Reflections of a Life - Chapter 1

Chapter 1

The Early Years Up To Des Moines

The cat and other adventures

I must have been three going on four when I threw the cat off the roof.

Not once, but eight times.

We lived in Clinton, Oklahoma where Dad had his own dry goods store. We had a nice stucco house with a flat roof that I could play on when it was not too hot, and a dog and a cat. What more could a little boy want?

I had no brothers and sisters, and kind of liked it that way. The Great Depression was not yet affecting our lives, and I was blissfully unaware of it, although from time to time ragged men would come to the door begging for something to eat, and Mom always gave them food, and they would thank her profusely.

Clinton was in the former Indian Territory of Oklahoma in the western part of the state. I found it fascinating to see wrinkled old Indians wrapped in blankets sitting or reclining on curbs and against buildings downtown, most of them just looking into space. "What are they doing?" I asked Dad.

He pondered this. "Maybe they're just thinking," he said. "Of days of buffalo, and unfenced prairies."

"Buffalo?" I asked. "Unfenced prairies?" Well, this promised more discussion than Dad had time for then, but he explained in days to come of the slaughter of buffalo, of the Indian wars that led to the ousting of Indians from their ancestral homes, and of the fencing of the land. For most of my youth, I thought what noble people these Indians were. When somewhat older as I read books of the West by Zane Grey and learned he had one-sixth Indian blood, I would often tell my playmates that I was part Indian, that the blood of Indian chiefs flowed through my veins.

I may have had a research scientist's mind even then. (Perhaps I missed my calling, for I never became a research scientist, just a professor.) Somehow in those preschool days I must have heard someone talking about cats having nine lives, and I had learned to count to ten. So I decided to test this hypothesis (only I was far from knowing about research experiments or tests or hypotheses); I really only wanted to find out if this strange thing about cats was true.

Our cat was a mother and had kittens, and we kept one kitten—the others must have been given away, maybe. Not wanting to confront the bigger cat in my research project, I took the kitten up on the roof and proceeded to drop it to the ground. I quickly ran down to pick it up. It seemed docile, but unhurt. Well, one life gone. So I tried again, and again . . . if my counting was correct I was getting close to that ninth life. I wasn't really sure I wanted to test that ninth life though, for I was fond of the little fur ball. So I was rather ecstatic when I found after the eighth descent that it was mewing rather piteously and had a wet nose.

I carried the kitten into the kitchen where Mom was blissfully unaware of her great scientist. "It's nose is wet," I announced.

She carefully examined it. "It looks like blood," she said, looking at the towel she had used to wipe its face. "How did it get bloody?"

I told her about my wanting to see about the nine lives. She looked at me but didn't say much, except that I should leave the kitten alone for a while so it could recover from the experiment. She told Dad after he got home for he came into my room. I felt some foreboding as he silently looked at me. Then he sternly told me not to ever do such a thing to the kitten again. But I detected a whisper of a smile, and he made no threats.

I never was able to resolve this experiment and find out if one more toss from the roof would have killed the little critter. I didn't want the experiment to succeed, but still I wondered for months about it.

Not long after that adventure, we left Clinton. The Depression brought an end to Dad's entrepreneurship, and he lost the store. To be out of work in those days had to be traumatic. I could sense the anxiety of my parents, but didn't comprehend much of it. In any case, we left our nice home—I remember my mother crying—and moved out to California to live with my Uncle Fred in Pasadena.

His was a success story of no small moment. He was one of the first J. C. Penney managers at a time when there were no income taxes, and managers got Penney stock for one-third of the earnings of their store, and one-third of the earnings of all stores for which they had trained men to be store managers. This situation fostered millionaires as the value of the Penney stock rose and split, rose and split many times, with the number of stores increasing from just a few, to hundreds, and then to well over a thousand. Getting in on the ground floor made Uncle Fred certainly one of these millionaires. His big house was surrounded by trees and was next to the slightly smaller big house of a movie star, Mae Marsh, which also nestled in trees. Uncle Fred had a son, Junior, five years older than me, and a daughter, Marjorie, a few years older than that. Somehow I didn't care much for the situation, for Junior lorded it over me. Our circumstances also bothered my mother, and probably Dad, and I recall hearing Mom use the term "poor white trash" on more than one occasion. Did she mean us?

