January 2007 Archives

The anniversary of my first year as a blogger slipped by without my noticing.  I guess I started around January 24 of 2006.

I think I will honor the occasion by complaining.

It has been one miserable year or rather year and a half.

About then—a year and a half ago—WB started acting out with violence towards the caretaker they had at the time and at Joan too, and poor Steve had to call in a 5150—which is California code for a danger to himself or others, and they had to come and take him away, screaming the whole time and fighting Steve says.  Then he went to the VA hospital, and we made visits to that and the brothers and I talked and tried to figure out what to make of the situation since this was all new territory for all of us.

But he couldn’t stay in a VA hospital forever, so he was shipped out to a “home” and I visited there a couple of times.  It was not a pleasant place and WB kept talking about all he could do was cry like a baby and that he was in hell.  Also God gave him spelling tests at night.  Senile dementia.

And then he died in his sleep on February 7.  Joan apparently insisted on a “viewing” at the morgue even though he was to be cremated and that was apparently awful because WB looked and was frozen like a popsicle.

And then there was the funeral at a Presbyterian Church in Escondido and         quite a number of people showed up that I had not seen in years and a number of bricklayers from the union.  And the Preacher read this thing about WB that had some truth in it but some outright lies because Joan had told him what to say and she claimed that she was the one who made all the block for the adobe house.  The hell, you say.  That is and was one lazy woman, and she didn’t make a single damn block.  I mean why the hell would a person tell lies to the Preacher about her husband to flatter herself at her husband’s funeral.

You know what.  I have managed to write so far only about six months or so of this last year and a half and as far as I am concerned all that crap was enough for two years right there.

Oh, that’s WB in an aircraft.  He washed out of flight school.  Then he got Valley Fever and was sick for a while, and then the war was about over though he was in for the duration, and that included some clean up in Europe.  But Joan says she wrote directly to FDR and said that WB couldn’t go.  Who knows, maybe FDR had heard about Joan and decided not to fight it.  He died soon after that.  FDR, I mean.

Here is the full photo of brother Dave at Art’s Mobile.  I cropped the earlier version to bring out more of the background detail.  Of the earlier version brother Dan wrote:

I think this is the day of or around Dave's graduation from MVHS which would put it as 71? I graduated in 78 and Dave has 7 years on me. I think that is correct. I recall it was Dave who got sick from eating at The Barrel, if it was from over eating cheap rolled tacos or from the "C" that it had in it's window as a health rating we can only guess. Looking at this I am reminded of the documentary on Crumb, who paid a photographer to drive around the urban industrial areas and take shots of the material that engenders "blight" of the feeling of it, the wires and poles and crap that your brain just forgets to see after a while cause it is always there and never changes. Crumb captured this in his comix, and who ever took this photo did too.

 Brother Dan remarks on the visual blight—something R Crumb attempted to capture in his comics.  I agree.  It’s a blight certainly—all those wires and cords and gaudy colors and different textures of plastic all of it stuck together every-which-away and willy-nilly. If you think about it, it’s the visual equivalent of litter.

But that was classic early (and still today) California.  No trees to block out the litter.  No zoning at all.  Just every establishment in its own way screaming for your attention.  Ultimately it’s deadening.

 The visual litter is more in the background of the full photo, and brother Dave more framed by Art’s Mobile on one side and the pumps on the other.

I had forgotten that the Taco Barrel had a C health rating.

This picture makes me want to laugh.  Notice the “want.”  I don’t quite—laugh.  I can’t say why exactly. 

Maybe it’s that I look so much like a dork in training or somebody entering the awkward age, which I was about that time.  I usually never wore pants like that, and where the hell did I get that hat and where the hell did the parents find those glasses.

Talk about uncool.  I remember I liked that windbreaker and zipping it clear to the top.

Maybe it just seems a really good picture of a dysfunctional fifties family.  The tall boy clearly is a loon; the one with the broken arm looking too happy, and all set off by that little fellow to the right—brother Dave--eyeing the world somewhat suspiciously from under his parka.

That’s great.  His head is sort of in and out of his parka.  Clearly he is checking things out.  He liked that parka and wearing it with the hood up whenever possible.

And then there’s the old lady, looking a bit reserved and a bit detached from the loon kids, but looking a bit daft herself.

