Prologue

On January 12, 2008, my brother, Thomas Pyle Reid, Colonel, USMC (Retired), was interred with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Virginia. After training at Parris Island, South Carolina, he served as an enlisted Marine in several Pacific battles, had been wounded, returned to his unit immediately after having been evacuated to a navy hospital ship, and continued to serve until the end of the war in the Pacific. He was eligible to receive the Purple Heart. After the war he entered Johns Hopkins University, continuing service in the Marine Corps Reserve. Upon graduation, he was commissioned a second lieutenant and assigned for officer training at Quantico Marine Base. Upon completion, he was sent to Korea as a platoon leader during the early days of the Korean War. He was awarded the Silver Star for bravery in combat with the enemy and received a second Purple Heart for wounds received in combat. He returned to the U.S. and completed a doctoral degree in jurisprudence, continuing to serve in the Marine Corps Reserve until retirement. His interment at
Arlington National Cemetery honored his long and honorable career of service to his country.

My wife, Dee, and I had planned to attend the interment ceremony with our daughter, Stephanie, and son, Jeffrey, traveling from San Diego, California, where we were spending the Christmas holidays. Unfortunately, Dee and I became ill with the flu and could not travel. At the ceremony, Stephanie and Jeffrey became reacquainted with their aunt, Connie, their cousins, and their families. In discussing their Uncle Tom, it became apparent that there was little written record of the years he and I had spent growing up. It was suggested that I was the only remaining source for information about these early years and that it would be helpful to both families for me to provide such a record. I agreed to start the project and continue as long as possible. It should be noted that I had begun a personal account of those early years several years ago, but had lost it when I changed computers. I had tried desperately without success to recover the manuscript and had finally given up trying to recreate the pages I had lost. Subsequent events have again encouraged me to undertake the task of describing what it was like
growing up with my brother Tom.

The Early Years with My Brother Tom

I have been fortunate during my life to be able to record photographically in my mind places, events, and facts that might otherwise have escaped my memory. Thus, my earliest memory was of living in a home in Narbrook Park, Narberth, Pennsylvania. As expected, most of my brother’s and my waking hours were spent with our mother, Mary Elizabeth Polk Pyle Reid. Our father, Alban Elwell Reid Sr., worked as a factory manager for the A.H. Reid Creamery and Dairy Supply Manufacturing Co. located in West Philadelphia. His father, Alban Hooke Reid, had invented the cream separator as well as other equipment related to the dairy industry and had created a very successful manufacturing business. He was by reputation a stern, self-contained man with a number of idiosyncrasies, among them the determination to walk daily to, and from, his apartment on Chestnut Street to the factory on Sixty-ninth Street, a distance of thirty blocks. It was said he could be identified easily because he always allowed his handkerchief to hang from his back pocket to dry.

As a factory manager, our father was expected to open the factory in the morning and shut it down at night, six-and-a-half days a week. Tom and I were still in bed when he left for work in the morning and usually fast asleep when he returned home at night. (I have a vague recollection of our mother being frightened at least once in the night when she thought someone was peeking at us through a window. Most of our contact with our father came on the weekends when we were held accountable for things, both good and bad, that we had done during the week. One session stands out in my memory. Tom and I disliked a little neighbor girl who insisted on following us around and taunting us. One day, when we felt that she had pestered us enough, we decided to teach her a lesson. We held her and loaded her bloomers with gravel from the road. She went screaming home and her mother came to tell our mother what we had done. I don’t know why two young boys would have decided to do what we did. We were barely out of diapers when it happened. When our father heard of our transgression, we were shut
up in a closet for what seems now like several days, living on bread and water. Dad had recently returned from the war in Europe where he had served as a lieutenant in the Transportation Corps, riding a motorcycle to transmit dispatches from point to point. (He had prepared for his commission by attending a summer training camp in upstate New York while he was enrolled as a student at the Wharton School of Finance at the University of Pennsylvania.) It probably seemed appropriate to him to punish his sons the way they would have been punished had they been in the army, thus solitary confinement and bread and water. Fortunately, while he was gone during the day, our
mother saw to it that we received proper nourishment.

I do remember during our time at Narberth being taken with Tom to a movie theatre where we heard Al Jolson sing “Sonny Boy” in the film, “The Jazz Singer.” The theatre also presented a full-color kaleidoscope projected on the screen, probably a precursor to Technicolor years later. “The Jazz Singer” was the first motion picture to have sound. The Jolson connection became significant years later when he traveled to Trinidad on a USO tour and I, as a newspaper journalist in the army, did promotional releases on his travels within the command. U.S. newspapers picked up the releases, and his career, which had been all but dead, was suddenly revitalized. Shortly after his visit, Hollywood
released the biographical film, “The Jolson Story.”

Grandfather Reid had worked on the family farm between Coatesville and Downingtown, Pennsylvania, after the death of his father, James Reid. In an early census, he was listed as a wooden-bucket maker. He was reputed to have spent much time sitting under a tree, thinking. Rather later in life he had come upon the idea of creating a machine that would separate cream from milk instead of waiting while cream naturally rose to the top of a bottle or pan. He had also invented and installed a device that cooled the milk as it was transported in a coil immersed in water that was pumped from a well. I remember seeing this rig when visiting the Reid homestead, which stood on a hill overlooking the Brandywine Creek (of Revolutionary War battle fame). Tom and I swam in a deep pool on the Brandywine. A later account by our cousin, James Reid Alburger, told that Grandfather Reid was fascinated by the idea of man flying, and built a glider that our dad was reported to have flown off the hill above the Brandywine. When the Wright brothers flew their powered aircraft at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina,
Grandfather Reid was reported to have visited them there soon afterward.

We also visited our mother’s parents at 101 West Twenty-ninth Street in Baltimore, Maryland, where we became acquainted with uncles, aunts, cousins, and Pearl, a black servant, who kept food on the table and generally kept the house running. I remember our mother telling us that Pearl had taken care of her when she was a baby. Mary Turner Polk Pyle, our grandmother, was a very austere person who seems to me, in retrospect, to have only tolerated the male grandchildren, of whom Tom and I were the principals. Uncle Whitey and Aunt Alberta Roberts and cousin Mary Polk Roberts, resided with Grandmother and Grandfather Pyle in the large, four-story, attached brick house on West Twenty-ninth Street. Whitey, who had played “professional” football with the Canton, Ohio team, (one of the original non-college football teams in the country), was vice-president of the Borden Company franchise for eastern Maryland and Delaware. I remember dessert for dinner each night was an ample serving of one of Borden’s many different flavors of ice cream. Aunt Alberta, I thought, took a distinct
dislike to me and seemed not to be pleased when Tom and I played too boisterously with Mary Polk. She was interested in the family lineage and I learned later that she was instrumental in searching out the connection with Charles Polk, who was listed as a patriot of the War of Independence and thus enabled her to join the Daughters of the American Revolution, where she became a regent. She also traced the lineage to Richard and Gilbert De Clare, farther and son, who forced King John to sign the Magna Carta in 1215, which entitled her to become a Dame of the Magna Carta.

Fanny Stalfort was our mother’s eldest sister, whom I remember as being a very sweet and generous person. Her husband, Edwin, was a chemist who had developed and manufactured several different kinds of waxes, one of which was White Sail, a liquid wax sold through a national grocery chain. Aunt Fanny died in a horrible automobile accident in Delaware. Their daughter, Mary Selma Stalfort, an older cousin, was about twelve at the time and did not get involved with Tom, Mary Polk, and me. Uncle Charles was a very short and jovial man who always seemed to relate to the children, though he and Aunt Mary Pyle had no children of their own. Bud, as he was known by his sisters,
had taken over management of the McDowell Pyle Confectionary Company, which grandfather Pyle had created from his beginnings as a candy sales representative in Delaware. He had lived as a boarder in great grandmother Polk’s house and had married our grandmother, Mary Turner Polk when she was just seventeen. Our mother’s younger sister, Theodora Polk Pyle, was married to Henry William “Bill”
Morgan, Jr., who was involved in real estate in Washington, D.C. I recall very little of their three children except that they were much younger than Tom and I were. Of course, I also very vaguely remember our great-grandmother, Sarah Fawcett Polk, who spent much of her time in her bedroom upstairs. I was only three when she died. We had no contact with the Baltimore relatives for years after we eventually left for Florida. I have a dim memory of Grandfather Pyle’s funeral. The Pyle-Roberts household seemed to be very much what would today be called a matriarchal residence.

My next recollection was attending Grandfather Reid’s funeral at our Aunt Josephine’s home in Lower Merion, Pennsylvania. I have a visual picture of him lying in his casket while family and friends talked. I was about four at the time and Tom was three. Since Grandfather Thomas Jefferson Pyle, our mother’s father, died within the same time period, and our grandmother, Mary Elwell Reid, had expired in 1903 while our dad was still a boy, Tom and I were left with only one grandparent, Mary Turner Polk Pyle.

Shortly after grandfather Reid‘s death, we departed Narberth and went to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Dad was studying finance and investments at Babson Institute. We had a great time playing in the great rooms of the Institute and in the office of Roger Babson. He was at that time an icon of the financial world, teaching economics and advising on investments. We learned much later that although Grandfather Reid had left the factory to our dad, and much of his property and wealth to our Aunt Josephine, the will had been challenged so that now the factory and real estate went to Aunt Josephine and her husband, Elmer Alburger. Much of the cash went to our dad, which was presumably why he was studying investments at Babson. (Josephine and Elmer soon after sold the factory, and thus ended the potential for continuity of the Reid inventive genius which could have been embodied in our father who, we understood, held several dairy equipment patents in his own right).

After Dad completed his studies at Babson, I recall a period when we visited a wealthy man in Spring Lake, New Jersey. He had a sumptuous home facing the ocean, with house servants and a massive Pierce-Arrow car in which we traveled to the beach. Many years later, we learned that Harry Merritt was maintaining his lifestyle in part by investing Dad’s money in his schemes, which eventually went south. Dad later spent
several years in Chicago pursuing a suit against Merritt, which resulted in Merritt going to prison for a period of time. When he was released, he moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where, amazingly, Dad took us to visit him.

One of Dad’s investments resulting from his studies at Babson was an orange grove located outside of Tampa, Florida. We packed up and left Narberth to settle in a very beautiful home in Temple Terrace, a suburb of Tampa. On the way to Florida, we were driving down a dusty road when we came upon a black woman lying in a ditch beside the road. It appeared that she had been struck with a piece of wood that was lying next to her. We slowed as our parents tried to decide what to do. Apparently, they decided that there was nothing they could do, so we continued down the road. After a while, we came across a man who was walking rapidly away from where the woman had been. Again, it appeared that there was nothing we could do, so we continued on our way to Florida. That scene was recorded in my mind some eighty years ago, yet the image is as vivid in my mind today as though it were just yesterday.

Almost as soon as we arrived in Florida there was a freeze, which killed off most of the trees in the orange groves. That ended our dad‘s Florida odyssey, for he soon became involved in another type of enterprise in the Midwest. Tom and I were enrolled in a school near our house to which we walked every day. Unfortunately, we had to pass a house where there was what seemed to us to be a gigantic chow dog. I can remember his black tongue as he barked at us when we walked past. I forever after have had a loathing of that type of animal. We were always afraid he would break his chain and attack us.

I can’t remember how Tom fared at school, but I recall that I had my first crush on a little blonde girl named Sally. We had a small white spitz dog that went berserk one day and tried to climb up the fireplace chimney. During his rampage, he turned from white to black. I don’t remember his departing, but suddenly there was no longer a dog in our lives. One of my more vivid memories was of the “tomato standoff,” where our dad insisted that I finish the sliced tomatoes on my plate before I could leave the dinner table. I sat for what seemed like hours before I was finally allowed to go to bed. I’m certain that dad won the contest, but it left me with a lifelong aversion to sliced tomatoes. I remember that both Tom and I developed scarlet fever, which at that time was considered to be a fairly serious illness. We spent some time being cared for in our beds. Those were the same beds where punishment was meted out for misbehavior. I can remember some rather sharp slaps on my rear from my father’s belt. He also managed to put some dents in Mother’s sterling silver Stieff hairbrush. (Years later that
brush was willed to my wife, Dee, and it still had the dents that had been placed there from contact with my bottom. It also disappeared one day when we were packing for a move in California. We believe it went to a cleaning woman who had a questionable background and a thirst for liquor. Somehow our liquor bottles remained at the same level while the contents of the bottles were clearly becoming more diluted.)

I recall Dad leaving on a trip to Detroit, Michigan, probably as a result of his failed orange grove investment. He was reportedly working with an insurance firm there. During his absence, we had a housekeeper and a handyman/chauffeur who looked after the family. It was during a visit home from Detroit that our dad and mother had a violent disagreement. I have a vivid memory of my mother standing on the couch in her stocking feet and flailing wildly at our dad while he attempted to block her blows. He disappeared back to Detroit shortly after this event, and it was the last time, at ages four and five, my brother and I were ever to see the two of them together. Tom and I became more and more dependent on our housekeeper and the handyman. After some time, our mother decided to visit her mother in Baltimore, leaving us in our home with the housekeeper. It was during her absence that our housekeeper decided to drive to her daughter’s house in our family car. Apparently, the daughter and her husband were brewing beer in their bathtub. When it came time to return home, they presented several
bottles of beer to their mother. Tom and I were loaded into the back seat of the car. Since I was older, I was given responsibility for protecting the bottles by holding them between my legs. The car started up and we backed out of the driveway and across the street, where we hit the curb at a sharp clip. The bottles came together between my legs and broke. Beer spewed over me, mixed with blood from cuts on my legs. We eventually got home, stopped the bleeding, and went to bed. To this day, I still have the beer-bottle scars on my legs. I don’t recall being taken to a doctor at the time, which might have required explaining to him about my cuts and why the clothes of a five-year-old were saturated with beer.

The next vivid memory was of our dad arriving at the house and telling us to pack our clothes since he was taking us back to Detroit with him the next day. Years later we learned that he had heard that our mother was returning from Baltimore on the advice of her mother and an attorney, and planned to reestablish herself in the Tampa home. I also learned that Dad had packed up and sent all of the rugs and furniture to storage. I believe the rugs and a desk showed up later in our lives, but many of the other possessions eventually were lost or sold off for non-payment of storage charges. (Within the past few years, I was contacted by a bookseller in upstate New York who had a Reid family bible that he thought I might be interested in purchasing. I forwarded $150 and found that I had actually regained possession of the authentic Reid bible, with hand-written notes on the births and deaths of several generations of the Reid family.) The trip to Detroit was uneventful and our stay there provides only vague memories of attendance at a summer day camp in the city park. At the end of summer, Dad drove us
to the place where we were to spend the next three-and-a-half years of our lives. It was during this time that Tom and I learned to depend on each other, since we had no contact with our mother and limited contact with our dad, though he wrote letters to us, and came to take us on trips during vacation times.

Four Years at Pembroke Country Day and Todd School

Our new and only home was Pembroke Country Day School, located on State Line Road, Kansas City, on the Kansas side of the Kansas-Missouri border. Tom and I shared a dormitory room with two beds, dressers, and desks. Our days were highly regimented, with meals on time in the school dining hall, classes well organized, and physical activities encouraged. I remember studying French in first grade. In third grade, our class published a magazine for which I wrote a poem and rendered a drawing of the gates at the entrance to the school grounds for the magazine cover. I remember sports activities as a vital part of our educational program. We were taught to play tennis. We
had our own football and baseball teams. I somehow became a pitcher for the third-grade team; we played against other school teams. We traveled to an Indian school in Kansas where we played against their teams. The schools were created to remove Indian youngsters from the reservations and indoctrinate them in American culture. In the spring we had relays where we competed in track-and-field events. I believe I took several medals, but Dad was most pleased when I took a medal in the high jump because he had been a star high jumper in high school in Philadelphia.