The earthquake

We stayed for some months, and frequently visited Dad's sisters, Aunts Ora and Ann, who lived in Long Beach, about forty miles from Pasadena. Fred's wealth supported these sisters who never married and I'm not sure they ever held a job. Their stucco house was the third one from the ocean, and this neighborhood was protected by a twenty-foot-high wall with a stone stairway that led down to the beach and ocean below. This was the first I had ever seen such vast water, and I was enthralled with it, much as I was with mountains. Somehow that child's sense of wonder and awe of oceans and mountains would always stay with me, a child raised in country devoid of either.

We were having dinner with the aunts one evening when everything began shaking, dishes and pictures crashed to the floor, a roaring sound surrounded us, and we left the table like we were drunk, hardly able to stand. One of the aunts screamed, "It's going to open up and swallow us!" We held on to each other in panic, wondering whether to stay where we were or try to go outside. Dad wanted us to get under the table except it wasn't big enough for all of us. After about 30 seconds the shaking stopped, and we looked at each other in dumb relief, not really sure if this was the end of it, or if a far worse shaking was just ahead.

This was the famous Long Beach Earthquake of 1933, and we were lucky because people were killed and injured. The two-story house held up and received no serious damage. We went outside and could see nearby buildings collapsed, and the street was blocked with bricks and debris. Anything brick was demolished, but the aunts' stucco house had only a few long cracks. The next day we drove around seeing much worse destruction. Most of the downtown was cordoned off, and some big buildings had collapsed.

Our worries were not over after the initial shock. The radio left us with two fears: aftershocks that could be almost as bad as the first quake, and the possibility of a huge tidal wave (now called a tsunami) that might sweep over our seawall and engulf us. Well, neither of these scenarios happened, but the aunts took the whole thing rather hard, and Uncle Fred urged them to come up to Pasadena where there was little damage, but they didn't want to leave their home. In years to come, I would boast of having been in, and survived, the great Long Beach Earthquake of 1933. Now it is virtually forgotten.

We left California not long after that when Dad got a job as a traveling salesman, and we moved to Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. I could sense the relief of Mom and Dad at not having to be dependent on Uncle Fred any more. There I started school, the first grade since there was no kindergarten. About the only thing I remember about Oklahoma City was oil wells scattered throughout the downtown and even on the grounds of the state capitol, and the fact that Dad was hardly ever home.

Fleeing a monster storm

I was sitting in the second grade classroom of Miss Telly that early afternoon in September. Daylight had suddenly been curtained and nighttime thrust upon us, and Miss Telly was getting more and more agitated. Suddenly the principal burst in shrilling, "Children, you must go home at once! Leave your books and run fast as you can! There's a bad storm, almost on top of us!"

After a year in Oklahoma City, Dad had in his travels as a salesman found a man willing to back him in another business venture. I don't know how they settled on Norton, Kansas for a dry goods store, but this was where we found ourselves, and I went to the second and third grades there.

Norton was in the northwestern part of the state, twenty miles from Nebraska and about 120 miles from the Colorado line. The country was rolling, like gigantic waves of the ocean, and mostly tan and treeless except in river bottoms and towns, and the sky dominated. It was wheat country then and still is, with huge farms whose owners lived in town rather than on the farm, unlike most other kinds of farming that were more labor intensive.

Norton was one of the larger towns in this country, being all of 3,500 people. It was a county seat with a courthouse in the square and had a tuberculosis sanatorium a few miles out of town, located here because of the low humidity. The main line of the Rock Island Railroad from Chicago to California was only two blocks from our house. This intimacy with trains was intriguing to a small boy and I would wave as often as I could to the engineers and they would almost always wave back, and that really made me feel good. At night when I was awake, train whistles were lonesome sounds, and I would fantasize their taking me to far distant places. I thought how wonderful it would be to drive a train.

I was dimly aware of kids and grownups screaming and crying as we made our way to the front door of the school and pushed through. I had never been more scared than I was that afternoon when I was six; the earthquake had not scared me like this. The sky to the west was a dark brown, almost black, but layered with dirty streams of white, and like fingers of doom it was stretching around to grasp us, while hard wind gusts attacked with debris and flurries of dust, foretaste of what was to come.