The old lady there is Aunt Daisy.  I remember she came out for a visit.  She was one of Grandfather Tingle’s sisters, I do believe.

We appear to be out on another outing; probably we were showing Aunt Daisy a good time by taking her down to the docks in San Diego.  Those docks are all tourist stuff now.  Back then there were warehouses and navy boatyards.  I think we had gone to see a boat that day; maybe that was the day we went to the submarine.  Maybe that’s why I look happy.  I enjoyed walking through the submarine and wishing I could linger because the place seemed really cozy.  A submarine seemed like a real good way to get away from it all.

The American Flag back there maybe was sticking up to mark the way down to the Submarine.

God, do we look like hicks from the sticks or what?

Here’s brother Dave sporting some new threads.

Why he is standing in front of the gas pumps of Art’s Mobile, I don’t know.  I do know he worked there for a while.  But that still doesn’t explain why he was wearing new threads in front of a gas station.

If I knew cars better, I might be able to date the picture a bit.  I reckon though that it was taken most likely in the early to mid seventies.

I have cropped and blown up the picture a bit to try to get some of the background detail in focus.  Unfortunately I didn’t really succeed, but this is the only picture I have of old Casa De Oro.

Actually this is late old Casa De Oro.  The one hour Martinizing wasn’t there when we first arrived in the late 1950s.  But if you look closely up in the left hand corner of the picture you can see the sign for the Club 94.  It reads “Club 94.”

It wasn’t a club by any stretch but a pretty down and dirty bar.  A stifling, windowless room whose sole purpose was to sell booze.  It had no atmosphere at all unless one counts the blood stains on the floor.

I might be hallucinating, but down the road to the right a stretch I think I see the Taco Barrel.  Originally, it was a Root Beer Barrel—a barrel shaped building of metal construction painted to look like a Hires Root Beer Barrel.  It changed hands a number of times.  I remember it best as the Taco Barrel.

David—or was it Dan—or maybe it was both of them—bought some Tacos there or different occasions and got pretty sick.

No, wait.  I think they bought “tacquitoes,” I think they were called, like 10 for a a dollar.

I don’t remember us having driven much of any where back in SC.  We didn’t have what people call vacations.  I know we drove to Spartanburg at least once and Greenville a couple of times.  These places seemed way far away though they weren’t really. We never made it to Columbia, the state capital, or to historic Charleston.

When we got to California, the folks started taking those vacations after a while, and every summer when we were all still in school, we would have to take an excursion out to the ocean on some Sunday afternoon. I guess since we lived in California and not that far from the ocean we had to go see it at least once a summer.  Actually, back then the freeways weren’t complete and it took a while to get out to the ocean.

I don’t think any of us wanted to go see the ocean.  It was always hot.  None of us knew how to swim.  So we didn’t really go to the beach.  We went to La Jolla Shores because that’s where our mother wanted to go.  We could look at the tide pools which would be educational and since these were tidepools and not really the beach there would be less chance of us sighting those indecent bathing suits.  After looking at the tidepools a bit, we would roast hot dogs and go home.  I think mother like La Jolla Shores because it was located in La Jolla where many rich people lived right next to ocean.  She talked like she had known people there way back when before the war.  Going to La Jolla shores fed into her delusions of grandeur.

First though we had to find a parking place, and that could go on for a goddamn half hour with the old man swearing a blue streak up and down and the rest of us just cringing in the back afraid he was going to throw something.  By that time my stomach would be in a knot.  But looking at the sea anomies and sticking a stick into them to see them move in the tide pools was somewhat quieting.  While we were out looking at the tide pools and getting educated by the sea life, the old man would start the charcoal up in something called a hibachi.  He always dumped about a half a can of lighter fluid on the stuff because he liked to make an explosion when he threw a match at it.

The hot dogs always had sand in them.  And by that time, the ice would have melted and the cola would be warm.  But that was about the only time we had cola so that wasn’t too bad.  Then we would get back in the car and go home, and the excursion out to see the Pacific would be over.

Thank god.

The next day we would have red spots and splotches and stripes where we had missed with the sun block stuff.