Mrs. Kennedy was our housemother as well as a teacher. She kept us from feeling very alone, helped us write letters to Dad, and saw that we went to church on Sundays. She monitored the evening study hall and controlled the behavior of the older students when they became unruly. I remember only a few of the students at Pembroke from those times. One boy was fascinating because he had a crystal radio set which he used to tune in to broadcasts from a station in Iowa. It was amazing that he could use a simple little wire to pull voices from the air. By contrast, our dad had a massive box in the back of his car that required a battery to operate. He had to park the car and string out an
antenna in order to have reception. Particularly outstanding among the students were the Rockne boys, Bill and Knute, Jr., who attended Pembroke. Their father was the coach of the Notre Dame football team. At one point, he brought Frank Carrillo and the other members of the famed Four Horsemen, who motivated the Notre Dame football team to visit the campus. Knute, Jr., though small in size, was a very competitive athlete and an important member of all of Pembroke’s teams. Bill was bigger but did not seem to be interested in sports. As I recall, he liked to smoke cigarettes out back of the garage. Much of the joy went out of their lives the day they were called from our luncheon in the dining hall to be told that their father had died in a plane crash. Coach Rockne’s fame lived on in film and legend and became an inspiration for future Notre Dame teams. I later learned that Knute, Jr. went on to play football for a college team in Florida, but never achieved the kind of success that might have been expected of him had his father lived.

During the Christmas holiday of our first year at Pembroke, our dad picked us up at school and told us that we were going to drive to Florida. He drove a very powerful Auburn convertible with what was called a rumble seat in the back. We took off driving from Kansas toward Florida on roads, many of which were unpaved. When we found paved roads, they were narrow strips of concrete. We arrived in Tampa in time to witness the annual holiday pirate parade. Returning from Florida, we drove to Washington, D.C., and then to Baltimore, where we later learned that our dad had contacted our mother to attempt a reconciliation. Her version, many years later, was that he had simply wanted
her to visit him in his hotel room. She was apparently enjoying her single life in the city and had no intention of rejoining him.

We left Baltimore and headed back to school. During the trip, Tom and I thought it was great to ride in the rumble seat. Since we were traveling through the Midwest during the Christmas holidays, it was extremely cold. One night we encountered a muddy pothole on the gravel road. The car dropped into the hole and we were stuck. Dad tried to rock the car out of the hole but finally gave up and looked for help. There was a light on at a farmhouse just off the road and the farmer seemed ready to help us, but it required hitching up his team of horses. Apparently, there was some haggling over the price of the farmer’s help, but finally, we were out of the hole and on our way. Our dad
commented that the pothole was filled with corn cobs which, when covered with mud, made it impossible for the car to gain traction. He thought that the farmer had probably loaded the corncobs into the hole to generate income from his towing enterprise.

By the time Tom and I returned to Pembroke, both of us had developed serious cold infections. We were signed in to the school infirmary where we stayed for some time. In those days it was not unusual for an infection to move into the ear and then into the mastoid bone behind the ear. The common treatment for this condition was to surgically remove the infected bone. At least one student at Pembroke had had this surgery with a resultant deep scar behind the ear. As I recall, the ear infection was painful, and I know now that there were no drugs available then to treat the infection effectively. Fortunately, both Tom and I recovered without the need for surgery, though I have retained a ringing in my ears throughout my life, a condition called tinnitus.

After our recovery, Tom and I were taken to a courtroom to testify about our mother having left us to visit her mother in Baltimore. We learned later that our Dad had filed for divorce from our mother. We learned much later from our mother that she had not been notified of the proceedings. Dad knew she was living with her mother in Baltimore, but had failed to have documents sent to her; thus she had not had the opportunity to present her side of the case. I remember how strange it felt to be children whoseparents had divorced. Divorce was unusual in those days and Tom and I felt somehow responsible for our family’s break up.

During the summer when school was out, Dad arranged for us to attend a summer camp on Lake Superior in northern Michigan. Camp Sosowagami was located at the confluence of the Yellow Dog River and Lake Superior so that we could skinny dip in the lake at daybreak and have swimming and canoeing classes in the river during the day. Unfortunately, the lake water was ice cold, and the river, though warmer, was shared with leeches that attached themselves to our bodies and had to be removed when we came ashore. One of the activities fostered by the camp involved boxing matches. I remember being paired with a boy about my size who somehow managed to keep his gloves in my face during the entire match. I have no memory of how he looked because I don’t believe I was ever able to see him because of his gloves. I was never very much interested in either participating in or watching boxing matches or fights after that experience. I believe that Tom had a more successful time in his match. The camp had a very active riding program. Each day we reported to the stables and were given our mount for the day. Access to the trail required crossing a stream. One of the horses regularly insisted on stopping midstream, lying down, and rolling over. The horse’s rider regularly wound up getting a bath in the middle of the stream. As luck would have it, being one of the younger campers and last to arrive at the stables on my first outing, I drew the horse that intended to give me a bath, and he gave me a bath. I found in subsequent outings that it was possible to convince the horse to cross the stream without stopping if you were willing to show him who was boss. However, I tried my utmost to draw one of the other horses that did not like to roll in the stream.

Tom and I returned for several camp sessions until the fall of what would be my fourth grade, when Dad informed us that we were transferring to Todd School for Boys in Woodstock, Illinois. He had moved from Detroit to Chicago, where he was involved in court proceedings against Harry Merritt, and he felt it would be better to have us closer to him. Todd School was a totally different experience for us. We still lived in
dormitories, but our rooms were located in large old mansions and were more comfortable than the rooms at Pembroke. Classrooms were spread around the campus and classes seemed more informal than at Pembroke. I still studied French as well as the other regular courses, but there seemed to be more emphasis on the arts and music and less on sports. I had been recruited to play the clarinet in the band at Pembroke. At Todd, I played in an orchestra-type organization instead of a band. Tom was given a fluegelhorn to play. I continued to play my clarinet until I had to pawn it for food money in Philadelphia in 1940. I don’t know what happened to Tom‘s horn. I played intramural basketball at Todd, but was not very good. I had somehow left my competitive spirit at Pembroke. I was pleased that we did have stables and a riding program at Todd. We also had an indoor swimming pool to carry on the swimming we had learned at summer camp. Because we were close to Chicago, and because the school had a kind of trailer/limousine, we were transported in groups to the city for various kinds of cultural
events. I remember seeing my first rodeo there, as well as plays and musicals.

Todd School and its headmaster, Roger Hill, we’re particularly proud of its theatrical productions. The school had a theatre and a workshop where sets were made and rehearsals held. One of the sets had been created for a production of Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar.” The production had been conceived and directed by a student who had graduated the year before. The student was Orson Welles, who was sixteen when he graduated and had left for a painting tour in Ireland. He had procured a horse-drawn wagon and was making his way around the island, painting as he went. Weekly, he wrote letters to Roger Hill, who had become a father figure for him after the death of his
own father. These letters were regularly read to the assembled students by Roger Hill during lunch. In them, Orson described his experiences as he made his way through the Irish countryside. When he arrived in Dublin, one of the first places he visited was the Gate Theatre, which was in the midst of a period of brilliant productions based on the works of William Butler Yeats, Sean O’Casey, and other playwrights and poets of the time. Welles, by his own account, introduced himself as a visiting producer and director who would be pleased to work with the theatre group as a director. He was given the opportunity to participate in productions as a set builder and painter. Eventually, he was
given a role in one of the productions where he portrayed a mature English nobleman, even though he was still in his early teens. During his time at the Gate Theatre, he met a number of actors and actresses, including Barry Fitzgerald and others, whom he later brought to the United States to work with him when he became director of the WPA Theatre in New York City, which evolved into the Mercury Theatre on stage and radio.

For some reason, Tom and I were to remain at Todd School for just one term before returning to Pembroke. Perhaps it was because our dad had completed his involvement in Chicago and had become involved as a partner in the American Union Life Insurance Company in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Sometime before he left Chicago, I remember that we visited him in his room at the Blackstone Hotel which, we learned later, had been host to ten presidents during its glory days. What was most memorable was his insistence that we start every morning with a glass of unsweetened lemon juice. It was supposed to be good for our systems but was hard to down. After his move to Tulsa, we visited his
office at one point, but had no further contact with American Union Life. Our last semester at Pembroke was unremarkable in my memory. Perhaps it was during that time that I played tennis and won my medals at the spring relays.

Three Years As Iowa Farm Boys

While we were at school in Kansas and Illinois, Dad had introduced us to the McWilliams women, who were the children of his aunt, Maria Reid, and her husband, William McWilliams, originally from Pennsylvania. The family had settled in Des Moines, Iowa, where they lived in the 1930s. Blanche McWilliams, a maiden lady like her sister, Mame had worked all her life in the U.S. Post Office in Des Moines. She was an
asthmatic who slept on an enclosed porch in the coldest of weather. Mame maintained the home for her parents and her sisters. A third sister had been a buyer for the major department store in Des Moines and had traveled to Europe extensively. Martha, the fourth sister, was married to Charles Campbell, who farmed 160 acres of rich cornfields near Grimes, Iowa, twelve miles southwest of Des Moines. She was a talented pianist who taught piano to students in and around Des Moines. Charlie was an equally talented fiddler who was in demand to play for platform dances (explain what these are) held around the countryside during the summer. It became routine for us to spend holidays in Des Moines with Blanche and Mame. On one of our visits, Dad decided that I needed to have several of my teeth pulled. We went to a dentist who anesthetized me and proceeded to remove all of my wisdom teeth in one sitting. Even today, I recall the trauma of the rubber mask over my face and the horrible odor of the gas. During the night, I hemorrhaged profusely on my pillow. I apparently survived but I can’t remember
visiting another dentist for a number of years.

It was during our last Christmas at Pembroke, when we visited Des Moines, that we discussed the possibility of spending our summer vacation on the Campbell farm rather than returning to Camp Sosowagami. Tom and I were very excited at the challenge of a totally new kind of experience. We were encouraged by the enthusiasm with which Martha and Charlie considered the prospect of our spending the summer with them. I believe that Tom and I returned by train to Pembroke by ourselves after that visit. I should probably note that we considered Des Moines a marvelous place to visit since we were allowed to go downtown alone to movie theatres where, on the same day, we could watch double features at one theatre and then go to another theatre for two more movies before heading for home. I remember especially Elizabeth Bergner in the film depicting the love affair of the Austrian prince and his young fiancée, who supposedly committed suicide while visiting a hunting lodge in the Austrian mountains.

Tom and I were excited as we anticipated spending the summer on a real farm, seeing live farm animals, and riding horseback. (We eventually discovered that farm horses were workhorses that were not ridden). Dad drove us from Pembroke to the Campbell farm, and suddenly we were farm boys. We were given our first pair of overalls. Although we didn’t know it at the time, this was the uniform we were to wear for the next three years. As I recall, we wore our riding boots from school and camp under our overalls rather than the high-laced dress shoes that we had worn at school. Our school blazers and grey flannel slacks went into storage for the duration. Our first initiation to
farm life was getting up at first light to a large breakfast of pancakes and eggs. We watched as Charlie hitched up a team of horses to a cultivator and headed for the fields where the corn was just beginning to show up in rows. He spent the entire day plowing up and down one row of corn after another. He stopped only for noontime dinner and, as the sun went down, he turned to other chores: feeding horses, cows, hogs, and milking the cows, of which there were at least a dozen. Tom and I quickly learned from Martha how to feed the chickens and gather eggs, and those chores soon became our responsibility. In time, we would learn to throw down hay for the horses and cows, mix slop for the hogs, and even milk the cows.

In a short time, we were charged with herding the cows up from pasture to the farmyard. We found it great fun to go barefoot, though accidentally stepping into one of the pies the cows left behind as we followed them up from pasture produced a strange sensation. Tom and I slept in a feather bed under the eaves of the farmhouse. Iowa summers were hot and our bedroom was hot! Opening windows did not provide much comfort and it did allow mosquitoes to harass us at night. Since both Martha and Charlie were frequently away from the house during the day, Tom and I had many opportunities to experiment. I recall our challenge matches to jump out of the second-story window.

One day, Tom decided to try some of Charlie’s chewing tobacco. Martha discovered bits and pieces of tobacco in the bedclothes. Rather than physical punishment that our dad used to correct our errant ways, Martha and Charlie delivered a lecture on the unhealthy impact of chewing tobacco on growing boys. Sometime later, Tom and I discovered the joys of smoking cigarettes. By this time our mother had located us through our Aunt Josephine, who knew and visited with the McWilliams and had started sending small amounts of money to the Campbell’s for us. We found a slightly older Seibert boy who lived a mile down the road who shared one of his cigarettes with us. In due time, we
used some of the money to have him buy a pack of cigarettes for us. Cigarettes sold then for about twelve cents a pack, about the same price as a gallon of regular gas. A pack could last us for at least two weeks. Another of our escapades involved siphoning off a Mason jar of wine from the cellar, loading the wine with sugar, drinking most of it, and then climbing the windmill to prove we could. It was scary climbing onto the platform with the windmill blades whirring just above our heads. We discovered that climbing down was more frightening than climbing up, but we managed to get down before the Campbell’s returned. Of course, some of these events occurred at a later time during our stay at the farm.

During that first summer, Tom and I learned many things about farm life. We learned not to turn our backs on the resident bull, whether in the pasture or the barnyard. Cows could also be annoyingly protective of their calves. Hogs were not to be trusted even when you were trying to feed them, and farm horses were different from the horses we had ridden at camp and school. We helped as best we could during haying season when the hay was mowed, hauled to the barnyard, and hoisted to the hayloft where it would dry and then be thrown down to feed the horses and cows during the coming winter. We learned about cooperation among the farm families. When the grain was ready for harvesting, a huge threshing combine, which was owned cooperatively by local farm families, was rolled out of the Campbell barn where it had been garaged, and taken to the farm where the first grain was to be threshed. Early in the morning, the local farmers assembled with their wagons to bring in the sheaths from the fields. A tractor was hooked up to the threshing machine with a long belt and the threshing process commenced. Sheaths were fed into the machine, grain was collected in a wagon, and the chaff was stacked for later use in the barn. Water bottles were delivered to the fields by boys on horseback. Meanwhile, the ladies and children had spent the morning preparing the noon meal, which was served on tables set out in the farmyard. There were enormous quantities of all kinds of farm-raised food–meat, potatoes, corn, vegetables, different kinds of salads, bread, cold tea, and many desserts. The men and boys ate first, then returned to the fields; then the women and children took their turns. When the harvest was completed at the first farm, the threshing machine was moved to the next farm where the process was repeated. When the harvest had been completed, the machine was wheeled back into the Campbell barn to remain until the next year’s harvest.

By the time the grain had been harvested, the corn had been cultivated three times and was tall enough to continue growing on its own. It was time to stop and relax a little. It was also time to visit the Iowa State Fair in Des Moines. As I recall, we drove to the fair on three consecutive days to visit those exhibits that were of interest to Charlie and Martha. There was also time for Tom and me to view some of the competitions that we saw for the first time. Farm boys wrestled greased pigs, or tried to climb a greased pole; boys and girls showed the animals they had raised during the previous months for judging and winning ribbons. There were daily horse races as well as appearances on stage by different musical groups. Tom and I had seen things in a few short months that probably none of our former schoolmates had seen or would ever see while at Pembroke or Todd. We were tired and happy as we rode back to the farm at the end of each day.