The school was situated on a hill at one end of town on the main street, so we ran downhill fast as our legs would carry us. There was no rain, nor would there be in this parched part of Kansas, but the wind began to shriek, and the dust would soon envelop us. I had been warned of such dust storms before, how they could suffocate and kill people only a few feet from safety. The storm seized me as I ran past the stores downtown—all were closed—and across the railroad tracks two blocks from our house. I could hardly breathe now with the churning dust, and was running blind, but feeling the sidewalk beneath my feet. I momentarily wondered whether my classmates had made it home safely, or whether they were behind me, for I had run like the devil possessed.

Now I knew I was close to home, and felt the sidewalk turn for the corner. The wind was a banshee, beating down all cries and shouts. I felt my way to our house on the corner, reached down to touch the steps, then moved up them, hoping I had the right house in this hell of darkness and howling wind and unbreathable air. Then Dad and Mom's arms were around me, and I was safe as they helped me inside. They seemed even more excited and disturbed than I was. Now I tried to make light of this great adventure and the race home from school.

But the adventure was not over. "We've got to put wet cloths around all doors and windows—to keep out the dust," Dad ordered. "Then we'll ride out the storm in the cellar." Most houses in this part of Kansas had storm cellars, which at first signs of dust storms or the even worse tornadoes a family would flee to. We wondered as we went down the steps to the cellar if our house would still be there when we came out. With the roaring and shaking we had to steel ourselves for the worst. Now dust was seeping even into our underground chamber.

At last the roaring subsided, and Dad cautiously opened the cellar door. I felt my heart pounding as he went up the steps and looked around. He turned, his face smiling. "It's still there, seems none the worst." We whooped with relief.

It didn't take long to find that while our house was still standing, everything was covered with dust: rugs, curtains and drapes, furniture, all books, pictures, knickknacks, dishes, food, everything. Despite our efforts to block the cracks, dust still had slithered through. We walked across floors leaving footprints as though it were mud—except it was dry. We spent the rest of that day cleaning, but supper still tasted of dirt and I had trouble sleeping that night with the dust tickling my nose and throat and making me sneeze and cough. Cleaning up was to take several days.

The next day was sunny and beautiful. Those who had hoped for a vacation from school (I was not among them) had to be disappointed. I was rather surprised that none of my classmates, or anyone else that I knew for that matter, had perished in the storm. I wondered whether my terror was unreasonable, whether I was a scaredy cat, full of cowardice and a sissy among my peers. But I never let on how scared I really had been. I came to wonder if my classmates were not just as scared as I was, and maybe we all lucked out.

Kansas and much of the central part of the country in the early- to mid-1930s was in the Dust Bowl, with rain far below normal year after year so that fields dried up, crops failed, and the over-cultivated topsoil simply blew away in strong winds. The resulting dust storms even brought a pallor fifteen hundred miles away on the East Coast. Added to the drought, the temperatures climbed to the highest ever recorded for weeks on end.

Air conditioning had not yet been invented, and with sun beating on the buildings the old and very young, and those otherwise in poor health suffered unmercifully. I remember some evenings when we would see from the porch distant heat lightning ranging across the western sky, wondering if it might not signal oncoming rain. But I don't remember that it ever did; it only raised our hopes, then dashed them cruelly. Finally toward fall some rain came and the drought and heat came to an end. I still remember the sensual pleasure of feeling a cool fresh breeze on my cheek and falling rain on my head.

I liked those school days. I guess the teachers made kind of a fuss over me. I wasn't sure why this would be, until several commented on my studying encyclopedias. Dad had bought a set of World Book encyclopedias when we moved to Kansas. They had quite a few pictures and I was able to read fairly well by then. The encyclopedias seemed like a window to the world, and I was fascinated. It was now that I first realized the immensity of life. I remember another book—descriptions and artists' pictures of Civil War battles. The pictures and descriptions kindled my dreams of heroic deeds.

While my childhood years in the barrenness of western Kansas might seem far from idyllic, in years to come when I had occasion to visit or pass through this treeless big sky country of distant vistas, I felt it pulling me, as though it had indelibly imprinted itself on my mind as a place of lost content.

South Dakota

Shortly after I finished third grade in Norton, my parents got divorced, and my mother and I moved to Watertown, South Dakota, in the northeast corner of that state. I believe my mother moved there to be close to her sister, Lizzie, and her family on a farm near Henry, twenty miles west of Watertown. We actually stayed a while with them that summer until Mom found a job and an apartment for us in town. Those few months were my first and longest experience living on a farm.