Oh, I didn’t say.  But in the picture is a real life La Jolla Shores tide pool with brother Stephen next to it and beyond them a bit, the old man with brother Dave, I am pretty sure, standing behind him.

From the backyard of 10194 Ramona Dr one may observe the penetration of the suburbs into what I have previously called the “urbs,” a kind of fringe area off in the boonies where one could buy land sufficient to grow gardens or chickens or cows or attempt to ressurect in sunny Southern California some aspects of the rural farming environment from which one had recently traveled.

This picture documents a penetration that happened around 1960 or so.

While the “urbs” were irregular with houses of all sorts and shapes next to each other and no side walks and no sewage system to hook up to, the suburbs came with all those things, neat houses in a row, with sidewalks out-front, small backyards, grassy lawns and a sewer system rather that your trusty septic tank.

The suburbs are here visible as a row of houses in the mid-distance; the urbs are visible as our backyard.  One may note the white soil, known as leche, and off to the right my basketball standard.  It leans a little bit and running across the ground in front of it one may note black snaky lines that are hoses running down to the garden off to the left and out of sight. 

One may see also our neighbor’s back yard directly in front of the row of houses.  At that point they had not yet put up their chain link fence beyond which they would eventually keep chickens and cows. 

The suburbs cut directly into the heart of the urbs.  In a matter of a day, to make as much space available for housing as possible, bulldozers scraped away the accumulated topsoil of a thousand years and scraped out flat spaces in the leche to lay down the slabs on which to erect ticky-tacky plastered houses.  Later, ridiculously, they had to cart in topsoil to put in front so people could have their stupid, little green lawns and backyards, having buried the perfectly good topsoil that was there under mounds of leche.

Indeed, while our neighbors had previously an unobstructed view up the hill, with the coming of the tract homes, they found themselves located next to a nearly perpendicular wall of compacted leche on top of which sat a house, looking more or less down on our neighbor’s house.

I don’t know what the people did who moved into these houses.  But they were people clearly of non-rural origins.  I know a professor at the state college lived in there somewhere because his ridiculous dog bit me in the back of the leg one day.  We had to track him and his dog down because the bite broke my skin and we wanted to make sure the damn dog wasn’t rabid or something.

This is WB’s stone located now in the cemetery of the ARP Church in Ora, South Carolina.

As the stone indicates WB died last year on February 7, so in a way getting the stone made, up, and in place serves to commemorate the date of his death.  Jewish people, I do believe, burn a candle every year on the death date of a beloved relative.  Probably not a bad idea to make us remember things do pass quickly. 

When we—me, Carol, and my brother David and his son—went back to the Church to put our father’s ashes in the ground, Carol and I went to the phone book and looked up a place where we might get a stone made.We drove out of Laurens on the Greenville Highway and found a place on the right that said Wilson Memorials.Nobody was there, but we could see into the yard work area and it looked like a place where memorials might be made.There was a big yard dog there behind the fence, but he was asleep and would not be disturbed by our presence.

After a while, Mr. Wilson showed up as Carol and I were looking at the stones out front. 
For some reason, I wanted one that stood up and didn’t just lie flat on the ground and it had to be big enough for two names since Joan had told me she wanted to be placed next to WB when her time came and I had said I would see to it. 

In this picture, the stone looks too big to me, as if it might be blocking out the view of other stones or something.  But I have been reassured that it is not too big, but looks big the way the picture is taken.  That is probably the case.

Mr. Wilson gave us a brochure to take with us, and some time before Christmas I pulled it out, and called Mr. Wilson and told him what we wanted.  But he wanted to be absolutely sure he had the right one, so I had to fax him a picture I had taken of the one I wanted out front of his place.

I think Mr. Wilson did good work, and the punctuation is solid.  That “G” in the middle of TinGle looks sort of big to me.  But I have always found a capital G hard to make with a pencil much less carve one in stone.

Mr. Wilson sent me this picture so I could see he had put the stone up.

This might be our first or second Christmas at 10194 Ramona Dr.  We have that damn dog Micky

Looks like we made out that year like bandits.  I have my baseball glove and appear to be scrutinizing it.  That means I was already playing Little League Ball or was going to that spring.  Also I have those horrible glasses.  I got them in fifth grade when I stopped being able to see the writing on the blackboard.  Man those glasses were a pain.  They kept breaking and always it was my fault as if I were the one responsible for the rapid aging process of cheap plastic.  Those things had no flex in them and the plastic would get real hard and fragile in a few months and then snap.