August marked the end of the summer for us. The corn would not be ready for shucking until later in the fall. We had not heard from our dad about returning to Pembroke. We began to talk with Martha and Charlie about school. We wondered if we could stay on the farm and go to school there. There was a one-room schoolhouse across the road from our house. We thought it would be great if we could simply walk down the road each day, go to school, and then walk home in the afternoon. Martha and Charlie found that we could not attend the local school because we were in a different district. Instead, we would have to attend Johnston Consolidated School at Johnston Center three miles
down the road toward Des Moines. The first mile from the farm in any direction was a gravel road. After that, there was a two-mile stretch of concrete paved road to the school. When there was still no word from Dad about returning to Pembroke, where classes didn’t start until mid-September, we asked Martha and Charlie if we could enroll at Johnston. They said yes, and we went off to school on the yellow school bus that picked us up in front of the house. Tom was enrolled in fourth grade and I was promoted from fifth grade to sixth grade. On the first day of school, I was introduced to the class as a new student from a school in Kansas. For whatever reason, one of my classmates decided to challenge me to a fight during the first recess. I don’t remember the outcome, but it probably wasn’t any better than my experience in the boxing match at Camp Sosowagami. After a few days, the novelty of the new boys from way out of town probably wore off. I don’t ever remember having felt the sense of belonging that I had felt during my years at Pembroke. And as a scrawny ten-year-old in a sixth-grade class, with rough and tumble farm boys who really belonged in sixth grade, I never again got involved in athletics. But we did take pride in the success of our girls’ basketball team, which earned the right to play in the state tournament in Des Moines each year. It was the major event of the year when we loaded on school buses and went into town to cheer on our team. I don’t believe we ever won the state championship; we were a very small school without the talent to overcome the sheer numbers available to the competing urban high schools.

Tom and I were well into our first several weeks of school when Dad showed up ready to take us back to Pembroke. There were some serious discussions about whether it would be right for us to stay on the farm. It was finally decided that we could stay on a trial basis, since we were already in school and seemed to want to continue. Dad eventually left and we settled in to become real farm boys for at least the first year. Though he argued vigorously for our return to Pembroke, it is probable that he was somewhat relieved at not having to pay our tuition there since, as we later learned, these were not the best years for him financially. The stock market had crashed and we eventually found out that he had an army footlocker of worthless stocks and bonds.

The first winter at the farm was a real test for us. At Pembroke and Todd, we had lived in heated dormitories with all the amenities expected in a private school. We had warm showers, heated classrooms, and, in the case of Todd, a heated swimming pool. Our activities there were directed toward recreation. At the farm, our activities were directed toward surviving! Although the farmhouse was spacious, with a number of different rooms, we lived in two rooms heated in winter by an iron cook stove in the kitchen and by a pot-bellied stove in the living room. There was no air conditioning or electricity. The toilet facility was a two-hole outhouse where pages of a Sears catalog served as toilet
paper. The back of the outhouse faced to the north, so that winter winds had a chilling effect on bodily functions, especially when it snowed. We did our homework by lamplight (kerosene) at the kitchen table. Martha was a hard taskmaster, insisting that all homework be done before we retired to bed at about eight o’clock. At night we slept in a feather bed in an unheated upstairs room. The nights were extremely cold and,
once in bed, we stayed until morning. In the morning we descended to the kitchen where Charlie would have lighted a fire in the cookstove for heat and for Martha to cook breakfast. Breakfast was a hearty meal with oatmeal, pancakes, and meat, usually sausage or fried scrapple, a solid blend of hog jowls and cornmeal. In time Tom and I would dress for out-of-doors and accompany Charlie to the barn where he would
undertake the morning chores of milking the cows. When we had learned the technique of sitting on a three-legged stool and squeezing milk into the bucket held between our legs, we were given the opportunity, and later, the responsibility, to milk several of the cows each morning before school. More often than not, we would miss the bucket and squirt the milk onto our overalls. The milk would dry in the warmth of the classrooms later at school and after several days would turn sour giving us our own aura, which was often matched by the aura of other boys in class who also did the milking at home before they arrived at school.

By early spring, we had settled into a daily routine. There was much to do around the farm from the time we arose, usually before daylight, and when the school bus stopped at the front gate to take us to school. We had to mix food for the hogs and scatter grain for the chickens. The horses and the cows seemed to survive on one feeding per day in the afternoon. In the morning during summer, Tom and I would repair to the garden with buckets and shovel to harvest potatoes for the noon meal-dinner, as it was known in the country. The four of us would consume half of a two-and-a-half-gallon bucket of boiled potatoes in one sitting. We would mash them on our plate with a fork and slather them with butter. When other vegetables were ready for harvest, they would be added to the noon menu. We ate watermelons and cantaloupes right off the vine. There were fruit trees of various kinds, and berry bushes and strawberries. We didn’t realize it until later, but while we were enjoying a surfeit of good food, other people across the country were struggling to feed themselves and their children during the Great Depression.

During the three years, we lived on the farm, we had all the chicken we could eat. Charlie taught us how to kill and clean a rooster by wringing its neck. Dipping the bird in boiling water loosened the feathers for plucking, but getting out all the pinfeathers was a problem. (Hens were kept alive for egg production; part of our daily chores called for collecting freshly laid eggs from the hen houses.) We ate a lot of chickens and eggs. Surplus eggs were cleaned and packed for transport to a market in Des Moines where they were bartered for staples such as flour, sugar, and coffee at the rate of about six cents per dozen. Hard cash was never in abundance during our stay at the farm. I remember Martha telling us that taxes on the farm were about $100 per year. Mortgage payments, when paid, were for interest-only with payment on the principal waived until times were better.

Occasionally, young steers would be hauled to the stockyard in Des Moines where, if customers were buying that day, healthy young steers would bring about four cents per pound. If the stockyard were not buying, we would turn around and return to the farm. The same was true for hogs. I remember one day when Charlie hitched the horses to a hay wagon and loaded several hogs for the twelve-mile trip to the stockyard.
Apparently, he was unable to hire someone to truck the animals to market. The trip was long, tedious, noisy, and uncomfortable. The wagon had ironclad wheels that responded to every crack and crevice in the road. Travel was slow and we arrived at the stockyard just as they were closing for the day. We turned around and headed back to the farm with our cargo intact. The price paid that day was two cents per pound, but they weren’t buying because they had all the pork they needed, or perhaps they didn’t have any money left to buy our load.

We collected milk that we did not use and placed it in cooling pans in the cellar where cream would rise to the top while the remaining milk would form clobber. We would skim the cream off the pan and place it in a container; the clobber was used for cooking. The cream would be left at the gate for regular pick up by a dairy truck. As I recall, that was one of the few sources of cash income we had at the time. One year, the farmers became enraged at the price being paid them for milk. In protest, they established a roadblock on the highway leading to Des Moines. They stopped any truck hauling milk and dumped the milk in the ditch alongside the road. Tom and I didn’t exactly understand what was happening as we drove past the roadblock, but we heard the men talking about how unfairly they were being treated. Cousin Charlie was a severe critic of the incumbent administration in Washington, and when Dad finally had a battery-operated radio installed at the farm, Charlie spent hours listening to the news broadcasts. He was particularly angry about the farm bills, which limited the acres which could be planted in specific crops, and required that litters of pigs be limited so as not to glut the market. We butchered hogs frequently to conform to the law and had an almost constant source of pork for breakfast and dinner.

In talking about cash income, I failed to mention that Martha was a well-respected piano teacher, who had a number of students in the area whose parents paid for their children’s weekly lessons. Martha tried to teach Tom and me to play the piano, without much success. She was a good teacher, but we were not very good students. I couldn’t seem to get my hands to operate individually. Years later, I realized what a wonderful opportunity I missed. If only I had tried harder, with my love of music and especially jazz, I might have been a George Shearing or better yet a Teddy Powell.

Weather was always a concern for Iowa farmers. In the spring, it either rained too early or too much or not enough. In the summer, rain at the wrong time could ruin a corn or wheat crop, or a hay harvest. Rain at harvest time could wipe out a whole year’s crop. Early frosts could kill plants just as they were ready to be picked. A period of drought as corn plants were emerging from the ground could mean little or no feed for the animals during the coming winter. Windstorms in summer could also kill crops. Tom and I learned concern about the weather not just as it related to our comfort, but also as it affected our survival. Weather also affected our mobility. The road from the highway to the farm, though graveled, could become flooded and filled with potholes. Floodwater blocked the highway to school almost every year during the spring thaw. Blizzards were also a cause for concern. I remember one winter when the snow drifted above the tops of the telephone poles on the road just below the house. The school bus couldn’t get through to pick us up. I think we tried to walk the mile to the highway but gave up almost as soon as we started. One thing was certain: Whatever the weather, there were chores to be done, animals to feed, and tasks to be performed to stay warm, dry, and fed.

Following our first experience as observers of the thrashing season, Tom and I put in a bid to deliver drinking water to the harvesters in the fields for the coming summer. We assumed that we would spend the summer on the farm again rather than going back to camp. Two things happened-somehow, we got the contract, and we also got to stay on the farm. The bad part happened when the harvest season rolled around and we realized that we didn’t have horses to carry us and the water jugs from the pump to the fields where the harvesters were working. We wound up hitching rides, with our wet, burlap-wrapped, one-gallon jugs, on wagons going to and from the fields. Once in the
fields, we had to carry our jugs from one wagon to the next until they were empty, then hitch rides back to the pumps. After a number of trips each day, we probably wished we had gone to summer camp, but we stayed with our project until the harvest ended.

Though out of touch with our mother, we did receive gifts from her through Aunt Josephine, usually small amounts of money, although she did send us roller skates one spring. The only surface on which we could skate was the highway one mile down the dirt road toward Johnston Center. Soon after we received the skates, we decided that we would skate to school. Of course, we had to carry the skates for a mile on the dirt road to get to the concrete highway. Once on the highway, things went well and we arrived at school almost on time. There were virtually no cars on the highway en route to or returning from, school. Having had one successful trip, we decided to do it again and again. The only problem was that the concrete was coarse and the skate wheels were not designed for extended travel on such a surface. After just a few trips, we were running on the rims of our skate wheels. Thus ended that experience! We had a somewhat similar experience when our mother sent us ice skates for Christmas. These were the kind that clipped on your shoes and didn’t provide much support. Fortunately,
there was a small pond in a field just across the road from our house where we could try out our new toys. I don’t believe this project was any more successful than our roller skate experience since both Tom and I had trouble with our ankles. I think I had the most trouble because I couldn’t keep my skates upright. Because of the extreme cold, the ice on the pond lasted much longer than the ice skaters. I don’t remember trying my hand at skating again for many years, and then with shoe skates and a heated rink.

We used another five-dollar gift to become entrepreneurs in animal husbandry. Having been impressed with the young farmers who raised livestock to show and sell at the Iowa State Fair, we decided that we would invest our windfall to purchase an animal. Normally, young farmers would purchase a very young animal to raise for a year to be shown at the summer fair. Tom and I were offered what was suggested as a very good deal by a nearby farmer. He had a sow (female hog) who was expecting piglets very soon. The deal was that we would not only have the piglets to raise, but we would also have the sow for future generations. As I recall, she was a huge, ugly beast who loved to wallow in the mud so that, instead of looking at her natural white color, she was always a crusted brown. We found it hard to like her very well, but then she started to give birth to our piglets. Before she had finished, we had twelve beautiful, squealing little white pigs from our five-dollar investment for less than fifty cents each. We were so impressed with our successful business experience that we lost interest in the young farmer project, and besides, we couldn’t decide which of the twelve squealers we wanted to groom for the show ring. I believe we eventually sold off the pig once they had grown up. In the interim, we were kept busy feeding them. Since we were raising them on a corn farm, we didn’t have to buy feed for them, which might have cut substantially into our profit.

Another enterprise was funded by a similar gift from our mother. Tom and I decided that we wanted to get into the business of raising rabbits. We had heard that they were equally prolific, with an even shorter gestation period. We used our gift to purchase lumber, nails, and screening material. We had designed the kind of rabbit hutch we wanted to build. Cousin Charlie advised us on details but generally left us to our own
devices on the construction part. In short order, we constructed a spacious hutch with a solid wood roof, screened sides, and a screened floor which reduced cleaning problems. The pellets we collected were very useful in fertilizing the nearby garden (which also benefited from leavings collected from the chicken coops). Today, our enterprise would have been called organic farming. I don’t recall where we procured the initial pair of rabbits, but the hutch was fully populated when we finally left the farm with Dad for Philadelphia sometime later. Raising rabbits domestically for food was not as profitable as our pig business, especially during the winter when Cousin Charlie would go rabbit hunting in the cornfields and come back with as many as a dozen wild rabbits. These we would skin and fry for dinner. I remember one day when I single-handedly managed to down two whole rabbits. Tom always kept up with me. It seemed that we were always hungry and could finish off whatever was put before us. It usually required two chickens to feed the four of us.

We both learned to catch, kill, pluck, butcher, and cook the chickens we ate. I previously mentioned the way we ate potatoes in the summer. For breakfast in the winter, we could down as many as twelve or fifteen pancakes each after chores and before leaving for school. When we butchered a young hog, we had pork for breakfast, dinner, and supper. Sometimes we would finish the whole carcass in two or three weeks. What was leftover was combined with cornmeal to make scrapple, a Philadelphia, PA, staple which came west to Des Moines with Maria Reid Williams, our grandfather’s sister. It was delicious when fried. In the summer when we went to Des Moines to barter eggs for kitchen supplies, we would usually stop at the Reed’s (should this be spelled Reid’s? Is there a family connection?) ice cream store for a gallon carton of ice cream. By the time we reached home, the ice cream would be deliciously soft and because we didn’t have a refrigerator, we had to finish off the entire carton in one sitting. If it seems that we were preoccupied with food and eating then, it should be remembered that these were the days of the Great Depression, and there were many families that did not have enough food to eat. I don’t believe we were particularly conscious of the state of the economy at the time, or that Tom and I were very fortunate to be living where we were.

Tom and I had an early and thorough exposure to the procreation process. At ages nine and ten, we observed rather clinically the impregnation of cows, hogs, chickens, rabbits, and dogs, and cats, sometimes on a seasonal basis and sometimes more frequently.
We watched as the animals gained in girth and eventually gave birth to their offspring. We loved watching the baby piglets, calves, rabbits, puppies, and kittens struggle to their feet for the first time and search for their mother’s milk. We saw hens sit over eggs which we left in nests for them until the baby chicks broke their shells and struggled to escape. For them, the world was a dangerous place where chicken hawks could swoop done down and turn them into a one-bite meal. We saw the birthing and killing of both domestic and wild creatures. We were also present when young male animals were turned into neutered beasts that lived only to grow fat, and for three to five cents a pound paid to the farmer, become meat for the tables of city dwellers. The only peer we knew who had a broader exposure to the procreation process than we did was the Erickson girl, who lived on a farm a mile down the road toward Johnston Center. Her family bred and raised horses. The breeding process for horses was described to Tom and me as something different from what we saw with our animals. We were never able to receive a precise description of the process or verify its accuracy, but it did sound interesting as it was described.

The seasons rolled by and we became more immersed in farming. Tom and I both did well in school, probably because of the solid foundation for learning established at Pembroke and Todd. There was talk of preparing for admission to the University of Iowa or Iowa State University as I completed eighth grade, though that prospect was still four years away. Meanwhile, in addition to the joint harvest festivities, we attended summer platform dances where Cousin Charlie was the fiddler of choice. He had a beautiful violin which, as I remember, was made of bird’s-eye wood. He was very careful in the care of his instrument. I remember us visiting a farmhouse down the road, where a windmill was geared to generate electricity which was used to charge a series of batteries. Power from the batteries was used to light one or two bulbs at night. When the wind blew strongly enough, it produced enough electricity to heat an iron. During the winter, cousins Mart and Charlie took us to weekly Saturday-night card games which rotated among farmhouses. Halloween was one of the few times when Tom and I got together with the local farm boys to roam up and down the roads doing whatever mischief we could. It was always rumored that outhouses were a favorite target to be pushed over, but I don’t think we ever had the strength or the courage to try to dislodge one in our neighborhood. Since the houses in our “neighborhood” were at least a quarter to a full mile apart, we were limited in how much we could do or undo in the time
we were allowed out.

For two weeks in late summer each year, life became different for us. That was when the Iowa National Guard held its summer training session at Camp Dodge, a few miles west of Johnston Center where we went to school. (Camp Dodge was where the Women’s Army Corps trained for service during World War II.) Among the units which assembled for training was a cavalry troop. It was natural for the troop to fan out across the surrounding farms to carry on maneuvers, both in daylight and at night. At least once during the two-week session, the troop would ride down our road. In daylight, it was an awesome spectacle for Tom and me. Having ridden horses both at camp and at Todd School, we were very impressed with the animals and their riders. When they rode out at night, it was an entirely different matter. We would hear the troop pass and then shortly we would hear the chickens start to panic. Cousin Charlie probably understood what was happening and approached the henhouses very cautiously, giving the raiders the opportunity to remount their horses and leave with their harvest of chickens. We lost some chickens but thought the soldiers better deserved to have fresh chicken on their dinner tables than the foxes that also stole into the hen houses on occasion, and made off with a fat hen or rooster. The foxes did more damage than the soldiers because more chickens died of fright from sensing foxes in the area.

