on the hardwood floors. Even in the drawers of the chests. I remember them getting into bed with me at night and feeling them scamper across my blanket. Once I awoke to see a whiskery little pink nose close to mine. I remember being afraid and covering my head with the blankets to keep the mice away from me. When my parents tucked me in at night, they really tucked me in. I was trussed up like a mummy.

·                Daddy going off somewhere for a long period of time. They told me Daddy was going to “school.”  

·                Mama pulling me down the sidewalk on my sled. We were going to the little neighborhood grocery. I remember that it was the wrong kind of sled – it had metal runners for use on ice. We were trying to use it on snow and it wasn’t very satisfactory.

·                Mama pouring a bottle of whisky down the kitchen sink.

 14 Earl Avenue, circa 1992

Daddy was an alcoholic, but he stopped drinking when we were in Shelby. He joined AA, there, and has been active in AA – and sober – ever since. He joined AA right after that Christmas week in a detox ward in 1950.

I don’t remember anything specifically about Daddy’s drinking. I do remember some drama between my parents in Shelby, and I remember Mama pouring a bottle down the drain. I learned about Daddy’s drinking from him and Mama over the years since then, but I actually have no specific recollection of Daddy’s drinking.

I remember one night, sitting in a parked car with Mama – Sheila must have been there too. We were waiting for Daddy to come out of a bar – I think he was in there on AA business. I remember a Cat’s Paw neon sign over a shoe repair shop. I remember reading the sign, perhaps with Mama’s help (I was only about four). I remember Mama telling me to look away when we saw a derelict begin to urinate in an alley.

Daddy says he came home drunk from work the last time on Dec 22, 1950. The next day he joined AA, and has been sober since.  There are lots of reasons that I am proud of my father, but none bigger than his courage facing, and beating, alcoholism.

[My wife and I made a trip through Shelby on our 25^th anniversary, in 1993. With no help, I actually drove right to the house on Earl Avenue. Shelby’s not a big town, but finding a house in a town by dead-reaconing when you had last been there as a five-year-old, 41 years earlier, is some miraculous experience, I think. I just had a feeling where it was, you know? And I recognized it immediately. I didn’t know the street address at the time, but I confirmed it with Daddy; I found the right house.

The house was still there, and it was still yellow! It was old-looking in 1952, but it didn’t look like it had aged any in the intervening 41 years. The street was not as wooded as I remembered, and of course, everything looked smaller.

I think I even found the remains of the old scrappy house too, while heading north out of town. It was then just a farmer’s dilapidated storage shed. Of course, it hadn’t been much more than that when we lived in it nearly a half-century earlier. But – I guess they built those glider boxes to last, huh?]

We left Shelby in June 1952; Daddy had his orders to go to the Korean War. He took the rest of us to Murray, Kentucky where my maternal grandmother lived.