REFLECTIONS OF A LIFE, Chapter 2: The Years in Des Moines Through High School

Chapter 2

The Years in Des Moines Through High School

            We left Watertown by bus on the Jackrabbit Line.  I was quite taken with the name, Jackrabbit.  "It must be fast," I told Mom, "With such a name."

            "We'll soon be switching to an even faster bus, a Greyhound," she said.

            "Wow," I said, impressed.

            In truth, the Jackrabbit bus was small and rather dingy and bumpy, but I was intrigued as the land flowed by, and felt wonder and anticipation.  I still have such feelings as I see country unfolding, even though almost eighty years have passed. 

            At Sioux City, Iowa, we got on the Greyhound that would take us to our final destination.  Des Moines was my first exposure to a real city since the long-ago year at Oklahoma City, and it seemed a huge city.  Tree-lined streets stretched in all directions and the tall buildings of downtown and the gold-domed state capitol building awed me.  Everything was green, so unlike the prairie country of Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Dakota.  Some streets were paved with bricks, which I had never seen before, and the streetcars were something, as were the horse-drawn carts that delivered milk, and the ice trucks that brought 25, 50, and 100 pound chunks of ice for our icebox—we put the sign in the window specifying which size we wanted for that day.  Refrigerators did not come until later. 

            Marvel of all, the lawns were full of scampering squirrels, running wild with bushy tails.  "Mom, did you know there would be squirrels here?" I asked.

            She smiled.  "I hadn't thought about it until now.  But I remember there were squirrels when I was a young woman going to Highland Park College here. . . when I met your dad in 1918, almost twenty years ago," she said softly.

            "I think I'm going to like this place, best of all."

            "I think I will, too," she said.

            Now, so many years later, certain memories are still with me.  I miss the smell of burning leaves in the fall.  (There were few trees to contribute their leaves to be burned in Kansas and Dakota, so I had not experienced this wonderful sensory embodiment of fall before Des Moines.)  Today, leaf burning is banned in most communities as causing unacceptable air pollution.  In my mind, something good and beautiful had been removed by heartless decrees.  

            St. John's Catholic Church, whose school I attended from 5th through 8th grade, was only a few blocks from our apartment.  It was huge, far bigger than any church I had ever seen.  It was even bigger than St. Ambrose Cathedral downtown, where Mom told me the bishop resided.  But St. John's had no stained glass windows; they all were plain glass, testimony to an ambitious building project that ran short of funds during the Depression. 

            I remember the first time I went downtown by myself, taking the streetcar, walking around for a while, and then taking it back.  It was a traumatic experience for my mother.  I'm sure she could imagine all kinds of worst scenarios, but she had been persuaded that it was a necessary part of my growing up to let me leave the nest for a little while.  Of course I returned safely, and fancied myself practically a Daniel Boone, a mindset I still have today when traversing unknown territory.  I tell Dorothy that I was born 250 years too late.  In my boy’s mind, I would have been a tremendous pathfinder or trailblazer.  Added to this tracking ability, I was a light sleeper, easily awakened.  I could imagine with this talent that I would hear the stealthy moccasins and arouse the camp.

            Life in those pre-World War II days of seventy years ago was different than today, not necessarily worse, but different.  The country was barely coming out of the Great Depression.  Luxury in the city would be chicken for Sunday dinner.  Since we had no car, public transportation—mostly streetcars, but later some buses—was all we knew.  Television would not come until some years after the end of the War, so we relied on radio.  And the programs, with their sound effects, were fully as interesting as TV today.  I well remember rushing home from school to listen to Captain Midnight, Jack Armstrong, the Green Hornet, the Inner Sanctum, the Lone Ranger, Little Orphan Annie, and other wonderful programs.  Soap operas, such as Ma Perkins, Just Plain Bill, One Man's Family, and the Guiding Light, filled the airways during the day.  Celebrities, such as Jack Benny, Red Skelton, and Ray Milland, had their programs, usually weekly.  Some of these entertainers switched to TV in another decade or so.  But their radio presence was completely satisfying in the days before TV.              

            For movies, it was a time of double features, black and white, and Saturday serials like Tom Mix and Hopalong Cassidy that always ended at a point of extreme peril for the main characters and brought us back week after week.     

            Other memories compete for attention in those years from 5th through 8th grade.  For one, I first learned to fish.

             My introduction to fishing.—Mom had a friend, Ed Fine, who was probably in his early sixties and had a wooden leg.  In his black Chevrolet he drove us around a great deal, and often out to the Iowa countryside where we might end up at some nice restaurant.  (He did not believe in tipping, and my mother usually surreptitiously would leave some coins for the waitress.)  I went almost everywhere with them, and Ed didn't seem to mind.  In fact, he served as a second dad and taught me things that no single mother could teach a young son.  Such as fishing.