It was probably during our third summer on the farm that we were driven to a cottage at Clear Lake, Iowa, for a two-week vacation. We were joined there by our dad and a woman whom we eventually came to know as our stepmother, Violet Hawkins. Most of our time there was spent out on the lake in a rowboat. There were undoubtedly other vacationers at the lake since I still have photographs of Tom and me with two girls in a rowboat. The other departure from summertime routines was when our dad took us to Chicago for the World’s Fair. We saw many new technological developments and visited exhibits provided by many foreign nations. Perhaps it was the year of awakening, but I remember that Tom and I were hurried past the carnival area where Sally Rand was out front with her fans, urging spectators to buy tickets for her performance.

The arrival of fall, our third at the farm, saw us indoctrinated into the process of harvesting the corn crop. We had learned how to eat as many as a dozen ears of field corn at a time during the summer when the corn was tender and sweet. As the corn matured in the early fall, usually after the first frost, we went into the fields with a horse-drawn wagon and began the harvest. Wearing cotton mittens which cousin Mart had
sewn, over what in later years would have been called a church key ( beer-can opener), we would reach up for an ear of corn, strip its husk and toss the stripped ear up into the wagon. Thus, each ear of corn on sixty or seventy acres of cornfields would have to be individually husked. We stayed in the field until the wagon was loaded, usually as darkness fell, when we would return to the barnyard where the corn later would be offloaded into a silo. What the rats and mice didn’t eat during the winter was fed to the farm animals. Since the price of a bushel of corn was not worth the cost of gasoline or the effort to haul the corn to market, where it might or might not be purchased, farmers
found it cheaper to burn the ears of corn than to buy coal for their stoves.

From an Iowa Farm to the City of Brotherly Love

As suggested earlier, if we had stayed on the farm, we might have found our way to attend one of the Iowa universities. Though farm life was hard and the monetary rewards at the time were limited by the weather and the economy, farm life was a good life, working and living among good people. Tom and I anticipated that we would continue living on the farm, and would have preferred to stay on the farm rather than going back to Pembroke or Todd. Unfortunately, neither option was to be available to us. Our dad arrived one day and told us to pack our possessions because we were leaving with him and our stepmother for Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where we were going to live. The suddenness of this change in our lives came as a great shock to us and to Cousins Mart and Charlie. We had not anticipated such a change and were given no choice in the matter. The decision had been made by our dad and we would leave at once. Thus, at ages eleven and twelve we began the fourth and most challenging phase of our young lives-life in a bustling Eastern city with a new stepmother and a father
whom we knew only from occasional visits.

Though I have a vivid recollection of so many things from our early years, the transition from Iowa farm to urban Pennsylvania remains a blur. Somehow we arrived at a large house in Radnor, Pennsylvania, where we were to stay for a short while. The home was located adjacent to the Villanova University campus. It was very spacious and much more sumptuous than what we had been used to in Iowa. Sam and Lila Cummings, our host and hostess, were very kind and considerate and seemed to understand the difficulty Tom and I were having in adjusting to the total change which was taking place in our lives. Within days of our arrival, our dad and Violet (Vi to us) were married. We hadn’t realized that they had not been married when they came for us. From letters which I received after our mother’s death, I learned that she and our Aunt Josephine and Blanche McWilliams had been corresponding for some time before our dad had picked us up in Iowa. Apparently, our mother had decided to apply for visitation rights based on our dad’s having left us with the Campbells for three years with only occasional visits. His sudden decision to reclaim us may have been his reaction to that threat. The Iowa cousins were very disturbed at his behavior, especially since he had failed to make payments to them as promised during our stay. They had indicated that they were willing to continue caring for us indefinitely even without reimbursement. They had met Violet and had thought she was very young (twenty-nine years) and didn’t know what she was getting involved with. They also expressed disapproval of her relationship with our dad prior to their marriage. Added to these issues was the fact that he was having serious financial problems, and had asked Aunt Josephine and Uncle Elmer for a loan to help him get started in the Philadelphia area. The request was denied with resultant bitterness on both sides. The wedding took place at the Cummings home. Though they had been friends of the Alburgers, they became confidants and counselors to our dad and had advised him to ask for the loan from Aunt Josephine and Uncle Elmer. The outcome was a broken friendship. A small number of relatives attended the wedding, including Cousin Anna Kite, who was the only member of Grandmother Florence Jardin Kite Reid’s side of the family whom Tom and I ever met.

Violet was a very sweet person who did her best to make us feel comfortable in our new situation. And we did our best to understand an arrangement which we had not experienced since leaving Florida. Within weeks, our dad had found a large house in Wayne, Pennsylvania, which was rented with the intent of operating what today would be called a bed-and-breakfast inn, but at the time was probably better defined as a tourist home. We set about getting ready to open, though the house was in disrepair and needed much work to make it habitable for its intended purpose. Tom and I were given the task of mowing the rather large lawn. (We had developed reasonable skill in this type of project on the farm in Iowa, where the yard we mowed was equally large.) We were registered for school in Radnor. I was to go into ninth grade while Tom would enter seventh. For some reason, we would never enter school in Radnor. The tourist home project collapsed and we moved into a house in West Philadelphia owned by Mary O’Brien, who had been our grandfather’s housekeeper and had raised our dad from the time he was nine years old.

Mary O’Brien was a family fixture who had been born in Ireland and had arrived in the U.S. when she was seventeen. She had been employed by Grandfather Reid until his death when she took over the management of Aunt Josephine’s house in Lower Merion. It is ironic that years later she would provide a home for the man–and his family–whom she had taken care of as a boy. It is doubly ironic that she was maintaining her home by continuing to work as a housekeeper for a family in suburban Philadelphia. Already present in her home as a renter, was our cousin, James Reid Alburger. He had taken a job as a chemist with RCA after graduating from Swarthmore College and was commuting daily to Camden, New Jersey. On her days off, usually Thursdays, Mary O’Brien would come to Philadelphia to take care of her house. I don’t believe she ever came into town just to relax and enjoy her home. It was a typical West Philadelphia, two-story row house with a front porch that faced a tree-lined street. At the back of the house was a small fenced yard that opened to a utility alley. I don’t recall where our dad parked his car since there was no garage in the back yard.

It is strange that I have such limited memory of our first days in West Philadelphia. I assume that our dad had a job and went to work. I believe that Violet also worked, but it wasn’t until later that we learned that she became very successful in the banking industry, working her way up to bank officer (treasurer) when they relocated to Florida. After so much emphasis on food and eating on the farm in Iowa, the only memory I have of our meals in Philadelphia is that we nearly always had applesauce at dinnertime. Our meals were very simple–meat, starch, and a vegetable followed by a dessert. One entrée that I remember as being new, different, and very good, was a rolled, stuffed flank steak.

Tom and I were enrolled in an urban junior high school which was a multi-story building with an enclosed, roof-top playground where we had physical education classes and played during recesses. I can’t recall any classes where the teachers or the subject matter were particularly outstanding. I did play clarinet in an instrumental music class. I don’t remember If Tom continued playing his fluegelhorn. Several things were quite different from Johnston Consolidated School in Iowa. One was that this was the first time in our lives that we actually associated with students who were different from us– different races, different religions. We attended classes for the first time with black students. Another was the size of the classes, with sometimes as many as twenty-five or thirty students to a class. There was little opportunity for a one-on-one relationship with the teacher. Also, I don’t remember having the kind of homework assignments we were given in Iowa, where cousin Mart insisted that we not only complete our assigned projects but that we do extra work above and beyond what was required. I don’t recall
either our dad or Violet working with us on our assignments. His approach seemed to be to ask us each night if we had done our homework. At one point, because I was twelve, I was able to join a Boy Scout troop as a Tenderfoot. We had weekly meetings which eventually culminated in a campout, where we learned to cook skewered pieces of beef on an open fire. I don’t know why, but I never advanced beyond being a Tenderfoot. We had very little contact with other children, although I remember being invited to a birthday party for a girl who lived down the street from us. That was my first experience at playing “Spin the Bottle,” an underwhelming experience in my memory.

It is interesting in retrospect that Tom and I never established friendships that involved visits by other children to our home, either during the years in Philadelphia or later when we were together briefly in Florida. If we socialized at all, it was outside our home. One of our “social” activities was getting together with a group of boys and roaming the streets of Philadelphia on Friday nights. We would run up on the front porches of the row houses, collect the available milk bottles, and launch them into the street with the crash and scattering of glass, then run away as fast as we could with whoops of laughter. Fortunately, the police were involved in tracking and solving more serious crimes than we were perpetrating, and thus we were never caught. We did have one other activity which was familiar to us, that of attending weekly movies. Where the movies we had attended in Des Moines had been intended for adults, in Philadelphia we attended the Saturday matinees which always included cartoons and serials, sometimes westerns or Buck Rogers in the Twenty-first Century, or sometimes both. Admission was a dime. We usually went with a gang, probably the same ones with whom we had launched the milk bottle barrage the night before. It was not unusual to visit the local drugstore to buy candy for the show. Occasionally there was a little shoplifting done by a boy who hadn’t brought money for candy, or who thought it smart to get away with something without paying for it. Tom and I were fortunate in moving away from that neighborhood before we had a chance to find out what happens to boys who behaved the way we and our friends did. Life had definitely changed for us, as we were immersed in what became the fourth phase of our young lives. We were no longer spoiled boarding-school kids or hard-working farm boys. We were back to our original state of living as part of a family, although we had a new and unfamiliar stepmother
rather than a birth mother whom we hadn’t seen for nearly eight years. I am certain that Vi felt the same kind of discomfort in dealing with us that Tom and I felt in dealing with her. She tried very hard to care for us. It was years later when we learned just how much she contributed to the creation of whatever home life we had during those early years of our relationship.

Our year as residents of Mary O’Brien’s home in West Philadelphia came to an end with Tom being promoted to eighth grade, and my becoming a sophomore eligible to enter senior high school. We moved to an apartment on Lancaster Avenue, a few blocks from the city limits, possibly because there had been a change in family income, or because our dad wanted to move us into an area which would offer a better environment for us– or because he wanted me to attend Lower Merion High School in the suburbs of Philadelphia instead of a crowded urban high school. He arranged to have me enroll at LMHS with the understanding that I would be an out-of-district tuition student. I was to ride to school on a bus that picked me up on City Line and took me to school and back. For whatever reason, I didn’t attend Lower Merion High School, but found myself enrolled instead at Overbrook High School, a massive, multi-story building with a massive number of students. And again, there was little opportunity for a one-on-one relationship with either teachers or fellow students. It seemed that each day I was getting further and further away from the life which, although definitely unusual, had nurtured me for my first fourteen years. For Tom the experience must have been even more wrenching because we had grown apart, since we now attended separate schools and saw each other only after school and on weekends.

Though Tom and I had never, to my knowledge, attended church, except at Pembroke and at Todd School where every Sunday morning we had marched into town for the weekly service, we suddenly became heavily involved in activities at Overbrook Presbyterian Church which was located several blocks away on City Line Avenue. We both attended Sunday school services before joining our dad and Vi for regular worship and communion in the church proper. (The Presbyterian church used grape juice rather than wine, served in tiny paper cups, for the communion.) I remember our dad quizzing us on the content of the day’s sermon when we arrived home. We were encouraged to listen carefully to the message of the sermon. I had spent many evenings at Todd School engaged in a project that I had decided to undertake for my personal growth and development. My goal was to read my way through the Bible from start to finish. I believe my project anticipated by a number of years the reading of the Bible as literature rather than as gospel, which was taught when I later attended Yale University. I somehow didn’t find the connection between what I had read and what we were being taught in Sunday school and again in church. We frequently returned to the church for the evening service. It is strange now to remember how, at the Campbell’s, we had sat in front of the battery-operated radio and listened to the popular shows of that era: Fibber McGee and Molly, Amos and Andy, and bands playing from the Trianon Ballroom in Chicago, mainly on Sunday nights.

At home in Philadelphia the radio, when it was on, was tuned primarily to newscasts. Since our dad and Vi left home early each day and did not return until early evening, Tom and I began to spend much of our time after school involved in church activities. During the week there were organized basketball games. We learned to play badminton, which was different from the tennis played at Pembroke but was quite
challenging. There were also arts and crafts activities. The idea was probably to keep us off of the streets and out of mischief. Tom and I did manage to escape occasionally to run wild, but not to the extent that we had while at Mary O’Brien’s house. Something that bothered me more than it bothered Tom was the Saturday night dances held for youngsters our age at the Methodist church just across the street from our apartment. I wondered why the Methodists could have dances while the Presbyterians couldn’t. Years later, when I studied the history of the Presbyterian Church in America and its role in the spreading of education, especially higher education, I became more forgiving of its rigid rules on socialization among young people.

That first winter at Overbrook must have been a difficult one for our dad and Vi. I remember his leaving the house wearing only a suit coat on days when it was snowing. His explanation was that it was healthy for him to brave the cold. It didn’t occur to me that he didn’t have an overcoat to wear. As I recall, he was working as a salesman for the Graybar Electric Company. Given the state of the economy at the time, it must have been difficult to find buyers in need of the products he was trying to sell. Vi had found employment, I believe, in a bank that assured a small but certain amount of weekly income. Our dad still had the army footlocker which he kept at the foot of their bed. He opened it and showed us neatly bundled stacks of certificates for bonds in which he had invested. Some were from foreign governments like Belgium, but all were presently worthless and would probably never be redeemable.

Our apartment was largely unfurnished except for a bed and dresser in the single bedroom which Dad and Vi used, and the Murphy pull-down bed which Tom and I pulled out of the closet to sleep on. (I don’t recall that Tom and I had separate beds except when we were at Pembroke and Todd, and in our room in Tampa, Florida. We had slept together in a double bed for three years at the farm.) We had our meals sitting at a table next to the kitchen. Of course, Vi was responsible for bringing home groceries and preparing our meals after a long day at work. Tom and I helped with the dishes. We did our homework at the kitchen table. Since there was no furniture in the living room, we sat around on straight back chairs, sometimes listening to the radio. More often, we were encouraged to read books that our dad brought home for us. I remember two books in particular; the first, “Sorrell and Son,” described the strained relationship between a father and his son growing up in the British Isles. It was a book which I read and enjoyed and which helped me to understand to some degree the distance that sometimes existed between father and son. The other book dealt with anatomy and was designed to help us understand our body and its functions. Sometimes after giving us the book and assuming that we had had ample time to read it through, our dad asked me if I had read the book and understood it. When I answered that I had read “parts” of the book, he became very annoyed. He knew that sections of the book dealt with the reproductive process between man and woman and he assumed, rightly, that those were the “parts” of the book I had read. This was our entire exposure to the topic of the “birds and bees.” We never got into a discussion of the things about which we might have been concerned. Fortunately, our experience with animal reproduction on the farm had given us a semblance of knowledge about the “birds and bees,” but it might have helped to have been able to relate that knowledge to boys and girls growing up by discussing it with our dad. Like most of our peers at the time, what we learned was learned from scatological stories exchanged with our friends on the streets.