Dave is looking abstracted and sort of staring off into space.  He has a bb gun on his lap.  I doubt it was his bb gun; maybe it was Steve’s BB gun.  The bb guns were always Daisy bb guns, made by a company called Daisy I guess.  All electric trains were made by a company called Lionel.  My baseball glove was made by Wilson.

Steve is looking alert.  Apparently our wardrobes back in that day consisted entirely of jeans and striped t-shirts and dirty white socks.  Later on I wore tennis shoes; Converse All Stars black and high topped. 

Dan is not yet on this earth yet.  That will be in a couple of years.

That tree looks pretty dinky to me; but the parental units didn’t really believe on splurging on the amenities.  

Christmas day was usually pretty awful.  So was Thanksgiving.

Behold! The very front of the upper eastern corner of the Tingle property as it abutted Romana Dr.  The house was in the early stages of construction, as is suggested by the pile of block sitting there in the lower left corner of the picture.

The class structure was pretty well laid out by the hill; the poor at the bottom, the upper poor more towards the middle, and then the solidly affluent up at the top.  These houses were in general just as ugly as the houses lower down the hill, but they were bigger, and boxier and they all had “views.”  The price of a house could go up or down depending on this intangible thing: the view.  At the very top of the hill, one might on a clear day make out the glisten and glimmer of the Pacific, way off there somewhere.

We had a view too but it was sort of a lateral view, a south to north view out the back window and not a truly valuable east to west view of the Pacific.

In a general way, this picture confirms my earlier description of Southern California as a rather dry and dusty place lacking green weeds.  True, up the hill a bit the truck farms stopped farming and tumble weeds took root in the abandoned dirt. These were actual tumble weeds and during a good wind they would become uprooted and tumble right through our back yard.

My brothers and I all attended Casa De Oro Elementary for all or a portion of our elementary school education.  The Boy Scout Troop that I was forced to belong to met in the basement cafeteria of the Elementary School. 

Here somebody is tormenting that damn dog, Micky, known as Micky the Dog.  Truthfully though we did not in general believe in tormenting animals.

Micky the Dog appears in the previous photo of the backyard of 10194 Ramona Drive, Spring Valley, California.  This picture too shows the backyard of 10194 Ramona Drive, Spring Valley, California, though in the opposite direction from the previous photo.  The previous photo was pointed east; this one is more a picture of the west of the yard.

We did not have a lawn in the front yard, but we did have one, as this and the previous photo indicate, in the back yard.  I think this was to keep the dust down.  In South Carolina weeds would grow up of their own accord to keep the dust down, but in Southern California you couldn’t count on anything to grow due to a lack of naturally occurring water, i.e., rain. So if you wished to keep down the dust in your back yard you either had to cover it with concrete or asphalt or grow a lawn.

This lawn was never in prime condition.  In the summer months we watered it only erratically.  In the darker months it died out.  The dogs would poop on it or pee on it.  Female dog’s pee kills a lawn.  Sometimes the poop would just lie there in the darker months and white mold would grow all over it.  Those piles of moldy dog poop looked like some sort of ulcers growing out of our scab of a lawn.

Sometimes, though, the lawn would grow up enough so that it had to be mowed.  This was done with a push mower with very dull blades.  The grass cuttings were then raked up and thrown over the back fence into the compost heap with the rest of our decaying organic matter.

Mickey the Dog was already a year or so old when we got it.  We did not acquire it as a pup and perhaps for that reason I never fully bonded with it.  It was part rat terrier and chihuahua.  This was a little dog with a somewhat nervous temperament; it was a fierce yipper and caused no end of swearing on the part of WB telling the m-f...king dog to shut up.  Also its penis was too large for its body and stuck out like a sore thumb. 

It had large thick fingernails or claws, as I suppose they are called on dogs.  Because the house at 10194 Ramona Drive had hard wood floors, where ever you were sitting you could hear that dog, when it moved about, clicking its fingernails on that hard wood.  Sometimes, if a person came to the front door or something alarming like that, the dog would rush out from the back of the house, round the corner into the living room, and slide clear across the floor and bang into the wall because it couldn’t get any traction on those hard wood floors.