            I really took to fishing.  Ed's tackle box seemed a veritable treasure trove, and I would finger some of the plugs and imagine myself casting for bass, or pike, or mighty muskies on some distant tree-lined lake.  All such imaginings were a far cry from reality.  This part of Iowa in the midsection of the state around Des Moines then had virtually no lakes, and the only water consisted of rather muddy streams and rivers that were inhabited by bullheads, carp, suckers, red horse and the like.

            Ed bought me a rod and reel and a tackle box with a small assortment of hooks, sinkers, bobbers, and other necessities, and showed me how to use this equipment.  The first major hurdle in becoming a fisherman was learning to put a worm on a hook,  steeling yourself to put the wriggling little critter over a sharp point, and see the blood and other fluids gushing onto your fingers while you resolutely pushed it further on the barb, but leaving its lower body or tail free to hopefully gain the attention of a fish.  After all, the little worm was only going to be bait with no great life expectancy, so one's conscience was not an issue.  It took me all of one afternoon to master the art and to be steadfast, and I was soon inured to the blood and slime.  What really solidified my fascination with fishing was the first time I had bigger than a minnow on my line—this was a 12-inch carp, or maybe it was a bullhead—and felt its heft and desperate struggles to escape my slender pole and thin line.  "Use the rod!  Keep the tip up!" Ed yelled at me.  I finally managed to get this huge fish to shore, and Ed had to remove the hook from the fish's throat, not always an easy task with natural bait such as worms that were likely to be swallowed deep in the throat. 

            Ed took Mom and me frequently to the Raccoon River at a city park in Adel, a small town twenty miles west of Des Moines.  Most of the time it was like fishing in a bathtub, but occasionally I got a nibble, and less often caught a fish.  But I loved it.  And Mom and Ed were free to enjoy each other's company while I flailed the water.

            In those early days with a rod and reel there were two difficulties.  One was to handle the hook and sinker and the length of line without catching the hook on yourself or someone or something else.  This took a fair amount of practice.  The other was the reel.  In trying to cast a lure, the reels in those days tended to spin too fast and the line would become almost impossibly entangled on the drum of the reel.  A careful touch of the thumb on the reel drum as you were casting was necessary to prevent such squirrel-nests.  I rapidly mastered this technique and soon became a rather good caster, for a boy, and even had visions of becoming a champion bait caster.  One of the parks had the plastic circles used for bait-casting competitions, and I would go there with a hookless plug and attempt to cast it into the circles from varying distances.  I impressed the men who were there but had yet to catch a fish more than a foot long.

            That was to change.  On an early summer Saturday there was a kids fishing tournament at Birdland Lagoon off the Des Moines River in one of the parks.  It was within walking distance from home, and I eagerly plied my art.  The tournament was to end at noon, and I had caught nothing.  But 15 minutes before noon I felt a monster fish grab my line.  I used all my skill to fight this trophy fish, and finally beached it, and struggled to remove the hook and rushed to the finish stand where they weighed and measured the giant, and then gave me a medal for the largest fish caught that day.  Proudly I walked the mile and a half home along and across busy streets with the fish dangling from my stringer.  A few cars even slowed and honked.  I was so proud.  It was a 16-inch sucker.  Unfortunately it wasn't edible.

            Mom's men friends.—Mom's relationship with Ed Fine was to last many years.  I'm not really sure when it ended; it may even have been when I was through college and we moved away.  But he was a great help to my mother, and to me.  She had another friend, Ira Wilson, a married man, who doted on her and helped during those Depression days by getting her a job as an artist at the Works Projects Administration.  He had political connections that helped gain us some perks.  I remember he was very jealous and Mom had to walk a tight line not to let Ira know of Ed, and vice versa.  She and Ira had, of course, to be careful not to let his wife ever learn of this affair.  Somehow, over the years the worst scenarios never materialized.

            Mom's most golden opportunity was Dr. Magarian.  She had met him professionally, his office being in the shopping center near our apartment, and he became our doctor.  He was a widower, was perhaps twenty years older than Mom, and wanted to pull up stakes in Des Moines and move to California.  I must say that Mom and I both thought California was the golden land, no winters, a paradise for the blessed.  I began to read everything I could about California and thought how grand it would be to live in this land of mountains and oceans and so much sunshine.  He wanted in the worst way to marry Mom and take us with him out west.  She was terribly torn, but eventually her religion won out and she turned him down.  I suspect the decision haunted her the rest of her life, but she stayed true to her faith and to the decree that a married woman who was divorced could not marry again and stay in the Church.  I wonder how many Catholics today would sacrifice what beckoned as a far better life to remain true to man-made decrees against divorce and remarriage.