The Slide Continues

Basketball season ended and I had had the good fortune to score 17 points in a game against Walworth—team high for the year. Of course things balanced out; I scored just three against Sharon. As the Tralfamadorians in Vonnegut’s Slaughter House Five might have said, “So it goes.”

I was still going to church, principally because I liked Rev. Allinder and enjoyed the church group activities now that I knew more kids.

Then, for the first time in my life I found out I was poor. I had been poor for much of my life as a kid, but kids don’t know about what poor is unless someone rubs their nose in it. If a kid can play and has food, it’s all good. The Ogle farm, with no central heat, outhouse and all was a cool place to live. The camp, with no insulation for winter and an oil burner to heat the entire house was no problem. We could play under the house, watch the river and shoot birds with the BB gun. All good. Didn’t even think about being poor.

Even after dad’s death, because mom starved herself to spoil us I had no idea. She bought us new bikes, bought too much at Christmas and seldom said no to anything. We weren’t suffering at all—Mom was. Some days she even went without eating. We didn’t know and didn’t care. We were like hogs at the trough.

Eventually it all caught up to mom and she had to face reality. She was broke and in debt and corners had to be cut. She had spoiled us rotten trying to compensate for not having dad, but the party was over. And she was mother of three rotten brats.

Here is how I found out I was poor.

The church group was taking a road trip to Chicago. We were to see the sights and eat at a Chinese restaurant. That would be a new experience and I looked forward to it. The church was to foot the bill for the trip except for the meals. Mom gave me all she had to give; a dollar.

The day was great and I had a terrific time, but when we arrived at the restaurant the only thing on the menu less than a dollar was a hamburger. I ordered the hamburger with my water. What showed up on my plate was a ball of ground beef with huge pieces of onion sticking out of it. There was no bun, and there were no condiments. I gagged it down but it was horrible.

We had taken more than one car. I rode with the Allinders and two other kids. It was night, the two others went to sleep and I was nodding. Then I heard Rev. Allinder whisper to his wife,   JoAnn, “Can you believe,” he whispered, “we take the kids to Chicago for something new and different and one of them orders a hamburger for crying out loud? A hamburger!” She agreed it was silly, they both shook their heads and the conversation ended there, but it was like a knife in my heart.

I thought Rev. Allinder was a cool guy. I wanted to shout, “But that’s all the money I had!” But of course I didn’t. I just sat in silence hurting. That is how I found out I was poor.

Now the pastor hadn’t meant for me to hear it and he certainly didn’t know I had been hurt. He really was a good guy. But another authority figure had let me down.

That summer the church voted to hire me to mow the lawn because they knew we were hurting and figured I could use the extra money. They were right, I could.  Rev. Allinder said they would pay me $5/week—a doggone good wage. I accepted.

On the next Saturday I mowed the church lawn. On Sunday everyone told me what a good job I had done, but no one paid me.

The next Saturday and Sunday were the same. So were the next. I didn’t mow the lawn the following week. Someone else, maybe even Rev. Allinder, had to mow it late that evening.

On Sunday he asked to speak with me and began to explain that what I had done was wrong; the church was counting on me and that I had made a deal, etc. For the first time I really unloaded on an adult. Angrily and loudly I told him that “people who live in glass houses, etc.,” that they had told me they would pay me $5/week and they hadn’t paid me a dime. He said that they had intended to pay me at the end of the month. I said that wasn’t what I was told and they had lied. He said he would get a check for what they owed me and I told him I wouldn’t mow anymore. What the church had intended as a good thing had turned into a mess—all because of poor communication and my anger. From that time on I seldom, if ever attended church.

By now I had alienated the school, my relatives and the church. I was on a roll.

Then baseball season came. A blessing. I was the starting catcher and hit OK (.367).  On non-baseball days I might hunt crawdads to sell to Robinson’s bait shop, swim or play basketball on the court outside the school. Linda West had moved away and so I began taking interest in other girls. That summer was OK.

The trouble is, summers end. When it did I was bussed to nearby Lake Geneva, a resort town, to attend Badger High. I quickly found out that kids from Genoa City were considered outsiders unless they were terrific in a sport.

I heard one day while walking in the hall that a couple of Geneva kids had pushed around a kid from Genoa in the boy’s room. I found one of them and made him understand it was a bad idea.

At lunch time there was one junior who would walk around the cafeteria taking milk from freshman’s trays and drinking it. I took my milk to where he was sitting laughing about it and poured a carton on his head. We would have had a fight on the spot but cooler heads grabbed us both. That probably saved my tail because he was considerably bigger and stronger than I. But I didn't care.

