Jefferson Part One: Introducing my Parents

 I had thought this installment would be about Amazons and  The Smartest Man in the World, but they will have to wait until Part Two.  The house on Jeffferson is too good an introduction to my parents to waste.  If our technologies are, as McLuhan claimed, extensions of ourselves, nowhere is that more true than in our houses.  (When we moved into the house at 713 West Jefferson, the porch was not enclosed.  My aunt Ruth and uncle Cecil did that after they bought the house from my parents.)

We only lived on Oakhurst about two years before my parents decided that the railroad track behind the Barkley's cabinet shop was probably too strong a temptation for their young explorer and looked to move to a safer neighborhood.  Hence the house on Jefferson.  I have few memories of the interior of the Oakhurst house, except for the breakfast nook, where we had donuts every Sunday until my father went on a diet.  But the house on Jefferson is very clear in my memory.  There was a central space divided into a living room and a dining room divided by what I suppose were pilasters, although the walls in those rooms were ccelotex, a sort of precursor, I suppose, to sheet rock.  The floors were 'hard wood' and my mother had a waxing and buffing machine that kept them shining and smooth enough to skate on them in one's socks. There was a room off of each side of each of the rooms, two bedrooms opening from the living room and another bedroom and the kitchen from the dining room.  The bedroom off the dining room had been divided to make a bathroom.  Originally there was an outhouse at the back of the garden, about which much more is to follow.  It would have been a long walk in bad weather, so I suppose people must have also had chamber pots when the house was new.  The small bedroom was used as a nursery for my brother Ken, who was quite young the whole time we lived there.  Behind the kitchen, which had a red linoleum time floor on which we really did roller skate, there was a dinette, a really nice place to eat with windows on three sides.  We used the dining room only on holidays and birthdays.

My bedroom was off the living room, and it was the best bedroom in the world because the wall paper was sky blue with airliners--Boeing Stratocruisers and Lockheed Constellations and DC 6's--printed on it.  It was the perfect background for a collection of model airplanes which I hung from the ceiling.

When we moved in, there was a small house just behind the main house, and no garage.  My father quickly removed the little house and built a 'garage' which was really a shop but which had large doors so we could get boats in and out.  This shop was built from concrete blocks, perhaps because my father thought it would be less likely to burn during weed eradication.  My mother did manage to batter in the doors when she got her first car with an automatic transmission, a Henry J.  She insisted that the transmission had a mind of its own.

The shop was of course useful for my father, but I think it was even more useful and wonderful for me, because I didn't have to go to work.  I could work on my rocket projects and defense projects right in my own back yard.  From my father I think I inherited my tendency to over-indulge in hobbies. Forr instance, when he became interested in photography, not only did he buy several cameras and a complete dark room, and make aerial maps of several counties, but he also gave me a Brownie Hawkeye and access to the darkroom.  

What had once been a garden was quite large.  At the back was a dog run for my father's beagles.  The rest was mine, for Fortress America, my defense against invasion by the Russians and a precursor to Space X. We didn't have a flag, but I did keep my army surplus tent pitched there all the time, and friends would pitch their tents there from time to time.  Besides the rockets, which were always a work-in-progress--my half-uncle Franks was my main cohort in rocket science--we had bazookas.  Mr. Danley, who knew me from Walnut Street Baptist Church, had a plumbing shop just two blocks away, and he gave me  scraps of iron pipe.  My father of course had the tools to thread them and a good supply of pipe caps, because who knew when his oldest son would need one to build a bazooka?  So, we drilled a hole in the cap through which we could stick the fuse of a cherry bomb. I can't remember what was the projectile, and since we hadn't done the math, we were luck we didn't blow ourselves up.

With explosions and smoke coming so often from the back garden, one might expect my mother to inspect from time to time.  But she didn't.  She was very concerned that I and my brother were clean, well-dressed, and had our hair combed.  (I suppose I am still rebelling against her even in my old age.), but after that she assumed that we were ready for anything.  I only remember one time when she asked what I was doing, a time of a particularly disastrous rocket failure.  (I know how Elon Musk must feel.)  She stuck her head out the door of the dinette and asked, 'Honey, what are you doing?' I said, 'Oh, nothing.' She said something like, 'Well, be careful.'

When I hear friends tell of the horrors of their childhoods, I realize how lucky I was.  My parents loved me, but they never tried to control me.  They empowered me in the best way.  My mother was a house-keeper in the best sense of the term, providing a home that was nurturing and supportive, an extension of motherhood, but which never  tried to suppress crazy schemes and ambitions.  My father was a model of the sort of intellectual explorer who not only thought but did.  The dinette table--red Formica with chrome legs, with chrome chairs upholstered in that same strange red plastic as the stool in Mrs. Dodson's stool--was his drawing table for project after project that would become incarnate in his shop.  (I didn't mention that he let me build part of the wall for the shop, the back wall.  It was not as even as the rest of the wall, but I learned to lay concrete blocks, sort of.)

Then there was the Jeep, which shows I think how interconnected all of our desires for our home were.  My father bought it for hunting and fishing,  although it proved to be a rather poor tow vehicle and was, alas, eventually replaced by a 1947 Ford in which I would learn to drive but which was nowhere near so wonderful as the Jeep.  My mother took the Jeep Christmas shopping in the snow, when her friends with mere cars had to fall back on what was available from Sears. And I?  Well, for me the Jeep was a submarine, and not just any submarine, but the Nautilus, although on any given day it might be either Jules Verne's Nautilus or the navy's nuclear Nautilus.  My first mate was most often the girl next door, Kathy Gibson, about whom you will hear more in Part Two.  I know, a girl, Yuck.  But Kathy had a pretty good imagination for a girl, and she was always ready to cast off.  I admit to tearing maps from my encyclopedia to use as charts.

I realize I haven't even mentioned my parents' names.  But names are, I think, less important than their actions and life styles.   I suppose in large part they were not untypical of the period after World War II, when anything was possible.  They were both pretty much living their dream, and they did a wonderful job of encouraging me to do the same.