The Red Badge of Specialness

Looking back to my childhood, it’s easy to see that attitudes about health have changed over the past 60+ years. People didn’t go to doctors then nearly as much as they do now. I only remember going to the doctor’s office once when I was about seven or eight for a slight crack in my left forearm. My neighbors, Helen and Leon, a brother and sister duo, thought it would be great fun to catapult me through the air. (I was a shrimp.) Helen launched me with her feet, and Leon was supposed to catch me. (I think the circus with a human cannonball had just been to town recently.) Leon, for some reason, missed the catch. I went bawling to my house, and Leon ran home. Helen ran after him, trying to beat him up for failing to catch me.

Dad and Mom were Depression-Era kids, when money was an issue with everything – doctors were not necessarily a luxury, but only for extreme situations. Plus, Mom was a farm girl, with an attitude that humans, like livestock, usually get over whatever’s ailing them. In spite of all this, they took me to the doctor, who took an x-ray and gave me a sling. I had a slight crack in my left forearm.

But here’s the thing, I didn’t always want to get better. Even before the catapult incident, I instinctively knew that if you were sick in our house, you got special treatment. I enjoyed having my arm in a sling. It gave me the status of a wounded warrior. I’d wanted a cast, but still thought of the sling as my Red Badge of Specialness.

 I knew even before the catapult incident that if you were hurt, you got special treatment from mom. And as important (or even more important), you got to stay home from school. This, of course, led to faking sickness, by me and probably my brothers and sisters.

It wasn’t easy to fake sickness at our house. My usual tactic was to sit in the corner by a heat register looking glum and trying to look sick while everyone else got ready for school. It usually didn’t work. Mom would then take my temperature. She had a guideline for this - 99°. Over this you could stay home, under it was “Off to school with you”. Sometimes I would try to boost my chances by rubbing the thermometer with my hands to bring the temperature up; one time I clandestinely held it over steaming kettle. None of this ever worked.

One faking-it incident sticks in my memory [I hope it is from early grade school and not junior high or high school]:  One morning in winter, I was doing my usual, sitting on a heat register trying to look miserable. I don’t remember why I didn’t want to go, I didn’t want to go most days, but this day I really didn’t want to go. Mom took my temperature, it was less than the required 99°. I sat there looking glum for quite a while, pushing up against that time I had to leave, or be late. “Finally mom said, ”Bob, are you sick?” In a weak (I'm sure pitiful) voice I said, “No”, and went upstairs to get ready for school. I suspect that if I had said “Yes”, she might have let me stay home.

Why did I not say “Yes”? Was I afraid to lie to her? Probably not, I had lied before. Was I reluctant to see myself (and be seen) as a malingerer in a house full of “can do” people? Probably. I was living in the house with “Put me in, coach! I’m alright” people.

Dad’s idea about health was similar to Mom’s, except his came from a slightly different perspective. His was the 1950s manly attitude of “suck it up”. Then there was the money. Not much cash in the budget for health care.  For some reason I think of my youth as the good old days of health care.

Bob

Bonus Postscript:  

My brother Alan received special recognition at his high school graduation for making it through all 12 years of schooling without missing a day. Alan said there were several times in his later high school career when he went to school sick – he just wanted the record. Here’s what else he has to say on the subject:

“…the real truth is there is no one in the world who was as sick of school as me. I hated every day, including kindergarten.

Oh yea, I did miss 38 days in kindergarten.”

When I asked Alan why he had so many absences in kindergarten he said it was the usual childhood maladies, chicken pox, measles and the not usual malady of blood poisoning which kept him out for at least 10 days.

I ask if he ever faked those kindergarten absences. His answer:

            No faking. This doesn't mean I didn’t hate every day of school.

Let’s Talk About Money

(Gasp!) You know - money – who has it, who doesn’t . Who has more, who has less.

It’s confusing, and often taboo to talk about money. On the one hand there is the myth that the U.S. is a classless society. You know, “all men (snic) are created equal”. And yet we can plainly see inequality all around us.

Now specifically regarding 828. Back in the 1950s, during the Kerber expansion period, our family’s appearance, if you didn’t look too closely, would have been considered middle class. Lower middle, but definitely middle class. Dad worked full time as a baker. Mom did the kids and the house. We presented ourselves as middle class. We had a clean car, clean clothes. We attended school regularly and got good grades; we had bikes and paper routes.

We were only peripherally aware of the “other two” classes. The upper (we called them the rich) lived in north Sidney. Or they had large houses outside of town. The “rich” kids had nicer clothes than us, newer bikes, and seemed to have more confidence in themselves.

The lower class we called “the poor”. They mostly lived in the west side of town and had fewer nice things than us. There weren’t many obviously poor kids at my school, which was a Catholic school. There was a stigma about the west side of Sidney. Poor Caucasians  lived there. We called them hics. And most African-Americans. We called them Negro and colored. Dad (not Mom) called them colored and “coons” on rare occasions would call them worse things, but not with any real emotion behind it. A child of the Depression, Dad grew up in Sidney, a small manufacturing town. Mom grew up in German-Catholic farm country where there were few, if any, African-Americans.