At first that was funny as hell; later on it was only mildly distracting.

This is a picture of the back yard of the house located at 10194 Ramona Dr in Spring Valley, California.

Welcome to suburbia.  Actually I don’t think we lived in suburbia with neat tract homes all in a row.  All of the homes on Romana Drive—or most of them at least—had been built independently as it were by its individual owner.  None of them looked alike though they were all one story and sort of boxy and cheap looking.  And most people had more land tacked onto their property than is usually the case in suburbia.  Nor did people on Romana Drive have lawns out front.  Nor did we have sidewalks.

People sometimes kept animals out back.  One time our neighbor grew a cow out back.  One guy parked his collection of Hudson Hornets in his backyard.  People kept gardens out back too.  Usually some sort of dog was running around in the yard.

We had a slop bucket.  Who the hell has a slop bucket?  What the hell is a slop bucket?  I think it was a left over from a rural way of life.  You kept a pig and you fed it slops.  You kept your slops in a slop bucket.  Any sort of organic matter could serve as slop: coffee grounds, egg shells, moldy bread, chicken bones, orange peelings, apple cores, corn cobs, pork chop bones, potato shavings, squishy tomatoes, and rotting meat.  Your slop bucket could get damn stinky in the heat; that’s why it had a special lock down sort of top to keep in the stink.

The slop bucket was sort of a vestigial organ, like the human appendix, left over from a previous evolutionary stage.  After a while, we stopped keeping a slop bucket.  We didn’t have a pig out back.  We would take the slop and dump it on the compost heap.  Seems as if we were always heaping compost.  After a while all our decaying organic matter ended up in garbage cans out by the road.

So we didn’t live in suburbia—but in some sort of half way place between that and a rural way of life.  I call it “urbia.”

Here we are back in South Carolina again.  That’s me upfront and brother Steve right behind me.  He looks about 3 so maybe I am about 5 or so.

As you can see there in the back ground we had one of those newfangled labor saving devices called a clothes line.  This is no store bought clothes line but one constructed in our own yard out of one pole of wood with another pole of wood propping it up.  Wet clothes and sheets can be quite heavy.

We had no so-called dryer like people have now.  But we did have a washing machine that sat right outside the kitchen.  It had an agitator.  You put the clothes in the machine and it agitated the clothes.  On the top, it had a wringer; that was for wringing some of the water out of the clothes and once you had done that you hung them on the clothes line and used the sun as a dryer.  I think the washer was called a wringer washer, because it had a wringer up on top.

If you look to the right and below the white stuff on the clothes line you will see on the ground a real, live (though now long dead) chicken walking around like it had a right to be there or something. 

Today I suppose that chicken would be called a free range chicken, because as you can see it was roaming about freely in an unconstrained manner.  Us, we called them chickens “good eating.”  I do have to say those yard chickens were pretty scrawny; and when you cooked them up there was not much to them at all compared to the fat, chemically fed, chickens you can buy today that have wing bones as big as the drumstick of those yard chickens.  Still the chickens of yesteryear tasted like chickens; the chickens of today don’t taste like much of anything unless you fix them up with stuff before cooking them.

In the summer of ’63 I think it must have been the clan took a trip back to South Carolina.  As usual, I don’t know why we did this.  But I think there might have been a bit of a crisis in the family dealing with Grandma Tingle’s future wellbeing.  But I am not sure.

That was one miserable trip, both ways.  It was sweltering hot.  One night we parked on the West Side of the Mississippi, right across from Memphis, I think, and the heat was just unbelievable, plus bugs, and of course we were “camping out” which meant my brother, Steve and I were sleeping in the very back of the Plymouth Station Wagon.  When I was young I could go to sleep almost anytime.  But I am not sure I got any sleep that night at all.

This picture was taken at Grandma Tingle’s place when we finally got back there.  Off to the left, you can see the open door of the old barn and the other building back there was the smoke house, as I recollect.  Things got smoked in there for later eating though I remember it mostly as having been filled with cobs of corn, or dried up corn still on the cob that was shucked off and then fed to the chickens.  I recollect some sort of corn shucking device because you couldn’t get those little corns off by hand.