Reunion with Our Mother at Last, and Separation from Tom

Midway through the winter of that year, we learned that our mother had invited Tom and me to visit her in West Haven, Connecticut. Our dad reluctantly agreed to let us leave for a brief visit. Again, the details are fuzzy, but Tom and I arrived in West Haven where we met, for the first time, our stepfather, Louis Torraca, and our half-brother, baby Louis Jr. Our mother and Lou were living in an apartment down the street from West Haven High School. She, Lou and the baby occupied the bedroom, while Tom and I slept on a made-up studio couch in the living room. For a few days, we enjoyed our mother’s cooking and saw several films at the local theatre, and then our visit was over. Unfortunately, Tom developed a cold while there and when it came time to leave, he stayed behind. Years later, I received copies of letters written to Tom by our dad telling him that he had stayed away for two weeks and that he was expected back in Philadelphia on the train at a specified date and time. Tom arrived as directed. Meanwhile, I had been agitating to be allowed to live with our mother and Lou. Whether our dad saw it as an opportunity to relieve some of the financial burdens he was feeling, or saw it as a way to relieve potential legal pressure to grant visitation rights to our mother or perhaps as a way to eliminate the frustration of dealing with a son who was growing increasingly difficult to manage–he agreed to allow me to go back to West Haven for an extended visit. I was to enroll in school there and help our mother take care of baby Louis. Tom was to stay with our dad and Vi. When I left, I didn’t realize that it would be several years before I would see Tom again. I don’t recall our being in touch on anything like a regular basis. You might say that we had already gone our separate ways, though we did get together later for a brief time in Miami, Florida after I had worn out my welcome in Connecticut.

I became a more or less permanent family member in West Haven. I was enrolled as a sophomore at West Haven High School, and learned that our mother had already found a job for me as an usher in the West Haven movie theatre. I worked several nights a week, wore a uniform, carried a flashlight to seat late-arriving patrons (and to discourage improper antics on the part of some young moviegoers). My wage was
twenty-five cents per hour with no benefits, but, fortunately, no tax withheld. I was on call and thus had no assured income for the week. I believe my take-home pay averaged about three dollars a week. At least I had pocket money for school lunches and a Friday night movie at the other theatre in West Haven. Admission at that time had gone up to about twenty-five cents. At the apartment house where we lived, I met Tim Shea, the son of Vivian Shea, a neighbor. He had a buddy named Bobby Stevenson, and we became friends for virtually the whole time I lived in Connecticut, even after our mother and Lou moved to a house in New Haven. Tim was an asthmatic who frequently missed school because of asthma attacks. Strangely, by Friday night he had recovered sufficiently to go to the local movie house, which was a hangout for high school kids. (I learned later that he graduated from high school, joined the navy and became enrolled in the Navy V-12 program at Yale University. Upon graduation, he was commissioned, but had recurring attacks of asthma, which caused him to be discharged from the service.) We didn’t go to see the movies really, but rather to see who could get the loudest response to a shouted wisecrack. Though I was a newcomer to West Haven, I felt that with Tim and Bob’s support I could join in the exchange, and did. I remember the week that Hedy Lamar swam across the screen in all her glorious nudity. Though the glimpses were brief, they drew a wild response from the young male moviegoers. It is obvious from an absence of any memories of my classes or teachers at West Haven High School, that my experience there was unremarkable.

I do remember the regular Sunday visits to Lou Torraca’s family home in Danbury, Connecticut. It was a long ride on curving Connecticut country roads that once in a while produced a siege of car-sickness. Lou’s family lived in a neat, white, two-story house on a residential street in Danbury, and they had lived there for years. The largest room in the house was the dining room where the family had all of its meals. Lou’s
brother, Ralph, was a doctor who had a hearing problem and had trouble maintaining a private practice. He enjoyed listening to classical music and looked with disdain on my evolving interest in modern-day jazz. Sunday afternoons after dinner were devoted to sitting in the living room and listening to Ralph’s selections of classical music. His sister, Lucy, was unmarried and lived at home where she cared for her mother and dad, Achille Torraca, who owned and operated his own tailor shop there. He had arrived as a boy in New York, traveling from his home in Naples, Italy, and had settled in Danbury, starting out as an apprentice in a hat factory. Danbury was a major center for the manufacture of hats, which most men wore in those days. Mother Torraca took care of the cooking for Sunday dinner, which required hours of preparing the sauce for the spaghetti, and was a mainstay of the meal. It took me a while to adjust to the strong odor of the Parmesan cheese that was added in prodigious amounts to each plate of spaghetti, but once I became accustomed to the smell and flavor, Italian spaghetti became one of my favorite meals and remains so today. A second sister, Jessie, was a teacher in the Danbury school system, and after completing her master’s degree during several summers where she stayed at our house in New Haven, eventually became a professor at the teachers’ college in Danbury. Lou‘s other brother, Pasquale (Pat), was a professor of architecture at Virginia Polytechnical University in Blacksburg, Virginia. He eventually moved to Florida State University, where our son, Jeff, visited him many years later.

My stay in West Haven was short-lived, and I found myself transferring, still a sophomore, to Hillhouse High School in New Haven, Connecticut. Strangely enough, because there were not enough classrooms to accommodate the freshmen and sophomore classes, I found myself attending classes in the afternoon from one o’clock to five. I remember being enrolled in a French class which was taught by a native
speaker. She inspired me to try to speak with a French accent rather than in the manner in which Americans traditionally mangled the French language. Hillhouse High School was actually located on the Yale University campus in downtown New Haven, and was viewed as an excellent school from which to seek admission to Yale. Of course, since the entering class at Yale was limited to just over a thousand students, your chances were considered better if you were a graduate of one the several distinguished preparatory schools located in New England and elsewhere. Hillhouse was definitely a college preparatory school with an emphasis on classical studies. Located next door was Boardman, the so-called trade school which prepared students for employment in local businesses and industries.

With our new home on Boulevard being located several miles from school, I spent a great deal of time walking to and from downtown. The Goffe Street bus was available about half the distance from house to school, but that cost money, and besides, I had been given a bicycle to get around. But bikes were not considered a very sexy way to get to school. And so, after the first few days, I chose to walk. Some of the younger students were driven to and from school by their parents, while a surprising number of older students had their own cars. My own daily trek was through the middle of that part of town that was predominantly black (called Negro at the time). Surprisingly, the Yale campus began where the black community ended. I don’t recall ever having had second thoughts about walking through what was known as the Dixwell Avenue black community, and a year later I would return on the train from New York long after the buses had stopped running and would walk the several miles home through Dixwell Avenue.

Summer in New Haven became a time of running free, and I ran to the beach back in West Haven almost every day. Or I should say I rode my bike the four or five miles to the beach starting in the early morning and returning when the sun went down. Frequently, I would join up with Tim Shea and Bobby Stevenson, since I had not yet developed friends in New Haven. Once in a while, I would stay over, usually at Bobby’s house. It was there that I had my first experience with an alcoholic beverage. Sloe gin was a fashionable drink for teenagers at the time, and we finished off a bottle without bad effects and without discovery. Summer was lots of sun and Long Island Sound and water in which, at that time, we could safely swim. And then it ended and I was back at Hillhouse as a junior.

I had my own room and was responsible for babysitting for baby Louis and little else, except for mowing the grass. I spent hours playing my clarinet, emulating the jazz (I thought) that was coming over the radio. Strangely, I didn’t enroll in band or orchestra classes at school. I just played along with Benny Goodman or Artie Shaw. I developed a new respect for Tim Shea’s older brother, Bobby, who was a great pianist. He played in local orchestras and his claim to fame was that he had arranged numbers for Bunny Berrigan and his new orchestra. Berrigan played a very mellow trumpet and had appeared with many of the leading bands of the time. His theme number, “I Can’t Get Started,” is still heard on jazz radio from time to time. He was recognized as one of the emerging greats of the jazz scene. Unfortunately, as with many of the young musicians at the time, he had a problem with drugs and died at an early age. Bobby decided to try to capitalize on his work with Berrigan and moved to New York City to establish residency so that he could join the musicians’ union, where I ran into him later.

It is interesting that several jazz greats came out of New Haven at about this time and a little later, including Charlie Barnet, who dropped out of Yale to organize and lead his own orchestra, which played in the ballroom at Savin Rock. This was an amusement park located on the Long Island Sound in West Haven that offered a wide variety of rides, sideshows, excellent seafood restaurants, and musical venues. Tim, Bobby, and I used to roam the streets there at night, enjoying the acts presented by performers on stages out front as a way of luring patrons into buying tickets for the real show inside. The freak show was a special magnet for the curious who paid to see bearded ladies, sword-swallowers, and other strange and interesting specimens of the human race. It was fun watching people arriving on the trolleys that ran down the center of West Haven Avenue and disembarking to join the already crowded streets in search of entertainment. Because of the employment opportunities offered by the sideshows at Savin Rock, many acts from Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey Circus, which had its roots in Bridgeport, Connecticut, settled in West Haven.

As a junior at Hillhouse, I entered a new and exciting world. I had an English teacher who actually motivated me in ways that I had not felt since fourth grade at Pembroke and Todd School. The first exercise of each class period was to copy our assignment for the next class session from the blackboard precisely as she had written it. We were then graded on our penmanship before we went on to the topic of the day. Dr. Ella Pardee Warner was a martinet who brooked no-nonsense in her classes. She was a nationally recognized English teacher who wrote a syndicated column for the newspapers. She taught the English classics but more importantly, she taught us the value of the disciplined study. I was particularly impressed with her presentation of Shakespeare’s “Macbeth.” Active participation in class discussions was a requirement. In addition, each of us was expected to develop and make a presentation on a topic of our own choice. I wanted to impress Dr. Warner, and since I was still studying French, I found a French translation of “Macbeth” and worked hard to memorize, in French, one of the scenes we were studying. My presentation earned me an “A” from Dr. Warner and some bitterness from my classmates. Many years later, when I had returned from military service in World War II, I located Dr. Warner, who had retired, and visited her to acknowledge that she was the teacher who had most inspired me and had helped me to understand how important it was to go beyond the immediate assignments of life.

It was in my junior year that I developed new friendships which enabled me, for the first time, to visit the homes of some of my classmates and to have them visit my home. Ours was the last house on Boulevard and a long walk from Westville where several of my classmates lived, so it was easier for me to walk to their homes than for them to come to mine. Two of the girls who became good friends at the time were Phoebe Chamberlain, whose father owned New Haven’s largest and most prestigious furniture store, and Patty Hurlbutt. Patty was interested in music and had an excellent collection of current records by the most popular bands of the period, and so it was natural for us to gather at her home in the afternoons after school. We stayed there until dinner time listening to great music and sharing our thoughts about school, our teachers, and our classmates. When the music stopped, I had a long walk home alone. I lost track of Patty once I left New Haven but I did visit Phoebe at her home a number of years later when I returned from the war in Europe. Although she was engaged to a distant cousin, she was my first post-war date. I borrowed Lou’s car to pick her up and drove her downtown to a movie. I did not have a license and had never driven anything other than an army Jeep, and so I was unfamiliar with the steering wheel gearshift on a civilian car. About halfway into downtown, with the gears grinding, Phoebe gently suggested that I was driving in first gear and that we might go faster if I shifted into high gear. The date was uneventful except that the next time we went into town she was with her fiancé, and I was with a friend of hers who apparently thought me a veteran who had not quite adjusted to postwar life and decided not to see me again. Phoebe’s father, who was
somehow connected to Yale University, found that I had applied for admission there as well as to Dartmouth and Williams Colleges and contacted the Yale president, Whitney Griswold, urging him to ensure my admission. I was subsequently denied admission to Williams and was disappointed until I received notice of my admission to Yale shortly afterward. I bought a studio couch, a desk, and a chair and immediately moved onto campus, though the start of the semester was still several weeks away. It was while waiting for classes to start at Yale that I received notice of my admission to Dartmouth. I was grateful for their consideration and told them so, but I was already at Yale and I stayed at Yale!

Sometime during my junior year, I became acquainted with Rodney Goodling, who reminded me somewhat of the photographs I had seen of Orson Welles from Todd School. He was a studious type who seemed to be interested in the theatre. He lived alone with his mother in an apartment in downtown New Haven. He had no interest in sports or music, as I recall. And he didn’t particularly seem to enjoy the friends with
whom I was associating. Actually, all I remember of him is his name and that he seemed to look like Orson Welles. As my horizons expanded, I lost track of him. I was to undertake my upcoming forays into the world of New York jazz music alone.

The Glorious Beginning and the Inglorious Ending of My Sixteenth Year

I can’t remember celebrating my sixteenth birthday on February thirteenth, 1938, but I do remember somehow convincing mother to allow me to travel alone to New York City on May twenty-ninth, 1938, to attend the first Carnival of Jazz (the precursor to subsequent jazz festivals annually across the country) that was held at Randall’s Island Stadium in New York City. Imagine a sixteen-year-old setting out from New Haven on the train to New York City without a map, a limited amount of pocket money, and only a general idea of where Randall’s Island Stadium was located. What a wonderful way to start my sixteenth year! Somehow I found my way to the concert site. History recounts that twenty-five bands played that day before an audience of 24,000 people. I remember arriving at the beginning of the concert and leaving very late in the day. All of the greats were there except Benny Goodman, who had another engagement. Of course, Duke Ellington was actually king for the day but other bands were notable for their performances. These great bands were there playing their distinctive styles of jazz. Among the bands, I remember seeing and hearing were Count Basie, Artie Shaw, Chick Webb with Ella Fitzgerald, Woody Herman, Cab Calloway, and Charlie Barnet. It was truly an amazing experience to see and hear in person, in one place, at one time, all of the musical groups that I had listened to on records and on the radio at home. I arrived back in New Haven that night long after the trolleys had stopped running and had to walk the several miles from the train station to the house on Boulevard.

With that experience, I had been initiated into the world of live jazz and had learned that I could find my way from New Haven to New York City, which at the time was the source of all great jazz music. Back home, I began to spend hours each afternoon and evening in my room playing my clarinet in time with the various bands whose recordings I had, or whose music was broadcast on the radio stations. I was already planning my next foray to the big city. Strangely, I never attempted to enroll in the music classes at Hillhouse, nor did I ever try to join any of the jazz groups that were beginning to emerge in New Haven.

I had virtually no contact with my brother, Tom, during my time in Connecticut. I believe that our dad had decided to relocate to Florida, this time to Miami. He seemed always to return to his early roots, thus to his birthplace in Philadelphia after sojourns in Boston, Tampa, Detroit, Chicago, and Tulsa, Oklahoma, and to the warmth of Florida after his rather brief and unsatisfying return to Philadelphia. For me, the world was truly opening up and I was running free. When I wasn’t playing my clarinet, I was doing limited chores around the house. Because of our proximity to, and my almost daily visits to, the shore of Long Island Sound, I developed an interest in boats and actually designed what today
would be called a jet-ski boat. Perhaps some of Grandfather Reid’s inventive genius had trickled down to me, but maybe I had lifted a concept from an issue of Popular Mechanics magazine. I was never able to go beyond developing the plans and specifications for my jet ski, but I enjoyed visions of being able someday to skim across the Sound at high speed. I don’t remember if there actually existed such a craft at that time. Perhaps my invention was really just an offshoot of something I had read about.

I returned to New York City several times during that summer. On one occasion I defied all sense of logic and turned up at the stage door of the theatre where Orson Welles, newly returned from Ireland and ensconced as director of a WPA (Work Progress Administration) theatre company that later became the Mercury Theatre, both on stage and on radio, was presenting a plain-clothes, modern-day version of “Julius Caesar”. The presentation had been conceived as an allegory to the rule of Benito Mussolini in Italy. At the stage door, I presented myself as a former student at Todd School and was graciously received by Orson Welles himself. We chatted for some time in his dressing room about Todd and the letters which Roger Hill had read while Welles was in Ireland, as he prepared for his afternoon performance. When curtain time came, he had me escorted to a front-row seat on the center aisle. The performance, as with every production Welles mounted, was unique, spectacular, and seemed destined to launch him on a career that would ultimately recognize him as one of the great creative geniuses of the time. I couldn’t believe that I had really met him, and had been treated so graciously by him in light of the fact that my Todd School credentials were so very limited (only one semester in residence). At sixteen, I was already envisioning a place for me in the New York theatre world with Orson Welles as my mentor. In fact, later that same year I was to broach the possibility to him in another visit to the theatre where he was staging a production of “Dr. Faustus.” But then, back in New Haven, it was back to mowing grass, baby-sitting, and working (again) as an usher, this time at the Paramount Theatre. Unlike West Haven where the menu called for double features, Paramount presented a major film followed by a stage show featuring name bands with vocalists and a bevy of dancing chorus girls. Although I didn’t get to visit backstage as I had in New York, I did hear a lot of music and see a lot of dance routines, since I worked a six or eight-hour shift for several days during each weeklong engagement. I usually developed a crush on one of the chorus girls and was an ardent admirer until the engagement ended and I would find another chorus girl in the next group to admire. Although most of the music was far from my then-current interest, I still have a vivid memory of Ted Lewis, his clarinet, and the battered top hat which he wore on stage at the Paramount Theatre.