Football was a game I had never played so I didn’t try out. Instead I would go to the games and the dances (we called them “sock hops”) and learned to dance. I tried out for freshman basketball, got cut, took the manager’s job and then was later moved onto the team. It was a great team. We won all our games by at least ten points. As an end of the bench guy I played just enough to average an amazing 1.3 points per game.

How did classwork go? It sucked. I was still stuck in classes I had taken in Cincinnati except for physiology. Because of my math ability they put me into algebra rather than arithmetic, but I had already begun algebra basics in Cincinnati and found it boring. My grades were marginal and my attendance poor. Plus I was a smart ass. I wasn’t really accepted by the Geneva kids, but a few of them thought me entertaining and smart and I kind of hung around the fringes of cool kids.

Then came baseball. After a couple of games on the freshman team I was moved up to the junior varsity. Only one problem: I hadn’t taken the required physical. By then I had begun to understand how little money we had and so didn’t tell mom I needed one. I got booted from the team. I tried lying that I had taken the physical and the school had lost the paper work. That didn’t do anything except make the JV coach angry.

I couldn’t wait for school to end, but finally it did.

Summer was glorious. I would head to what we called “The German Camp” to swim during the day and play Pony League ball at night. I hit .538, and found out later that a couple of scouts had come to see me. No one told me until after they had come and gone—I suppose it was to keep pressure off me. In the three games they saw I ten hits in twelve at bats including two home runs, two doubles and a triple. I couldn’t have played better. Sadly but rightly they decided I was too small to be a pro catcher and too slow to play anywhere else. When mom told me I was crushed but I actually handled it pretty well. I wasn’t angry—just sad.

Genoa City had a good men’s fast pitch softball league, and that year the worst team, figuring they had nothing to lose, asked me to catch for them. I was just 15 and the next youngest players were 18. I couldn’t wait. For the most part the men treated me fairly. A couple of them did knock me head over heels in plays at the plate, but when they saw I held on to the ball I was pretty much accepted.

There were three exceptionally good pitchers in the league: Johnny Hogan, Joe Schmidt and Scotty Halderman. Scotty once pitched a no-hitter while so drunk he could barely stand. I once watched Johnny and Joe each pitch seven innings of perfect ball against each other. In the eighth inning Joe’s shortstop made an error and Johnny hit a home run. Joe was furious. He had a temper, as I found out the first time I hit against him and tripled. The next at bat he knocked me down not once or twice, but three times before getting me to pop out weakly. I hit .341 for the year—an extremely high average for fast pitch. The next year I was invited to play on all but three teams—but I’ll cover that later.

The rest of the summer was spent at Jeff’s house playing APBA baseball, making out with girls at the show and fumbling around in dark corners of the park trying to learn what girls were made of.

I was treating mom terribly. She had no control over me at all. I was too big to spank and she was off at work and couldn’t supervise me. I know now that I was breaking her heart and am ashamed of that. Later, thank God, I was able to make some amends, but that was a long way into the future.

The truly good part was that Jeff’s parents semi-adopted me. They let me stay there nearly every weekend. I had never had any steak but round steak until they took me to dinner with them. Joe, Jeff’s dad was the local postmaster and operated the pop stand at the park. He probably gave away as much pop as he sold, and although he never talked about it, donated all the profits to maintaining the park. He liked everyone, and when the rest of the town pretty much hated me—and with some good reason—he would tell people to give me a break, that I was an OK kid.

Jeff’s mom, Catherine, was perhaps the best true Christian I ever knew. I don’t mean she was preachy or pushy. I mean that she was ever ready to help. She could turn on the deep freeze when Joe had one too many and go completely silent for a day or two. When that happened everyone tiptoed until “the Catherine look” was past.

The rest of the household consisted of Jeff’s younger sister, Kathy, who was probably three or four at the time, and his grandfather. Kathy and I are now great friends, but at that time Jeff and I were always angry with her because we would want to watch the Cubs or Bears and she would say, “But I want to watch (fill in the blank) and it is my faaaaaavorite program.”  

The other resident was Jeff’s grandfather, James. He was sharp and was probably the oldest guy in town. It annoyed him to be asked his age, so whenever anyone did he would say, “How old do you think I am?” Whatever the response was he would say, “You’re right.” Genoa City was full of people ready to argue about his age because they “Had heard it from his own mouth”—but it was from their mouth not his. I could tell many stories about him—especially about his selective deafness (!), but this is one of my favorites.

One night he sat up with Jeff, Joe and I to watch Gentlemen Prefer Blondes starring Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell. After watching a while he turned to Joe and said, “You know, Joe, those two have tits like Holstein milkers.” We almost laughed ourselves sick.

I’ll exit on that note and pick up the story in the next post.