Actually, I do believe “shucking” corn refers to taking the green leaves or shucks off the corn.  And taking the corn off the cob is called decorning and there are machines for doing that called “decorning” machines.

In the middle there of the picture is a white vehicle that was called by some in those days a “dewdrop” trailer and sometimes called a “teardrop” also.  Joan and WB slept in that along with brother, Dan, I imagine who wasn’t that old then.  Just three.  As you will note the thing has no windows.  It sweltered inside that thing.  On the other hand, they had a mattress to sleep on and not hard, cold car metal.  And I may be wrong but I think the back of it opened up and there was a propane stove there.  So you could pull over, sleep inside the thing, and then get out, go round to the back, open it up and cook breakfast on the propane stove.

We were driving through the middle of the Civil Rights Movement, not that I knew a thing about it.  Still, when we stopped for gas, WB said to the old black man who came out to operate the pump, “Fill’er up Uncle.”  And the black man said, “I ain’t your uncle.”  And WB just laughed as if he were laughing at a child; I didn’t like that laugh at all.

It just came to me.  But when we started that trip back to SC, I can remember sitting in the back of the Station Wagon with a copy of Wilde’s “The Portrait of Dorian Gray.”  It was a paper back and the cover had a picture of a young man looking into the mirror and seeing the old man version of himself.  I thought that book was pretty spooky.

So I sat in the back reading Dorian Gray while we drove across the country in our 59 Plymouth station wagon pulling that darned dewdrop or teardrop trailer through the middle of the Civil Rights movement of which I was as yet unaware.

We’d heard you could find oranges just lying around on the streets for the picking up in California.  The Land of Milk and Honey at the end of our Exodus.  But we didn’t find any free oranges, and the place turned out to be pretty dirty really.  Moving from SC to CA was a big change.  We gained things economically and lost our connection to the culture we had been raised up in.

This is Dave, in the cowbow hat, and me, and Steve with that big metal pole. We are standing out back of the house on Ramona Dr, though the house wasn’t probably built yet, but in its first stages.  As you can see we had much managed to move into the middle of nowhere again; this time East County San Diego which wasn’t all that built up in 1956.

We had about ¾’s of an acre that went back to about that pile of wood you can see behind us, and then on down the gulley and up the hill on the other side you can see to the right a darker patch.  That’s the truck farm that grew tomatoes and peppers.  On beyond that stretch pretty barren hills right on up to Mount Helix—that you can’t see in this picture.

Directly behind us you can see the ’47 Studebaker that carried us and towed all our earthly belongings in a U-Haul trailer from one end of the USA to the other.  That car gave us its life for us because by the time we got to CA the rear axel had broken, and the car sat out back for a number of years, as is the Southern tradition.

The dirt immediately beneath our feet looks pretty white and was called locally leche, which is Spanish for milk.  All white and crumbly, it wasn’t real dirt at all.  You couldn’t grow anything in it.  As far as I was able to learn, it was dried up sea shells and such left from a time long ago when the whole area had been under the ocean.

Aunt Betty sent this telegram to 731 West Prinston, Orlando, Florida where I guess we were living at the time.  It’s dated August 4, 1955.

I have no memory of Orlando except for mosquitoes.  The place we were in had no air conditioning of course.  If we were to sleep at all the windows had to be open, but the screens were in bad repair.  So I have a recollection I believe accurate that we slept with mosquito netting hung over our beds.

Before that we had been in Tampa for a while that summer as WB looked for work.

Since we arrived in San Diego, more specifically La Mesa, before the school year started we must have lit out for California not long after that telegram arrived.

It reads:

Talked with Johnny Melega for Etching 5831 El Cajon Blvd says good brick masons badly needed here advises you to come on house plentiful beautiful GI close to beaches here there is no other place like San Diego I drove it in a 38 please come home love Betty.

So that’s what happened.  WB got a job with Etchings and worked it till he retired.  We did not settle close to the beaches of course.  “I drove it in a 38”—I don’t know what that means unless Betty was indicating that she was able to drive from South Carolina to San Diego in a car made in 1938.

We drove it in a ’47 Studebaker.