It was early in the summer when Lou Torraca somewhat reluctantly agreed to teach me to drive his car. We had several driving sessions beyond our house at the end of the Boulevard. The lessons didn’t go well, although Lou did his best to impart the basics of good driving practice. I never got beyond the point where I should have started studying the Connecticut DMV Driver Manual because Lou and our mother left on a visit to Rehoboth Beach, Delaware where the Pyle, Roberts, Stalfort families took their summer vacations. Rehobeth Beach at that time consisted of a hotel with a boardwalk, and a number of very primitive wooden cabins lined up on unpaved streets. Although the Henlopen Hotel would today probably rank just above some of the simple accommodations that still survive in isolated beach resorts on both the East and West Coasts, in its day it was considered a very desirable destination center with a very active social life for vacationers from Baltimore. I can remember Mother and Lou departing at one point early in the summer for several weeks during which Lou’s sister, Jessie, came to stay while she took course work at the local teachers college. She was left in charge of the house and its only other occupant, me. As might be expected, I took advantage of someone who had never had responsibility for supervising a teenager with a wild streak. I invited my friend, Bob Stevenson, to spend the night and arranged for Phoebe Chamberlain and Patty Hurlbutt to visit during the evening. It was a fun evening and the only time I was able to invite friends to the house while I was in high school. Apparently, the party, if it could be called that, did not please Jessie, because I received a severe reprimand from both my mother and Lou when they returned from their trip.

Their absence enabled me to undertake another bold adventure, this one a return trip to New York City, where I arrived in the early morning and walked up and down Broadway and Seventh Avenue, taking in all of the glories of the Great White Way. At one point, I turned off onto Forty-second Street and, heading west, almost immediately came abreast of Minsky’s Burlesque Theatre. I spent some time ogling the posters and photographs at the front of the theatre and somehow managed to approach the box office where I purchased a ticket. Apparently, in those days it was permissible for a sixteen-year-old, who certainly looked sixteen years old, to be admitted to one of New York’s best-known burlesque theatres. I thought at the time that the performers looked rather old and the dancers didn’t seem as attractive or talented as the ones who performed at the Paramount Theatre in New Haven. There seemed to be a major effort during an intermission to sell a variety of burlesque-related products to members of the audience, which was almost totally male. It was still daylight when I emerged from the theatre feeling a little sheepish at having gone where I probably shouldn’t have gone. I had entered out of curiosity and didn’t want people who saw me to think I was like the other patrons who emerged with me.

I continued my walk up and down Broadway, stopping for food at one of the Horn and Hardart Automats where dishes were displayed in glass-fronted boxes from which you could observe the offerings. When you saw a dish which you wanted, you inserted a coin into a slot, the door would open, you took out the dish, and retreated to a table. If you wanted another dish, you repeated the procedure. Beverages were dispensed the same way. The only personal contact you had in the cafeteria was with other diners and an occasional cleaning person. It was an economical way to dine and apparently enjoyed some favor in other communities across the country, though not in New Haven.

Having nourished my body, I went in search of nourishment for my mind. I found my way up Broadway to Fifty-second Street, which at the time was home to what was known as East Coast jazz music. Actually, East Coast jazz was a hybrid deriving its impetus from the Midwest where a number of the best-known musicians, having started out in clubs in Chicago and Kansas City, had gravitated to New York City, where their musical style had melded with that of musicians who were based in Harlem. There were a number of clubs on Fifty-second Street at that time where the better-known bands played. It was a joy walking up and down the street listening to the different sounds. I got as close as I could to the source of the music as I wandered back and forth. Just opposite a club named Leon and Eddy’s, which was quite well known, was the Famous Door, a small room located in the basement of an old brownstone building. Holding forth in that venue was the Count Basie band with Jimmy Rushing as vocalist. I was one of the early arrivals when I entered the room and went to the bar where I asked for a beer.
I was a sixteen-year-old who looked like a skinny sixteen-year-old, but I was served nevertheless. I had ordered a beer because I thought it was something I could afford and I could make last. I certainly did make it last. Count Basie started to play and went from one number to another, hitting all the numbers I had heard at the concert at Randall’s Island. As the evening moved on, I moved closer to the band, still nursing my original beer. No one bothered to ask me if I wanted a refill. No one challenged me when I moved to the edge of the bandstand. By two o’clock in the morning I was standing almost at Count Basie’s right elbow, where I stayed until the music stopped and the patrons had filed out onto the street. I walked down to Grand Central Station, caught a very late train to New Haven, and once again walked the several miles home to the house on Boulevard.

I thought I had been able to get into the house unnoticed, but found later when I was chided by mother for staying out all night, that my absence had been noticed. I must have been exhausted by my long day and night in New York, but I believe I went to work as usual the next day. Today, I look at a photograph taken of the Count Basie band playing at the Famous Door in 1938 and I see the exact spot where I stood with my beer on that memorable night in the summer of my sixteenth year.

It seems to me that life began to go downhill rapidly from that point on. Apparently, I had not shown proper respect for Lou’s sister, Jessie, which is anathema for Italian families. Because she was in New Haven studying for her advanced degree, she needed a place to stay. She had stayed in mother and Lou’s bedroom while they were away. When they returned, she was given my room and I was moved to the New Haven YMCA on Howe Street. I continued to usher at the Paramount Theatre. Of course, my driving lessons were never resumed. Meanwhile, a decision had been made for me to go south to Miami to visit my dad. I was given a Greyhound bus ticket, loaded my possessions into a suitcase, and was driven to the bus station. My mother convinced me that it was for my own good that I was going to live with my dad and Vi and my brother, Tom. Because of my attitude and my unruliness, I had worn out my welcome in New Haven. I remember being told that it was a trial run and, if things didn’t work out in Miami, I could possibly return to New Haven in time for the start of fall semester classes at Hillhouse High School while living at the YMCA.

Arriving in Miami and being taken to the Reid residence, I realized that things had not progressed much for Dad and Vi since Philadelphia. They were still driving the same car, though it was still a beautiful Auburn roadster. They had taken up residence in a garage apartment off of Biscayne Boulevard. Both of them were working–Dad for an electronic supply firm and Vi for one of the major local banks. Times were extremely difficult for everyone in those last years of the Great Depression. Tom was on summer vacation from school. Space was limited. The days and nights were hot. We were crowded together in such a way that we were constantly confronting each other. The tension was felt by each of us and, of course, I was the intruder into what had probably been a reasonable balance of interests and needs. I was a sixteen-year-old on my way to becoming an incorrigible adolescent; certainly not a good companion for my brother, Tom. In the few months before I was to turn seventeen, we were never able to develop the closeness we had felt when we had only each other. I became surly and insolent.
Fortunately, Tom did not follow my example–at least not until sometime later when he left without saying goodbye to go to Baltimore where he was taken in by Grandmother Pyle.

The tension grew until it became apparent that the situation could not continue. Somehow a return to New Haven became an option, though certain conditions were placed on my acceptance there. Once again, I was given a bus ticket and left Miami with my belongings. Things went well on the trip north until we arrived in New York City, which was in the midst of surviving a major hurricane. At the bus station, we learned that the roads to New Haven were closed and would probably remain closed for several days. New York City did not seem as inviting as it had been on my previous visits. With no contact possible with my mother and nowhere to go, I somehow found Tim Shea’s brother, Bobbie, who had moved to New York to gain access to the musician’s union and was working at Macy’s in the music department. Bobbie generously took me in and allowed me to stay in his hotel room. It really wasn’t “his” hotel room. He shared it with several other roommates who slept there in shifts. For several days, I roamed around New York meeting with Bobbie for meals at different restaurants where the food was good and also cheap. One day in my rambles, I encountered a theatre billboard that announced an up-coming Mercury Theatre production, “Danton’s Death,” directed by Orson Welles. In addition to his on-Broadway productions, Welles had landed a contract for his Mercury Theatre group to produce weekly radio shows, known as the Mercury Theatre of the Air. He had also established himself as the voice of “The Shadow,” as in “the Shadow knows “! As I had done once before, I threw caution to the winds and found the theatre where the production was in rehearsal. Again, I introduced myself to him and found him as gracious as he had been the first time I had visited him. By that time, I had decided that rather than becoming a second Benny Goodman (clarinetist), I would opt for the theatre where I, too, would become actor, playwright, and producer. Orson Welles gently suggested that it would be better for me to go home and finish high school. If later I were still interested in the theatre, to come to see him again. I was to see him again later in Philadelphia, where he was preparing his production of “The Five Kings,” derived from his scripting of the works of William Shakespeare. But before that, I would have another not-so-close encounter with his genius in the fall of that year.

Bobbie Shea, since he worked days at Macy’s, was one of the night-shift roommates. Absent entertainment in the room, one of the preoccupations in the long evenings was to use binoculars to check out activities in the windows in the surrounding hotels, and to watch strollers in the streets below. We were fortunate in being located just one block north and one block east of the very popular Cotton Club, which had relocated from Harlem to a site between Broadway and Seventh Avenue. Our venue overlooked the stage door of the Cotton Club where, long into the night, we could watch the beautiful dancers come out to cool off and smoke a cigarette. The 1938 hurricane, which wrought such devastation on Long Island and Connecticut, had added another dimension to life in my sixteenth year.

The hurricane finally ended, the roads were cleared, the busses started running, and I was once again on my way to New Haven. My reception was less than enthusiastic as I settled in once again to start the school year. My attitude hadn’t changed and, in fact, had become worse, and so it wasn’t surprising that I became persona non grata and again was given a bus ticket–this time one-way–to Miami. My reception there was also less than enthusiastic, but we settled into what became a more normal relationship with each other. Tom and I were enrolled in high school on the other side of Miami. The drill was to get four people through the bathroom, get everyone dressed, out the door,
loaded in the car and then to set out for our respective destinations on schedule. Tom and I each had a bicycle that was loaded onto the car and dropped off with us at school so that we would have transportation home in the afternoon. I have no recollection whatsoever of what school was like in Miami. I believe that I stopped attending at some point, as I became more recalcitrant. I remember Tom being puzzled by my behavior, not knowing why it was happening or what to think about it. Dad was still trying to maintain control of a difficult situation. We reached the point where we were living week-to-week. I started to take long walks alone down Biscayne Boulevard. The contrast between the lives of average people and that of the wealthy was apparent in Miami, bothered me, and only pointed out the ultimate hopelessness of my situation. I think I became depressed and more resentful of what I had come to after sixteen-and-a-half years. My life had already taken me through seven distinct phases and I was not yet seventeen. I felt rebellious and ready to explode.

Before the explosion came, I had one more encounter with my idol, Orson Welles. We were sitting in front of the radio on Sunday night, October thirtieth, 1938, when an announcer broke into the regular program stating that a space ship had landed in New Jersey, and there were strange little creatures beginning to stream out onto the New Jersey landscape. It was clear that these were creatures from Mars, and that they were armed with powerful death-dealing weapons and intended to destroy anyone or anything that got in their way. Interviews were reported with government officials and with spectators who volunteered vivid descriptions of what was happening. The New Jersey National Guard was brought in to try to deter the advance of the Martians without great success. All of the commentary and interviews were conducted in the crisp language of radio commentators reporting a catastrophic event happening now, and live. We switched to other stations only to find that there were reports of people actually panicking and trying to escape from New Jersey and New York City. Periodically, the reports were interrupted to assure the audience that what they were experiencing was a production of H.G. Welles’s “War of the Worlds,” done in up-to-date, radio journalistic style by Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre of the Air. Eventually, the program ended and life returned to normal after several days of accusations, recriminations, and explanations. Orson Welles had added another star to his vast range of accomplishments. In retrospect, I believe that I tried to convince those of us seated in front of the radio that we were in fact listening to another of the Mercury Theatre of the Air programs which we as a family listened to every Sunday night. I am certain that there were moments for us when the realism of the production seemed overwhelmingly convincing that the Martians had really invaded New Jersey.

I don’t recall Christmas that year, though we must have somehow suffered through it. Holiday celebrations were not a favorite tradition of the Reid family. The weather turned colder and Tom and I tried to stay warm in the bed we occupied in the living-bedroom, which had open windows. We were unceremoniously stripped of the covers when it came time to wake and start the day. We carried on through the month of January and, as I was approaching my seventeenth birthday in February, I became more disrespectful of my dad, probably believing that I would, in a few days, be able to strike out on my own. We had had a number of discussions about my attitude, about my homework, about my bad influence on my brother, Tom. Finally, it happened on a Sunday afternoon! I spoke defiantly to my dad. He lashed out at me and I lashed back! Then I was out the door with no idea of what to do or where to go. I had walked several blocks away from home when a police car slowly drew up behind me. The police car stopped. The door opened and a policeman came toward me. He asked me my name, and when I told him, he directed me to get into the car. We drove downtown to the city hall whose upper floors housed the county jail. In short order I was booked into the juvenile wing of the jail. I had definitely hit bottom in my young life, even before I reached my seventeenth birthday. For the next several days I occupied a cell by myself, wondering what was going to happen to me. There were other juveniles in the cell block, one of whom boasted that he had robbed a safe at the Riverside Military Academy and had enjoyed a week of fast living in Miami before being caught and brought to the jail. I remember very little of my time there. Meals were brought on time and were tasteless and unimaginative. I was arraigned before a magistrate and advised that I had been adjudged an incorrigible teenager. I was returned to my cell where I continued to wait and wonder what was going to happen to me. On the thirteenth day of February, my seventeenth birthday, I once again appeared before the magistrate, this time with my dad and Vi present. I was told that I could no longer live with my father, but that my Aunt Josephine Alburger, who lived in Merion, Pennsylvania, had agreed to take me in, and that I would be traveling there on the bus that same day. I was escorted from the hearing room, picked up my few possessions, and was placed on a Greyhound bus headed for Philadelphia. I don’t remember any farewells, though I am certain that my dad had a few words of advice about trying hard to work things out while I was living
with the Alburgers. I can’t remember whether my brother, Tom, was present for my departure, or whether we were able to say goodbye. I do know that it would be several years before we saw each other again and that by then we had lost that feeling of closeness which we once had growing up. As for my dad and Vi, I would pass through phases eight and nine of my life, including my service during World War II, before I would return to visit them in Miami.

Just When You Think Things Can’t Get Worse – They Do!

I don’t remember the trip north to Philadelphia. Probably the trauma of my weeklong experience at the Miami jail, and the uncertainty that lay ahead, shut down my normal ability to retain a visual record of my activities. The first real memory I have of my arrival in Philadelphia is the welcome from my cousin, David Alburger, whose room I was to share. The Alburger home, located at 350 Meadow Lane in Merion, was large and comfortable, unlike the Reid quarters in Miami. I was welcomed into the family after some rather explicit instructions from my Aunt Josephine. I was to respect other members of the family, mind my manners, conform to the household schedule, and, since she had already detected a certain tendency on my part to be disorganized in speech and behavior, I was to maintain a notebook in which I would keep a calendar of my activities, as well as my thoughts.

The household ran on a well-organized basis since David was attending classes at Swarthmore College and had to be at his classes on time. There was an ornate grandfather clock in the front hall which rang the time every quarter-hour. It seemed that that clock was the reminder that time was important and that things should and would be done on schedule. The dinner meal was the important event of the day, when the family came together in the dining room and shared in discussion of individual experiences as well as discussion of current events. The meal was prepared by a cook who brought food to the table in large serving dishes, where it was served onto our individual plates by Uncle Elmer from his place at the head of the table. It was here that I was expected to exercise my note-taking ability while also exercising restraint by not joining in the conversation unless I had something significant to contribute, which I normally didn’t have.

