The Roots

A pause is in order so that I might better introduce my mom, Helen Klabunde McCalester and my dad, Howard Eli, “Mac” McCalester. It should be noted that the vast amount of material here was given to me as stories from my mother. For obvious reasons I was not an "eye witness" to any of this. Dad did share his part in his hobo days with me, but that is about all.

Mom was the daughter of a farm family in Wisconsin and of German heritage. She was born September 24, 1916 and brought up in the era that taught, “Children should be seen and not heard.”

She was the daughter of Grace Miller and her husband Albert Klabunde. They divorced—and wild horses couldn’t get anyone in the family to even mention Albert, let alone share anecdotes. He was universally, but silently despised. Even mom didn’t speak of him—not even to say how old she was when the divorce occurred.

Fortunately her mom remarried to a great guy, Charlie Kautz, who, she always said, treated her as his own. She loved him dearly; he was “daddy.”  Together Grace and Charlie had two children, Roy and Bill. Roy was eight years younger than mom and Bill eighteen. As a result her relationship with Bill was as much mother as sister. She was not so close with Roy.

Grace and Charlie Kautz, my mom's parents 

Mom was good in school, second in her class, and graduated in 1934. She had a goal in mind. She wanted to become a pilot—and women not named Amelia Earhart did not become pilots—especially when they were proper ladies. 

Her mom and dad wanted her to become a teacher--in their eyes a respectable profession. She did not. There was no compromise. (Hence the old saying, "You can always tell a German . . . but not much!")

How badly did mom want to be a pilot? When, after her death, I was sorting through a small box of her most precious keepsakes, I found a small golden pin . . . of a prop plane. I had never seen her wear it, but she had kept it; a symbol of a hope that never died.

So she waitressed and partied and on one occasion, so she told me, a boyfriend let her drive his Duesenberg. She promptly backed it into Lake Geneva.

The pin and the pilot

In the summer of 1935 or 1936 she met my father at the Walworth   County Fair, in Elkhorn Wisconsin. He was working as a part of a traveling show or carnival of some sort. The way she told it she fell in love on the spot. Dad told her he would be traveling with the show through the summer, but would be in Detroit working at a theater that fall and winter.

Mom went home, gave her engagement ring back to her fiance, and waited for summer to end. Then, with only the name of the theater to go on, she left home and took a bus to Detroit.

She found dad and got a job as a ticket taker at a theater and they lived together, poor but happy. They were married on May 27, 1937.

She told me that one evening she had nothing for supper. In the fridge she found a few slices of bacon, an egg, part of an onion, and in the pantry a can of creamed corn. She lined the bottom of a casserole with part of the bacon, mixed the rest together, poured into the dish and put the remaining bacon on top before baking it in the oven. Dad loved it and it became a family favorite. Who knew?!

Some time later they moved to Indianapolis (which mom always referred to as “Indian No Place”). They had a rough time in Indian No Place. There they tried and failed to make a go of a small restaurant and after that a corner hot dog stand. Finally they pulled up stakes and headed for Cincinnati.

In Cincinnati they found a home on it's East End. They worked summers at Coney Island, and dad worked as a traveling salesman in the off season. They didn’t have a lot of money but they were happy.

They wanted children, but mom had trouble carrying a baby to term. She had four miscarriages before I was born in June of 1948. She was proud that she had given “her Mac” a son. Two years later she had a second child, a daughter, Leta, and two years after that another daughter, Karen. After I was born mom became a stay at home mother.

We will leave mom here and begin my dad’s story—a very different story indeed.

Mom holding me with her friend Betty Giles and daughter Sandy

Dad was born on July 19, 1912, the first of two children born to Wray Herbert McCalester and Leta Dennison McCalester. He had a younger sister, Laura Belle, and later a step-sister Marie. Dad’s parents divorced and Wray married Florence (last name?) after his divorce from Leta.

His father worked at the International Harvester plant in Moline, IL, where at some point he served as a union representative. 

Dad and his father

Things did not go well for dad after the remarriage and he left home in 1928 at age sixteen. He rode the rails finding work where ever he could. He told me that one farm couple offered to take him in. Once he had moved in the man beat him with a belt to start every day because, “he was a sinner doomed to hell.” He left, of course, and continued across the country doing odd jobs.

While in Oregon he was hired to help fight a forest fire. Suffering from smoke inhalation he was left by the side of the road, near death.

A fellow driving by (I am sorry I cannot remember his name) saw him, and Good Samaritan-like, took him to a hospital, paid all his bills, and brought him home to recuperate. The man and his wife refused to let dad work off his debt, simply telling him to help someone else when he could. The man's request caused mom no end of angst: she had to get used to waking up on a winter morning with a homeless man or alcoholic sleeping on the couch. "But Helen, it was cold," he would explain.

Dad continued working Carnies until he ended up at the fair in Elkhorn where he met mom.

In his travels dad picked up some useful skills. He could get along with almost anyone, he learned how to gamble—particularly card games—and he learned to survive using his wits to make the most of nearly any situation.

Times were tough when he and mom first reached Cincinnati. It was still depression time and jobs were scarce. For a time he even worked outside Crosley Field making balloon animals for children of fans attending the games.

He also used his gambling skills to make money to get by. At one of the card games he learned that the local “mob” was hiring a number of gamblers to be arrested in a bust staged for the papers. It turned out that this was a semi-regular occurrence.

The local pols could then point to how hard they were fighting organized crime. The mob would pay each man a certain amount of money, bail them out, and keep their record clear. Then they could continue running their gambling operations without unscheduled interference . Dad jumped at the chance to earn the extra money. From that time on he was “arrested” at every opportunity.

He was so well liked that he began to be hired to be a dealer in private games. Eventually he dealt at the biggest. Politicians and mob bosses would play for days. They hired 3-4 dealers who worked in shifts. Thousands of dollars changed hands. The games were protected by armed guards and dealers bunked in an adjacent room. No one could leave until the game had finished. Food and drink were brought in; no phone calls were permitted. Mom said that sometimes he might be gone for two, three, or even four days.

Eventually he found a gig as a traveling salesman and continued to work at Coney Island in the summer. He rarely dealt games after that.

This rounds out their story until dad began his apprenticeship in the stage hands union. . . and it leads us to our next subject: Church!