Remembering

It all started on August 13, 1940. I was born in Sioux City, Iowa, a city of 80,000 people on the cliffs above the Missouri River on the west side of the state. By the way, Gene Autry was one of the heroes I worshiped as a boy growing up in Sioux City. The others were Tom Mix, The Lone Ranger, Hopalong Cassidy, and, of course, Roy Rogers. Roy and his horse, Trigger, actually came to the Orpheum Theater, and I got to shake hands with Roy and pet Trigger, or, was it the other way around...I can't remember.

Our family consisted of my sister Ruth, 6 years older than I, and Mom and Dad. Mom was a stay-at-home Mom, while Dad was at the time of my birth trying to learn how to be the manager of a local office of the Equitable Life Assurance Society. He worked long hours at that task, and was often not home until late at night in those early years. It was stressing him to the max. A few years later he gave up trying to manage people, and became a very successful life insurance salesman, working mainly with rural Iowa clients, who bought life insurance from him, because they realized he sincerely cared about them and their families. He was 37 when he became the father of me, his only son. I believe he was five years older than Mom.

Dad's mom was "Grandma Alice." She lived alone in Goldfield, Iowa, near the center of the state. Alice had at least one sister, my Aunt Nell, living in that same town. The sisters lived well into their eighties. I remember Grandma Alice as a sweet, smiling person. We got together with them several times a year, along with an assortment of my aunts and uncles and their kids. My Aunt Nell used to tell me there was a birdie in the house. She would whistle like a bird, then ask me to find the bird. I would look everywhere, while all the adults laughed, thinking this stupid kid had been bamboozled by the clever Aunt Nell.

I never knew Grandma Alice's husband. When I was a teen, Mom explained to me that he had committed suicide by shooting himself. Dad was the one to find him in a river bed, when Dad was a teen. Mom made me promise not to ever talk about this with Dad, but she did want me to understand that this event was the reason Dad was often sad. Alice raised three boys and two girls.

I did know both of Mom's parents. "Grandma Davis" was what I called Mom's mother. We never visited her house, but she often visited ours. I don't even know what town she lived in, although I think it was Davenport, Iowa, on the banks of the Mississippi River on the east side of the state. She was of German heritage, and had a tougher exterior than Grandma Alice. She had raised five daughters during the depression, while her husband, Fred, roamed the countryside looking for card games. He did show up at Lake Okoboji whenever our family went there for a few days of fun in the summertime. I guess Okoboji was just about the "coolest" place in Iowa, a pretty lake with an amusement park.

My parents neither drank nor smoked. Dad had a sister, Bess, who lived in Seattle. One summer we visited Bess out there. There was a regatta on the Puget Sound. Bess had a doctor friend who owned a yacht, and invited us all out on his boat with other friends during the regatta. Dad nudged me and told me to watch him put one over on all the drinkers on the boat. I sat next to him, while he was served drink after drink, pretending to drink the alcohol, but actually pouring it into the Puget Sound when no one but I was looking. He had more fun that day than any of the people who were using alcohol to have fun, a lesson not lost on his son.

Do you notice that I am writing more about my Dad than my Mom? That is because he was the one I felt closer to. He was the one who put up a basketball hoop in our tiny basement, and encouraged me, a third-grader, to dream of one day playing for the University of Iowa, where he had been a track star. He could beat the guy over the first two hurdles who won the Olympic Gold medal (the guy was portrayed in the movie Chariots of Fire). Unfortunately, sadness again entered Dad's life when someone ratted on him, and he lost his amateur status and eligibility to compete in track. You see, to help his mother feed her large family, Dad played semi-pro baseball in the summers.

I experienced Dad's speed first-hand, when I, a sixth-grader, was walking with a friend through the alley next to our house. Dad reminded me that I had an unfinished chore, and I stupidly showed off for my friend by giving Dad the middle finger. He chased me one block down the alley, a half-block down the hill, and one-half block around the corner to a parked car. He would have caught me much sooner, but he had stopped to look for just the right piece of wood for my well-earned consequence. We ran around and around the parked car until justice reached my rear end. I never again disrespected him.

Being a fast runner was the most important thing in the world to me, as I entered kindergarten at Hunt Elementary School. Only Joanie Burroughs could beat me in a race. I loved my third-grade teacher, Mrs. Green, whose son played for the Iowa Hawkeyes basketball team. By third grade, I was already a basketball fanatic.

By fifth grade, in Miss Zerbe's class, I had added baseball to my obsessions. That year I had a traumatic experience while attending a "softball" game. I put softball in quotes, because that dang thing was not very soft, when I was innocently walking back to my seat with a freshly purchased bag of popcorn, and the center fielder's throw to the plate was wildly errant enough to bean me on my noggin! I suffered "dizzy spells" for some time after that and missed a lot of school that year. I was home listening on the radio when Bobby Thomson hit "The Shot Heard 'Round the World." The Giants were my favorite team, and Leo Durocher my favorite manager. Once when Dad had a sales convention in Chicago, Leo Durocher was on the same elevator with me and Dad. Durocher graciously took me around the hotel lobby asking players to give me their autographs, before they left on the team bus for their game with the Cubs!

Another kind of obsession had hit me in the fourth grade, when I found myself becoming attracted to members of the opposite sex. That Spring I left May baskets at the front doors of both Mary Knoll and Judy Hamilton. If the girls could catch you, you had to let them kiss you. Somehow I lost my vaunted reputation for speed on that wonderful day.

In sixth grade cocky Bob met his match: Miss Bingamon. Miss Bingamon put up with no crap. If us guys were fooling around in the boys bathroom, that was no barrier to Miss Bingamon. She would come right on in and bang whomever she adjudged guilty against the bathroom wall. Thus, her well-earned nickname: Miss Bingbang! I was afraid of her, and that fear manifested itself most embarrassingly one day when I was giving a book report before the class. Yes, I peed my pants.

Pants also figured large in my seventh grade, which was the first year in junior high school. Because I had a reputation for being cocky, especially when I had a basketball in my hand, some guys from the "other side of town" bragged that they were going to "pants" me after school. "Pantsing" was when guys would take off your pants and hang them on the flag pole at school, or so I was told. My house was a long way from North Junior High, and I took a different route home every afternoon after school, until the threats died down and I became good friends with some very tough hombres on the basketball team.

Eighth grade was notable for my first love affair. I fell head over heals in love with Judy Kyle, who had long legs that she loved to cross and uncross whenever my eyes were turned in her direction. In ninth grade Judy became the lifeguard at the pool at the Boat Club, where my parents joined in order for my mother to play golf and my father to meet clients, while flailing away at the little white ball. I took up the game, and got pretty good at it.

In tenth grade we made the big transition to Central High School, "The Castle on the Hill." I'll pick up there in my next installment.