In “The Southern Diaspora,” James N. Gregory argues that southerners, both black and white, had been moving out of the South in considerable numbers since the turn of the 20^th century.  The 50’s were the decade of greatest migration. More than four million whites, blacks and Hispanics moved out to other parts in that decade.

We were part of a great migration whether we knew it or not.

I don’t know what the deal was exactly, but I have noted that in pictures of me from about 6 to 18 months I am elevated or stuck up on top of things.  A fence post in one case; atop a hay wagon in another; on the hood of the Reo, and in another case on the fender of the Reo. Also seated in a wheel barrow.  In all cases, my feet are not touching the ground; you might think I had something against earth.

I was being posed in what was perhaps a fad of the era.  Put Baby up on something high, and if he is not up on something high, you get down on your belly and point up with the Brownie so it looks like Baby is up high somewhere.

But I am pretty sure this is not a fad, but more a case of Freud’s “His Majesty, the Infant.”  Baby is elevated because baby is King.  In the infant, Freud says, the adult sees his or her own narcissism reflected back in a way that can be admitted into the light of day.  If that’s the case, then Joan, who am I pretty sure was responsible for my various placements, was pretty grandiose since she insisted on my being elevated in Kingly fashion.

But then brother Steve has long claimed that Joan thinks she is the Queen of England.

I for my part did not apparently always like being posed or stuck high up on things.

In this photo clearly I am somewhat distraught at having been stuck in that ugly-assed wheelbarrow, that is not, as I look more closely, a wheel barrow at all but most probably a fertilizer distributor. Possibly I did not feel the fertilizer distributor a truly regal conveyance.

When recently I assisted, one day, in helping my brother’s clean out Joan’s house for the purpose f selling it, I was given the responsibility of collecting the pictures and other documents Joan had stuck in a cedar chest or left lying about.  I spent some hours over this Christmas break plowing through the stuff, sorting out pictures I found of historical interest largely.  I found also a couple of envelopes: one labeled Dan and another Dave, containing pictures of my brothers Dan and Dave respectively.

I gave Dan his envelope of picture stuff on Christmas day.  We went through it and got a couple of laughs, and Dan on his blog has used some of the pictures to tell the story of his early years as a dork.  Well, not as a dork, exactly, but as a dorklike person in the land of dorks.  He told me that he almost pissed his self laughing at that Napoleon Dynamite movie.  I didn’t think the movie was funny really, just sort of sad, and peopled largely with drooling idiots.

But Dan is 14 years younger than I and completely a California Kid born and raised.  Fads come and go quickly under late consumer capitalism.  I was spared the Dork phenomenon.

I have got to mail Dave his envelope of picture stuff but I keep forgetting.

The Old Reo was called the Old Reo back then in 1945, so who knows how old the Old Reo was even then.  Over the years that car became for me a sort of mystical and mythical beast—the car I rode in to get from San Diego to Ora, South Carolina.  Some might say we were going in the wrong direction, but who cares.  We went where ever we went in the Old Reo.

Suffering as all kids do from Infantile Amnesia, I have no recollection of the trip; and by the time I started having a memory the Old Reo was defunct.  I remember it only as a car carcass sitting past the barn at Grandma’s place and slowly sinking into the weeds.  It did not decay as most old cars do via rust, but actually rotted since a good portion of its frame and paneling was wood.

 So that’s me in the Old Reo with the old man.  The Old Reo was probably related to the more famous Reo Speedwagon.  Along the hood of the truck—for I think the old Reo was technically a truck—appears in a little inlay the word Delivery.  This is in another picture and I cannot make out the word before Delivery because I am sitting in front of it.  But this suggests the Old Reo was a Delivery Truck.

If this is the case, in all likelihood, the truck probably had only a front seat and a lot of room in the back for other stuff.

So we crossed the County in a Reo Delivery Truck.  And so we were Delivered.

Now is that love or what?

That’s me and MY dog.  I had other dogs or I was told they were my dogs so I would feed them.  They were big and rangy yard dogs and they either ran off or became chicken killers and that was the end of them.

But that was MY dog.  I don’t know what kind of dog it was, but it was a little dog for a little fellow like me at the time.  It would be waiting for me outside and it would follow me around and knew your basic orders like “sit” and “stay.”  From the picture I would say we had a pretty good dog human relationship.