I don't remember feeling real bad about my parents getting divorced, although I probably did at the time. It must have been far, far harder on my mother, since Dad had fallen in love with someone else, and my mother, being a good Catholic, could not remarry. Now I can imagine how it must have been for her, a young beautiful woman, who at least three times would face the great temptation of accepting a marriage proposal and thereby giving up her religion. But she was stout in her faith and never married again. How many times she must have agonized over her decisions that sacrificed having a far better life for her son and herself. For she was attractive to men, and I will later describe one affair that must have been particularly difficult for her to turn down.

Leaving Norton didn't really bother me; indeed, I looked forward to seeing new country. My life up to then had been one of frequent moves. In my mother's womb we had lived in Ely, Nevada, where Dad worked for Fred in his store. I was born in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, where Dad was promoted to manager. But he was shortly after fired from the Penney Company, thereby losing the ticket to wealth, because of an affair with one of his employees. Then we lived for a while in Spearman, Texas, near the New Mexico line, then Clinton, Oklahoma; Pasadena, California; and Oklahoma City, where I went to the first grade before moving to Norton—all this in the first six years of my life.

Aunt Lizzie's farm did not particularly appeal to me. I didn't like the outdoor privy and having to use Sears' catalog pages to wipe my bottom. Nor did I go for the kerosene lamps and other primitive conditions because electricity had not yet come to farms in this part of the country by the middle 1930s.

Today, 80 years later, I have few memories of the farm, nor even of the other children there. I was probably the youngest, and certainly the skinniest and least prepossessing. I had some other flaws too. I had been diagnosed with a heart murmur when I was born. Now that my mother was divorced, she became even more solicitous toward her only child, very concerned that I not overdo myself with physical activity on the farm. Added to this, one time I was playing with nieces and nephews in the hayloft, and the dust settled in my lungs so I could hardly breathe. I spent several days in bed, to the concern of all, and escaped with harsh dictates never to get near hay again. In truth, I was not near the physical wreck my mother thought I was, though I stayed allergic to hay all my life. But I think we all breathed sighs of relief upon moving to Watertown where my mother got a job as housekeeper for the priest. She also made extra money painting pictures for local businesses.

Somewhere along the line, she must either have had some training or else taught herself to do oil painting, and found she had a nice talent. I think she probably started this shortly after getting married, and we had a number of her paintings in our house in Norton, and in the apartment in Watertown. I still have a few of these paintings, though most have either been given away or sold to used furniture dealers.

The owner of a downtown bar happened to see one of her paintings. It was a peaceful scene of sheep grazing on a tree-lined meadow with a flowing brook in the foreground, and he commissioned her to do a mural of this scene for behind the bar. As I recall it now, the scene seems rather strange for a raucous bar, but maybe it toned down the atmosphere and brought tranquillity to solitary drinkers. The task must have been formidable for my mother, amateur that she was, since her small, mostly-square-shaped picture had to be enlarged greatly and adapted to a long rectangular wall. I remember it took her three or four weeks to finish this, but the bar owner was delighted with the result. She got all of $25 for her work and creativity, seemingly only a pittance, but this was the depths of the Depression, and $25 was a fair week's wages for full-time work.

Watertown seemed a big city compared with Norton, being all of 10,000 people. I went to fourth grade at the Catholic school, the first time I had not gone to a public school. There I became rather religious, reading my missile in church, trying to keep my thoughts from straying to mundane things during Mass, even going to benediction and vespers. What a holy little kid I was turning out to be.

In this northern South Dakota land, the winters were much harsher than they had been in Kansas. I can remember a lot of snow, blizzards, and bone-chilling cold. And the incessant wind. But spring was no gentle maiden either. Another memory I have was of looking out our third floor apartment at the cars parked below us. In those days, many cars did not have all-metal tops, but had fabric within the metal perimeter. On this late spring afternoon, I watched fascinated as the hail from a raging storm made holes in these cloth roofs and soon shredded them.