Breakfast was more of an individual event, with the meal still served by the cook, but this time in the less formal breakfast room. There was little conversation at breakfast as each individual seemed focused on preparing mentally for the day ahead. I don’t recall the enrollment process at Lower Merion High School, which I was finally going to attend some three-and-a-half years after the plan to have me attend from Philadelphia fell through. Since this was the eleventh time I had changed schools in eleven years, perhaps I had grown insensitive to the process. Lower Merion was one of Pennsylvania’s top-rated high schools, known for its academic standards as well as its athletic teams. I only remember how lonely I felt during this brief period of time. I had given up on trying to develop friendships with classmates at school. Only once did I venture out at night to one of the places where students met and socialized. I went home without having had a conversation with a single individual. My cousin, David, had a group of friends who visited him at home on some Friday nights. On one occasion I was able to join in on their fun when they watched with binoculars as the neighbor girl next door got ready for bed. I suspect she knew that she was being watched since she seemed to take an inordinate amount of time getting out of her clothes and into her nightgown.

During the three-and-a-half months, I attended Lower Merion, the only things that registered mentally were the French class, where I felt comfortable with the native teacher who reminded me of my French teacher at Pembroke nearly a decade earlier, and my English teacher, who was a martinet and was no Dr. Ella Pardee Warner. Apparently, I hadn‘t learned a thing about conforming to the mores of my environment from my experiences in New Haven and Miami. Although I hadn’t arrived at Lower Merion until mid-February, I was told that I was expected to submit an essay that had been required of my classmates during the fall semester. It would have been an easy matter for me to prepare such a paper since writing was something I had done well as early as third grade when I had been editor of my class paper at Pembroke. Being the rebel that had gotten me nothing but trouble before, I chose to contest the teacher’s demand. During this time, there was talk at the Alburger home of my submitting an application for admission to the University of Pennsylvania. I was warned by the teacher that I needed to submit my paper if I expected to receive a grade in English and have the required units for graduation. Once again, I decided to defy the fates. When it came time to attend graduation rehearsal, I was told that it wouldn’t be necessary for me to attend, since I wouldn’t be receiving a diploma. It was hard to believe, but I would have to stay in school for at least another semester and retake my senior English class.

Of course, Aunt Josephine had no sympathy for me, since she and Uncle Elmer had already bailed me out of jail once, and now I had shown my appreciation by once again rebelling as I had done in New Haven and Miami. There was no way that they would tolerate my behavior and allow me to wait around for another opportunity to complete work for my high school diploma. So, there I was, a high-school dropout at the age of seventeen with no skills, no prospect for a college education, and no place to live, since I had worn out my welcome at the Alburgers. Uncle Elmer came to my rescue by hiring me to paint fire escapes on the Satterlee apartment building at Forty-fifth and Chestnut Street in Philadelphia, which he and Aunt Josephine had inherited from my grandfather. I would be paid twelve dollars a week for forty hours of sanding, scraping, and painting. They arranged for me to rent a room from one of their tenants for five dollars a week. She was a sweet, elderly lady who collected things–all kinds of things—but mostly clothes and newspapers which were stacked on every available surface. It was summer and it was hot hanging over the fire escape railings and painting during the day, and it was hot living in a barren room at night with nothing to do. The only positive thing was that windows were left wide open everywhere, and since it was baseball season and Philadelphia had two baseball teams at the time (the Phillies and the Athletics), and since everyone in the city seemed to have the games tuned in on their radios, you could lie in your bed and listen to all the action. With the volume turned high in almost every house and apartment on the street, you could follow every inning without missing a pitch.

Once again, it was a lonely time with the monotony of loneliness broken only when I was invited to Sunday dinner by a family who lived in the Satterlee apartment and knew the Alburgers. They were a nice family with two daughters, one of who was about my age, and who had dark eyes and luxurious black hair. As a fire escape painter, I had very little in common with the girls who were already in college, they were very gracious in welcoming me into their home. Even after I had relocated to my own place in downtown Philadelphia, I would walk back the forty-some-odd blocks to enjoy some Sunday dinners with them.

It was while at the Satterlee that an appointment was arranged (probably by Uncle Elmer or Aunt Josephine) for me to meet with Harry Teller, director of the Big Brothers Association of Philadelphia. Big Brothers provided a program of one-on-one mentoring for boys six-to-eighteen by interested volunteers who could serve as role models for youngsters who needed guidance. I had a very friendly meeting with someone who seemed to be sincerely interested in me, and who understood some of the problems I had had. He had obviously worked with other “troubled” youths and had helped them find a solution to their problems. He asked me about my aspirations, and strangely enough, I told him that I thought I wanted to be a journalist; this after failing senior English at Lower Merion because I refused to write a required paper. I was amazed
when he arranged for me to have an interview with one of the editors of the Philadelphia Bulletin. I met with the editor and was told that I might be given a job as a copy boy, but I would have to enroll for a journalism class at a local school, which would enable me to receive my high school diploma while learning something about newspaper work. He asked me to return in a week and report on my progress. I did and reported that I had not pursued the schooling requirement because I could not pay the necessary tuition, and hoped that he would hire me anyway. He said that he couldn’t, but if things changed, he told me to come back and see him.

I felt completely deflated when I reported back to Mr. Teller. I felt that I had let him down and had chalked up another failure. Surprisingly, he didn’t give up on me and actually arranged another interview which he felt might offer a similar type of experience that would enhance my chances for work on a newspaper. I’ve thought many times in the passing years about what a wonderful person he was to have tried to help a troubled young boy find his way in the world. I would like to have told him that I finally found my way and how much I wished belatedly to thank him for his help. On his recommendation, I interviewed at the Free Public Library of Philadelphia for a job as clerk in the newspaper department and was hired on the spot. I was offered a salary of sixty dollars a month, paid semi-monthly. Overwhelmed by my good fortune, I began looking for a place to live and found a nice studio apartment at 330 South Smedley Street. It had a pull-down bed, no other furniture, no refrigerator or stove, but it did have a small bathroom. It rented for thirty dollars per month and I signed a year’s lease. I was still just six months past my seventeenth birthday, but I had my own place, though with nothing in it and only the clothes on my back. I had thirty dollars a month to live on after paying my rent, but I had no deductions for taxes, retirement, or health care. But neither did I have benefits for unemployment, retirement or illness. At seventeen I was employed with a salary. I was healthy and retirement was something too distant to even think about. I felt good about myself for the first time in a long while.

I don’t recall how I came to choose South Smedley Street as my future abode since it was a mile away from my place of employment. The idea of an uncluttered living space appealed to me after my experience at the Satterlee apartment. South Smedley Street ran for two blocks in the downtown part of Old Philadelphia. It was a narrow, cobbled street that dated almost to colonial times and still boasted hitching posts for horses and horse-drawn carriages. Small, brick-fronted row houses occupied both sides of the street. Because of its history and its quaintness, it was a street that was considered very desirable, and many prominent Philadelphia families maintained townhouses there. In a
number of cases, they had purchased side-by-side houses and had remodeled two rather small residences into a more comfortable single residence. I believe the Wanamaker family maintained a townhouse on South Smedley. And the Strawbridge family, which established the Strawbridge-Clothier department stores, lived directly across the street from my apartment building, which was the only new structure on the
street. Three-hundred-thirty South Smedley boasted an elevator which rose several floors to a penthouse which reputedly was occupied by Leopold Stokowski, the famed symphonic concertmaster who, at the time, was finishing up his long-term position as conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra. He had separated from his Johnson & Johnson heiress wife and would not marry Gloria Vanderbilt, heiress to the Vanderbilt fortune, until 1945 when she was twenty-one years of age. It was reputed in the neighborhood though, that the two had met during the time I was living in the building, even though she was very young.

I believe that I had modified my life plan, if I had one, sufficiently to cause me to envision myself as a writer, not just a newspaper writer. Thus, it seemed proper for me to locate in an “arty” neighborhood, which was bordered by South Smedley and Pine Street to the south, where South Smedley terminated. Pine Street was considered somewhat avant-garde since several artists and interracial couples lived there. South of Pine Street was where the real Italian South Philadelphia began. On the corner of South Smedley and Pine was a delicatessen owned and operated by a very kindly Jewish man, who by his generosity and kindness, literally kept me alive during the time I remained in Philadelphia. It was in his deli that I became acquainted with sticky buns and chocolate milk. Though he made delicious corned beef sandwiches on rye and maintained a large barrel of kosher pickles from which he drew a large pickle to go with the sandwiches, I had a limited income and had to choose when I could afford one of his sandwiches. One of the nice things about him was that he would allow me to run up a tab to be paid when I received my semi-monthly paycheck.

His deli had a back room with tables and chairs where customers could sit and enjoy their food and drink. It was in that backroom that I first encountered a number of his female customers. They seemed attractive and somewhat older than I was. They wore quite a bit of makeup and dressed in clothes that were different from what girls wore in high school. On one occasion, I noticed that one of the girls seemed to have bruises on her face. I was curious about the girl who was bruised and after they had left the deli, I asked the owner about the girl. He explained very patiently that these girls called girls who went out in response to calls for their “professional or non-professional” services. This was my first exposure to the seamier side of life in Philadelphia. I was surprised to learn that my neighbors on Pine Street were girls who sold their bodies for a living. I was beginning to store up knowledge which I hoped one day I could use in a story or a novel. As to the girl with bruises, I was told that sometimes they had to suffer physical punishment from their clients or their pimps. I continued to see the girls in the
back room of the deli and to feel compassion for them. If they were aware of me at all, I suspect they thought I was just a young boy from the neighborhood.

I hadn’t realized when I moved into my apartment that I would be living more than a mile from my job at the library. My shift was from one o’clock to ten o’clock when the library closed. I had done a lot of walking in my young life, so the trip was not particularly challenging, even though I was walking the streets of a major American city alone late at night. After all, I had walked through Dixwell Avenue in New Haven at two and three o’clock in the morning and had even walked Fifty-second Street in New York City at three A.M. My day usually started with a leisurely breakfast of cereal and orange juice, which I kept outside my bathroom window since I had no refrigerator. When the milk turned sour, which it sometimes did after a few days in the summer heat, I would have my cereal dry. To this day, I still feel that a day without a bowl of cereal for breakfast is a lost day; today I always have sweet milk and enjoy bananas, peaches, and blueberries on my cereal when they are available. It was interesting that with my first paycheck, I chose to splurge on a real meal. While living with our mother and Lou and riding every Sunday to Danbury for a bountiful Italian dinner, I had developed a taste for spaghetti and meat sauce, one of the staples of the meal. It had been many months since my stomach had felt the fullness that I remembered from those Sundays in Danbury. It was natural then for me to seek out an Italian restaurant in downtown Philadelphia for my first complete meal. The luncheon menu offered a rich variety of dishes and was less expensive than the dinner menu, so from that day forward at noon on every payday I returned to the same Italian restaurant for what today people would call a pig-out. And today, seventy years later, spaghetti and meatballs, or a similar family pasta dish is known as “slosh,” continues to be an important part of my diet.

The walk to the library was enjoyable, and I liked the quiet atmosphere of the newspaper reading room. My main job was to check out newspapers to the library clients, remove out-of-date papers from the racks, and replace them with the latest issues of local newspapers, as well as papers from around the country and from around the world. It was fascinating to read stories that dealt with life and death, finance and the economy, sports, and Philadelphia’s arts and social life. It was even more fascinating to be able to go to the basement to recover newspapers which dated from the earliest days of the city, and to read about the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, the War to End Wars, the Spanish Civil War, and the beginnings of what was to be known as World War II. Though most of our clients were men and women who had a serious purpose in visiting the newspaper reading room, our facility became a hangout for the homeless who used the place primarily as a refuge from the heat in summer and from the cold in winter. I worked with two other people in the newspaper room. One was my supervisor, who was probably about thirty years old and married with two children. He lived in a house which he owned, took the trolley to work on the day shift, and was paid, I understood, about one hundred twenty dollars a month. I believe he held his position as part of the city’s political patronage system, where you owed your job to the party in power and thus you worked to help keep your party in office. The other employee was a young man who aspired to be an operatic tenor. He carefully nurtured his voice, speaking softly to protect his vocal cords, and practiced breathing exercises frequently during his work shift. I don’t know where he lived or how he spent his time when not at work. It seemed to me that he was content to have his job so long as it enabled him to have his singing lessons so that one day he would be a featured tenor with the Philadelphia Opera company. Unfortunately, I never heard him sing so that I never knew whether he was talented or someone with an aspiration that would never be realized.

It was during my tenure at Philadelphia Free Public Library that I once again encountered Orson Welles. He had come to Philadelphia after an opening in Boston of his monumental production of “The Five Kings,” his adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Henry’s” plays, with plans to take the production on to Washington, D.C. before an opening in New York. I hurried to the theatre one afternoon and presented myself at the stage door with a request that I be able to speak with Welles as a schoolmate from Todd School. He apparently remembered that I had accosted him in New York while he was doing “Julius Caesar” and again when he was developing “Danton’s Death,” an enormously complex production dealing with the French Revolution, with a set that involved special lighting effects and hidden entrances from under the stage. I learned many years later that Time Magazine, as well as other critics, panned the production mercilessly in its November fourteenth issue, just two weeks after the spectacular “War of the Worlds” radio production, leading to an early closing. It is interesting that the play is not listed in any of the accounts either of Welles’s productions or of those of the Mercury Theatre Company. Welles was his usual gracious self, though many of his critics thought him standoffish. He also remembered that I had expressed an interest in becoming involved in the theatre in some capacity. He suggested that I might investigate becoming involved with the New (Labor) Theatre group in Philadelphia, which was preparing a production of the very popular musical, “Pins and Needles,” which had been developed as an activity of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union in New York City. One of the New York production’s composers was Marc Blitzstein, a native of Philadelphia, who was working with the local theatre group. Welles had been the director of Blitzstein’s first musical, “The Cradle Will Rock,” in 1935. Even with Welles giving an impressive performance as Falstaff, “The Five Kings” came to be a little too convoluted for audiences to appreciate and folded after appearing briefly in Washington, D.C.

Following Welles’s advice, I sought out the theatre company and sat through some of the auditions of aspiring performers. Probably as a courtesy for my interest in the group, I was given the opportunity to sing a number. Perhaps if I had paid attention to the breathing exercises my colleague at the library was practicing, I might have been better prepared to win a singing role in the musical. I was only partially disappointed at my rejection since I didn’t really see myself as a threat to Frank Sinatra–who was beginning his climb to fame at that time–or other popular singers of the period. I did continue to meet with the group, which was strongly labor-oriented and held great admiration for the Soviet Union and the communist ideology. It was considered quite proper at this time to become a card-carrying member of the Communist Party, though I was either not invited or chose not to ask to become one. I remember attending a homecoming party for a young man who had just returned from serving in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade on the Loyalist side in the Spanish Civil War. Of course, there was general hatred within the group for General Franco, who was leading the military’s rebellion against the elected government, as there was empathy for the suffering of the masses of Spanish people. There was also general revulsion against the atrocities on both sides which were being reported from the war zone. They felt it was right for the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and troops and equipment from the Soviet Union to join the Loyalist cause in battling Franco’s forces. There was also an intense hatred of Hitler and the Nazis for their general suppression of liberal elements and Communists in Germany. This intellectual bonding with the Communists in Moscow and indigenous Communists in the U.S. later took a sudden reversal among some of the group when the Soviet Union joined in a pact with Hitler to conquer and divide the land between their two borders. At this point, I became disillusioned with what was happening and gradually withdrew from the group.