But one day I am out collecting coke bottles from along the road, and I have my little dog with me though Joan had said over and over don’t take that dog down by the road or it will get run over.  And sure enough I walk across the road to look in the ditch on the othe side of the road, and as I turn to go back I see MY dog has started towards me from the other side of the road.  And there is car, coming out of nowhere.

I was paralyzed.  The car was on us so fast, I didn’t have time to move.  I didn’t even have time to yell as the car ran right over my dog killing it instantly.  

The car just kept on going.

I picked up the dog and took it back to the place and I started crying and couldn’t stop and I went and threw myself belly down on my bed and just couldn’t stop crying.  And Joan was completely useless per usual.  She prided herself on being a Mother par excellance, and she did an OK job I guess at keeping us in clean clothes and fed alright, but when it came to the emotional side of being a mother she was completely clueless.  All she could do was sit by the bed and say over and over that she had told me so and the dog wouldn’t be dead if I had listened to what SHE said.

A fat lot of good that did.  I knew I had a mistake.  I didn’t have to be told that.

Any way, when I came across that picture recently, I almost regretted it because I started remembering that dog and that moment by the road.  I can almost feel that dog sitting in my lap.  It liked me and was an affectionate animal.

Below please find the official legal description, duly signed and notarized, for the former Tingle family acerage near Ora, SC.

Apparently, WB couldn't get any bank to lend him the money for the land; after all he lacked any collateral, except maybe that white mule.  So he borrowed the money from AY Bryson.  1800 bucks for one acre.  I don't know but that seems a bit steep to me for one acre back in 1946.  But maybe he was paying for the prime location.  Below please find the terms for the loan:

 And from the Greenville News, date line Wednesday, November 3, 1948. I sadly report:

Jasper Barton, 50, Route 1, Woodruff, was still in poor condition last night at General Hospital where he was admitted Monday for treatment of injuries recveived when a mule reportedly struck him while Mr. Barton was trying to hitch him to a wagon.  What the mule struck Mr. Barton with is still unknown. 

Brother Dan upon reading a recent entry wondered why the heck WB did not build a house—after all, it was a new house—back in 1947 with an indoor toilet in it.  That’s a good question really that I don’t know how to answer.  Maybe it was just tradition.  Grandma didn’t have indoor plumbing either. This question is also related to another raised by brother Dan and that’s how poor were we back then and there.

I do think money had something to do with not have indoor plumbing and tradition might have made it easier to go without.  We did, as I said, have our own well, and WB ran pipe into the kitchen.  We had running water there and I do believe the water ran also to the washing machine.  But that part of the house—the kitchen and the little porch with the washing machine—directly adjoined the well.  So the house had water but no bathroom had been built, so no water could get to what wasn’t there.

So how poor were we?

We were so poor the rats dined out.  Ha ha.

We were so poor the roaches became cannibals. Ha ha.

I don’t know how poor we were.  I know WB went back with the idea of growing cotton and being a farmer, and that did not work out AT ALL.  He was trying to make ends meet with the assistance of a white mule. So when the house was built they just may not have had the ready money for the extra room that would have been the bathroom and for the appointments—like a toilet—that go along with a bathroom.

I don’t remember having been hungry in a really unpleasant gnawing at your stomach way, though I do remember having occasionally really wanted that last pork chop or part of it anyway.  The kitchen table, though, according to Joan, was not a proper table but a table frame to which WB had tacked a piece of plywood.  Seems as if we could have gotten a proper table from somewhere, but apparently not.  Also I did not have a proper chair or a chair proper at the table.  My seat was a nail keg.  I imagine brother, Steve, sat in a highchair as long as they could keep him there.  I don’t know what he sat on when he was big enough for a chair proper.

The hot water heater was right there in the kitchen with us and not off in its own little room as is the custom today.  We did not go in the kitchen when there was lightening because sometimes a nearby strike would cause a bolt of blue electricity to arch across the kitchen from the wiring on one side of the room to the refrigerator on the other side.

Joan also paints a pathetic picture of her driving into town, clutching me to her bosom, tied down by a rope to the front seat, because her side of the vehicle had no door.

So, overall, I think a money shortage might have had something to do with the lack of an indoor toilet.