I don't know what influenced my mother to move us again, after one year in Dakota. But the move to Des Moines, Iowa was a joy. We stayed in Des Moines all the way from the fifth grade through graduating from college, by far the longest I had ever lived in one place, until decades later my family and I grew deep roots in Cleveland, Ohio.

Reflections of a Life, Prologue: Dreams of Youth and Beyond

REFLECTIONS OF A LIFE
A Memoir of Dreams and Striving
By Robert Hartley

Prologue

Dreams of Youth, and Beyond

It is a summer day in June, and I am ten years old. I sprawl on a cushion of grass, looking up at the cloud ships moving across a tranquil sky. Out of nowhere a boy’s dreams flow like the gentle wind. At ten, anything seems possible.

* * *

Experts tell us that the dreams of youth—of great manly deeds, heroic endeavors, leaving footprints on the sands of time—are not likely to be fulfilled, and will fade with the disillusionment of age. I cannot agree with this fading of dreams. I think dreams can be with us all our days.

Not all dreams are realistic and attainable. For myself, a skinny boy, dreams of great athletic achievements were not realistic and would only cause frustration unless put aside for others more reasonable. Still, all my life I have dreamed of becoming a better golfer, and probably did to the limits of my ability, even being a tiger in matches with mediocre golfers like myself.

I have had an enduring dream from early childhood to be a writer, even a great writer. While few of us can achieve greatness, I have always been a good writer, ever since I delighted in writing dog stories hoping to influence my parents to buy me a dog. I found the ability to write—better than most of my peers—reports, term papers, and essay exams to be the major reason I didwell all the way through graduate school. For I had no great mental ability otherwise: my memory was average, my reasoning maybe a bit above average, but there was scant aptitude in music, mathematics, and oral speech. (In my aptitude tests, acting and politics were dead last. To be a writer was first.)

How well have I achieved my dream to be a writer? In academic and nonfiction writing I could probably be given a "B+" grade. One of my supplemental books, Marketing Mistakes, has gone through 11 editions (as of 2008) in the 30+ years since it first came out. These books have given us the income to have a nice house, a Lexus, and a country club membership, things few of mycolleagues could afford since college teaching is not a great source of income unless supplemented by consulting, speaking, expert witnessing, or writing. Today, my dreams for writing are as passionate as decades ago. Only now they are more fiction driven.

I had my first story published in 1960 in a little Wisconsin literary magazine, Creative Wisconsin. I was a Penney store manager in Superior, Wisconsin, a small port at one end of Lake Superior, and the story was about a young bride whose husband was a sailor and away for weeks at a time. There was no pay, but they gave me a copy of the issue. (See Appendix A.) After that, almost thirty-five years were to pass before I could again turn to writing fiction, and in particular,novels. But success eluded me (and I would consider success to be just getting accepted by a publisher).

I have written three novels, but they seemed forever destined to be "closet manuscripts,” with rejected queries numbering in the hundreds. Still, I just could not accept this relegation to the closet or attic, unread and forgotten by those who would follow me. Finally,early in 2001, I self-published my first novel, one I had been writing and revising since 1996. Printed by a local firm, it turned out to be an unattractive book, not one a prospective customerwould likely pull from a bookshelf. But I could hardly be surprised, knowing the impossibility of getting published that legions of writers face. I self-published my second novel in 2005 with Xlibris, a print-on-demand publisher, who produced a good-looking book. Still the resultswith little publicity and no credible reviews (a stigma facing self-published authors) were about the same. My dream is to write novels that touch the heart, that may even bring readers to tears,and be inspiring. But first these efforts have to be read. Now in my 83rd year, landing an enthusiastic agent who might convince a publisher seems unattainable. Still, this stubborn dreamtantalizes and torments.

A person without dreams and goals surely must have an empty life, a life devoid of hope. Some people mired in poverty face such hopelessness. Even wealth does not insulate from emptiness and hopelessness, as the words of an old Jo Stafford song suggested: "Is This All There Is?" But dreams do not have to be of heroic proportions, but only of help and compassion toward others, of guidance and inspiration for those who follow, with this perhaps best done by example.

In these “reflections of a life," I have sought to recapture events that were notable to me, and to flesh them out with remembered thoughts and feelings. In so doing, I have added dialogue to some of the encounters to give them more interest and immediacy. I can only hope that the trace I leave may be read by one who follows me, some empathic and compassionate soul. But I’ll probably never know.