Meanwhile, I was beginning to think about the high school diploma which I didn’t have. Once again, my mentor from the Philadelphia Boys Club came up with the bold plan that I enroll in a local downtown preparatory school. The headmaster of Brown Preparatory School seemed willing to accept me on the recommendation of my mentor, though I didn’t have any idea as to how I would pay the two-hundred-dollar tuition for the spring semester. He felt that my “well-to-do” family (my mother) in New Haven or (my grandmother) in Baltimore would most certainly support my serious effort to complete my schooling. I strongly expressed my doubt that support would be forthcoming from either source and suggested that they not even attempt to make such a request. Meanwhile, I was enrolled in the necessary English class for graduation as well as math, physics, and chemistry classes, which supposedly would enhance my application for admission to college.

Because I worked the afternoon and evening shift at the library, I was able to attend morning classes from eight to twelve each day. It was apparent that I could not continue to commute from South Smedley Street to school and then to the library and back to South Smedley and have time to study for my courses. I made the decision to give up my apartment and move into the YMCA, which was located between the library and school. My landlord was not happy about my breaking my lease but reluctantly allowed me to depart without penalty, probably knowing he could easily re-rent a very comfortable studio apartment in a desirable location.

I found my classes at Brown Prep quite interesting. The classes were small in size and taught by caring teachers who took an interest in each of their students. When it appeared that I needed special help in my science classes, the teacher invited me to his home on several Saturdays. I took the interurban trolley to a Philadelphia suburb where he lived and spent several hours being tutored in those areas where I was having trouble. He seemed to be focusing on preparing me for the College Board exams which would be required for my admission to college. It took very little time for me to realize, with his encouragement, that a very different kind of life would be available to me with a career in medicine. And so, within months, I had changed my goal from a career in journalism to one in medicine. By spring vacation, I had developed a plan to apply for admission to the Dartmouth College five-year premed program, from which I would transfer to Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland, for my final two years of medical school. Somehow it seemed to me that such a plan was feasible and would enable me to redeem myself in the eyes of all those I had disappointed in the past. I really believed that I could finally straighten out my life!

I moved into the YMCA thinking that great things were going to happen. I was back to paying five dollars per week for rent which saved me almost ten dollars per month, from which I could contribute a few dollars toward my tuition. My daily routine of sticky buns and chocolate milk from the South Smedley deli continued, as did my bi-monthly spaghetti binge, except that now I had somehow to walk from school near the library, across town to the deli, have my meal, and return to the library all in a little over an hour between twelve and one-fifteen when my shift started at the library. My room at the YMCA was small in comparison with my apartment, but it did have a desk, which my apartment did not. I budgeted my time so that I studied after I returned from work and on weekends. It was a very challenging schedule but one that seemed to promise a great reward if I could just sustain it for a few months. And then, once again, life became complicated for me. At the Saturday night dance, I met a girl who seemed to overlook my clumsiness on the dance floor and my inability to make small talk. She was to become a friend, a confidant, and the first person in my life whom I could say I loved, and who appeared to return that love.

Reba Smith had come from a small town in Ohio to pursue studies leading to a certificate in dental assisting. She apparently was a good student who was earning good grades in her studies. She was also a good listener who endured hearing about my dreams and aspirations. Perhaps she reinforced my determination to complete my work at Brown Prep and move on to the Dartmouth College pre-medical program. With my work and course schedule ranging from 8 A.M. to 10 P.M. five days a week, the only time we could spend together was after work at night Mondays through Fridays, Saturdays after my tutoring sessions, and most of the day on Sundays. Most weeknights when the social areas of the YMCA were closed, we would walk and walk and talk and talk. One of our favorite walks was to the Philadelphia Art Museum at the end of a vast, grassy promenade. Sylvester Stallone, years later as Rocky Balboa in the motion picture “Rocky,” made the museum well known by ending his workouts with a race up its front steps where, turning to face the city of Philadelphia below, he defied the powers that be to deny him his dream of becoming heavyweight champion of the world. On Saturday nights we attended the YMCA dances. Sundays were days where we could talk about future plans. I remember presenting a sketch of a house that I wanted to build when I became a successful physician.

In retrospect, my motivation is not clear, but at some point, I decided that it was important to me to bring the church back into my life. I had only once during my time in New Haven attended a church service–this with my friend, Rodney Goodling, who was an Episcopalian. The church we attended was a venerable old structure located near the Yale campus and built in the form of a medieval cathedral. The church gave off an aura of solemnity both outside and inside, where the service was conducted in what was defined as “high church,” with all of the ceremony and accouterments of a traditional Church of England ceremony. The clergymen were referred to as priests and were called “father.” As I considered choosing a church in Philadelphia, I remembered the emotion I felt in being a part of the service in New Haven and the very barrenness of the Presbyterian church service in Philadelphia. Our mother had described how, as a young girl in Georgetown, Delaware, she and a number of her friends had left their church to attend services conducted by a new, young priest who had recently come to town. His sister, Marjorie Gateson, became a friend of the girls and later went to Hollywood, where she became an actress in motion pictures. Her brother, Reverend Father Gateson, was eventually assigned to a very large church in West Philadelphia. It was suggested that I look him up, which I did. When I introduced myself and described the Georgetown connection and told him of my experience in New Haven, he welcomed me as a suppliant who could become a member of his church after passing through an instructional program. I attended the classes and was duly admitted as a parishioner, and attended church on fairly regular basis during the remainder of my time in Philadelphia–until my life once again became unsettled.

Meanwhile, since my studies were going well and I was earning good grades, I had written to the dean of admissions at Dartmouth telling him of my interest in the premed program. He invited me to visit the campus in Hanover, New Hampshire, for an interview. I checked the train schedules and found that I could take a train to New Haven and transfer to one going north to White River Junction, from where I could take a jitney to Hanover. I checked the fare and found that I could afford a one-way ticket. As spring vacation started, I bought my ticket and boarded the train for New Haven. At New Haven, I switched to a train that could have been used in an early Western motion picture. The passenger compartment was in the back half of the mail car with primitive accommodations, though it was kept comfortably warm. We arrived at White River Junction before dawn and settled down in the waiting room to await the first trip of the jitney to Hanover, some ten miles away. We got underway just as dawn was breaking, and drove on a snow-covered road to the campus. The wind was blowing snow across the road and it was bitter cold outside. On-campus, I was directed to the dean’s office where I found his secretary had just arrived and was setting up for the day. She remembered my letter and invited me to make myself comfortable. The dean would not arrive until about nine o’clock, but he would be glad to see me. The room was warm and I made myself so comfortable that I fell sound asleep and did not wake until the dean arrived. He greeted me warmly and I immediately felt good about my trip to Hanover.

He queried me about my background and my studies at Brown Prep. He seemed impressed at what I was doing on my own and my desire to study to be a physician. I told him that I would be strictly on my own as a student at Dartmouth. He assured me that I could probably receive a scholarship and would be able to work on campus to cover my room and board and other expenses. He wanted me to complete my studies at Brown Prep and forward a completed application with a transcript of my grades as soon as I completed the semester. We ended what I considered to be a successful interview. He arranged for me to get a ride back toward Philadelphia with a student who was going as far south as a town in Connecticut. The car the student was driving was an open touring car with no windows and no heat. The wind seemed to blow snow right through the car from drifts on the side of the road. It was dark when he dropped me off somewhere north of New Haven. Reluctantly, I called my mother and told her where I was. She advised me to take a bus to New Haven and stay overnight with them before going on to Philadelphia. I had planned to continue my trip by hitching a ride somewhere on the highway since I couldn’t afford a train ticket. The next day she gave me money for bus fare and I continued my trip back to Philadelphia, tired but enthusiastic about my prospects at Dartmouth.

I lived in a warm glow of personal success and happiness. For the first time in my life, I felt that I had established an achievable goal for myself. All of the unhappiness and confusion which had marked the preceding years of my life had faded into the background. I was a successful student with solid prospects for admission to a highly regarded institution of higher education, one that offered excellent preparation for the final two years of medical school at what I hoped would be Johns Hopkins University. I had developed a happy relationship with a sweet and attractive young woman named Reba, whose goals and aspirations seemed to parallel mine. I was so committed to my new found goal in medicine that I decided to gain additional insight into medical education and practice. I visited Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia where, surprisingly, no one challenged me when I entered classrooms to listen to lectures on topics that were beyond my comprehension. I even entered the gallery overlooking the surgery where students observed surgical procedures which one day they might be expected to perform. I witnessed several complex procedures performed on patients who might not have survived without those procedures. As they operated, the surgeon/professors described for the students in the gallery what they were doing and why. I had had very little contact with doctors while I was growing up, and had never encountered a surgeon. Thus I was greatly impressed with what I saw and thought surgery might be an interesting specialty.

I was never busier or happier than I was during those six or seven weeks following my return from Dartmouth. My work at the library had become simply a means to an end, rather than an end in itself. I was enjoying my studies with a new interest and enthusiasm for my science courses. All was well with the world–or seemed to be–until the day I was called into the headmaster’s office and informed that the school had contacted my grandmother about paying my tuition, and she had informed the school that she was not responsible for her grandson’s debts and wished that the school would not contact her further. Since I had advised the school against contacting my grandmother, I was not surprised at her reaction. I was surprised when the headmaster told me that I could not continue as a student and would have to leave school, even though the end of the semester was only a few weeks away. I might be able to receive credit for the work I had done to date, but would not be issued a transcript until my tuition bill was paid in full. I was distraught knowing that I was once again caught in the same predicament that I had faced in my interview at the Philadelphia Bulletin–no diploma, no job! No transcript, no admission to Dartmouth. Where would I go from there?

If I were not able to go to college and could not attend classes at Brown Prep, there was no reason for me to continue to work at the library or to stay in Philadelphia. I heard that there were job opportunities at the New Jersey beaches now that the weather had warmed, and people were beginning to go to the shore for weekends or longer. I could probably find a job in one of the restaurants or hotels for the summer there. Contractors were hiring workers for the construction of new, expanded facilities at Fort Dix for good wages. I might be able to work as a carpenter there, even though my only experience with carpentry had been in constructing the rabbit hutch on the farm in Iowa. I was so overwhelmed by recent events that I was virtually immobilized. No matter which way I looked, there didn’t seem to be a place for me. I felt cut off from anyone who could have cared for me. The final blow came when Reba completed her course and announced that she would be going home in the next several days. Of course, I had known that she would be going home someday, but the realization that she was actually going to leave within the next few days was overwhelming for me at that time, with everything else that had happened.

I believe that my reaction to these events ultimately was reflected in my attitude toward my job at the library. I had moved on from my interest in journalism, and thus there seemed to be no relationship between what I was doing and what I had hoped to do. Given the sudden termination of my studies, I was left with time to brood, and though I now had time for socializing, the person I wanted to spend time with had gone home to Ohio. My supervisor, as well as my fellow clerk, became aware of the change in my attitude. I was reminded of things that I failed to do or did incorrectly. I was advised to improve my performance. I was reprimanded for not changing, and eventually, I was told that I no longer had a job at the Philadelphia Free Public Library. Of course, these events were spread out over a number of weeks, but by early August, I drew my last paycheck and I had lost my last hope of a predictable future. Running out of money for room and board, I returned to Harry Teller, who once again helped me out by securing me a position as a counselor at the Big Brothers’ Camp Wyomissing for one of the two-week camp sessions offered to inner-city youths. The assignment offered me room and board for at least two weeks while I thought through my situation. My duties were undemanding, and for the first time in a year or more, I had three meals a day.

Upon my return to Philadelphia, I checked in to the YMCA, only to find that since I had not checked out before I left for camp, I owed two weeks of rent and that I could not check back in until I paid the back rent and paid in advance for my next week of rent. I found also that my room had been cleared of my possessions and that they were being held in storage until I settled my bill. So now I was back in Philadelphia and homeless. I was advised to visit the local navy recruiting office, which I did, only to find that the navy would not accept me without a high school diploma. I was advised to contact the army recruiting office, which I did. Happily, they could accept me but not without a birth certificate. Since I had lost most of my body fat due to my starvation diet over the past year and a half, and probably looked about fifteen, the recruiting sergeant had trouble believing that I was even sixteen, the legal limit for enlistment, rather than the eighteen years that I recorded on my enlistment form. Though I had been born at Hahnemann Hospital in Philadelphia, only my mother or father could secure the necessary
certificate. Given the fact that the army could potentially lose the National Guard units which had been activated for a year of federal service the preceding year, and there was a clamor for deactivation of those units which would seriously reduce its current manpower, it was difficult to understand why the army was making such an issue over my enlistment. The mantra of the National Guardsmen at the time was “OHIO, over the hill in October,” though it was seriously doubted that few if any, would actually go AWOL (absent without leave) or would desert.

My mother was able, on an emergency basis, to have the necessary birth certificate supplied to the recruiting office so that I could be sworn in and give my pledge to serve my country faithfully and to protect her from all enemies, foreign and domestic, during my three years of service, which was the standard at the time. While these proceedings were taking place, I had no place to stay, since I had been turned out by the YMCA. My nights were spent sleeping on a bench just outside the railroad station. It was cold at night, even though it was early September. Fortunately, the police either overlooked my transgression, or were busy elsewhere, and thus I was able to sleep through the night. During the days, I gravitated to the recruiting office to check on progress on my application for enlistment. I thought I had fallen pretty low from the recent months where I thought I was headed for Dartmouth and a career in medicine, to where I couldn’t even be accepted as a recruit by the U.S. Army.

Then came the day when my papers were complete and I was interviewed as to my preferred assignment. Somehow, the army decided that they could use me at the Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. I joined a group of enlistees who had been given meal tickets for lunch at a nearby restaurant, and I had a taste of what it would be like having three meals a day for the next three years. Then we were loaded onto a truck, transferred to a train, and were headed for our first assignment at the Army Medical Center on the grounds of Walter Reed Army Hospital, Washington, D.C. Actually, I had decided that it would only require two years for me to pay off my debts at the YMCA, at Brown Preparatory, and at the delicatessen where the tab for the final weeks of sticky buns and chocolate milk went unpaid. During those two years, I could hopefully save enough to buy out the third year of my enlistment and be able to go back to Dartmouth and my medical career. In the meantime, I would be working in the field of medicine during my time in the army. I had certainly hit bottom, but there appeared to be a
reasonable hope that I could bounce back.

These were my thoughts as, once again, my life was to change direction. I had no idea what life would be like in the military. During induction, it had been made clear that we were subject to orders given by officers, both commissioned and non-commissioned; that we would live according to a strict schedule, and that any deviation from orders or from the schedule would bring severe consequences. Certainly, I would no longer be able to exercise the kind of free-spirited approach to life that had brought me to the present state. I was in for an entirely new lifestyle, and I was, as it turned out, in for the duration. But somehow, I thought, I would survive! In reality, I survived the Great Depression–as a boarding-school youngster, a farm boy, an urban youth, and an “incorrigible” teenager roaming almost at will up and down the Eastern seaboard. And now, I had left those years behind and I was a young adult; a soldier who knew nothing about soldiering but was about to learn. I was Private Alban E. Reid Jr., assigned to the Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C.

Postscript

What started out as a brief account of my life with my brother, Tom, turned out to be an account not only of those years when we were together, but also, an account of those brief years when we became separated, and I launched out on my own to incorrigibility, partial redemption, disillusionment, and passage into young adulthood with my enlistment in the U.S. Army. As stated at the outset, I would and could rely for much of the details of those years on flashes of memories: names of people, place names, and incidents engraved indelibly on my mind. Using the computer, I was able to edit, add to, and correct the manuscript with ease. I could and did save and delete them regularly. Occasionally, I came across a photograph or a letter that served as a memory refresher for me. A number of times, I was able to use the Internet to check a fact, a year, a name, or an incident. Of course, there must surely have been some details which have been lost in time. At no time have I attempted consciously or unconsciously to misrepresent or denigrate any person or organization. I am wholly responsible for any misstatements or errors of fact, and I welcome comments or recommendations intended to improve the accuracy of facts. This manuscript has provided me with many hours of satisfying thought and writing. It is challenging to consider, but not promise, to carry on this narrative into the army years leading up to and during World War II and beyond, as long as time allows. I hope that you have enjoyed my effort to recount my perception of the years leading to, and the escape from, that period of time known in our nation’s history as “The Great Depression.”