Back to 828. What were we? Certainly not upper. We looked middle, but financially we were lower. Just considering Dad’s paycheck we would have been classified as “poor”. We looked middle class because Dad, and especially Mom, decided that’s who we were. Not that they made any actual decision. That’s just who they were. In this regard they were, on a micro scale, financial geniuses. Their ability to make Dad’s paycheck cover the necessities and a few of the small luxuries for up to fourteen people was (and is) inspiring.

Mom augmented Dad’s paycheck in various ways. There was the garden and hand-me-down clothes, of course. And the neighbors fruit trees. Mom cultivated the benefice of our older neighbors by sending us kids over to sweep their sidewalks in summer and shovel them after a snowfall. And they repaid with fruit. U-pick. Mom’s genius was that she would have sent us to clean their sidewalks even if they didn’t reciprocate with fruit. That’s just who she was. A “globalist” before the word originated. You know, “We’re all in this together.” People recognized that in Mom and Dad, and probably Mom and Dad recognized that in people.

Utilizing other resources, our parents tapped us kids for additional income. When things occasionally got tight we paperboys had to throw a small amount of our collection money into the common fund. When we graduated to a paycheck, she sometimes took a small percentage.

Another part of our parent’s genius was that I don’t remember resenting getting dunned. Or even thinking that it was unfair. Mom kept her “nickel and dime” money in a jar in a kitchen cupboard. I never stole from it, I always had enough change for my daily candy/ice cream fix. I don't think I even thought about stealing from it. 

Earllier I said we really could have been classified as belonging to the economic “lower class”, the poor. Back then I felt poor. I knew that our being part of the middle class was false, that we were faking it. (Of course I didn’t think any of my classmates were faking it.) But that feeling only lasted until I turned 16 when I got a part-time job packing groceries. Then I was a “working guy”.

This was Dad’s and Mom’s genius – teaching us (usually not verbally) that money need not be the central focus of our life’s pursuit. And for teaching us that we did indeed belong to the middle class back then. This has helped me to realize that now I belong to no class - unclassified.

Sibling Pairs

I met with my brother John yesterday. He lives about two hours away so we met at a park in a town mid-way between us. I had an electrical problem in my truck camper and John is an electrical engineer. We worked on the problem without success. (AC don’t mix with DC.) Oh well.

John and I often meet halfway to have lunch or dinner. We talk for a couple of hours then drive home. John is the sibling closest in age to me. As kids, we were paired by our place in the family. We did much together – boy scouts, paper routes, pick-up sports.

By the luck of the draw, all of us 12 kids were paired up. Dan and Bill were both born during World War II. Then John and I, the first of the baby boomers. Then Linda and Nancy, born next, back-to-back in the midst of ten boys. (There must be a god to have divided our family thusly, as least that what Linda and Nancy say.) They are the dividing zone between what’s called the four older and six younger boys.                

Then George and Mike, Fred    and Alan, and Joe and Gary. But while Fred and Alan, while paired with each other, they were also floaters. Fred sometimes ran with George and Mike, to make a triad. And Alan, sometimes teamed up with Joe and Gary to make (in my mind) the “three little kids”.

The most visible pair of course are Linda and Nancy. Born a year and a half apart, in the midst of all those boys, they always were an obvious twosome. They had their own room in a house with only four bedrooms. With Mom and Dad in a room that left the boys in the other two. If you’re keeping score [which I’m of course not], that’s two girls per room and five boys per room. [This fact, though, does provide me with plenty of ammunition in any present-day

argument about who was special in our parent’s eyes, and who, as kids, got all the gravy.]

But, on the other hand, what a delight it is to watch Linda and Nancy in one or the other’s kitchen, preparing a meal together. They’re like one brain with four arms. All that togetherness through the years melded into them a kind of a closeness that brings faith to the godless. This is not to make a ranking of the closeness quotient in the sibling pairs in our

family. I think closeness is not something that can be measured or counted. Maybe it can only be observed.

The pairings of the past have easily been carried into the present day. While circumstances and experiences have changed the internal workings of John and I for instance, something indescribable in us, has not changed. During our recent lunch, I looked across the table at John while he was talking and realized the bond we share. And it was good. John and I have gone down different paths in life.  We have different but not necessarily opposing outlooks in life. Differing politics, differing religious beliefs, but not differing views about family. This just makes the bond John and I share even more special because differences that could drive us apart seem trivial inside the bond of family.

Bob

Asparagus and the Stick

Each of us kids didn’t get to spend a lot of alone time with Dad. Looking at it mathematically, if you divide any small number by 12, you get an even smaller quotient.

Looking back after all these years, though, the amount of time doesn’t seem small. It feels like enough, and I suspect most of my sibs would agree. When Dad was with you, he was with you.

The longest period of alone time Dad regularly spent with any of us (boys) was when he was cutting our hair. He was meticulous with everything he did, and it took almost an hour for a haircut. The irony here is that most of us hated how long it took and couldn’t wait to get back to playing. What I wouldn’t give for one of his haircuts now. And he never just gave us a buzz cut (except when we were very young); he always left something in front to comb.
 

My look during junior high was the flat top. (C’mon…it was the ‘50s!) This was challenging, but Dad never tried to talk me out of it. He would take his time – walk around me, snip, pause, snip. Another look, another snip… Patience was his strong suit, not mine.

The most cherished alone time I had with Dad was when we hunted wild asparagus along the railroad tracks near our house. Mostly it was just the two of us. Why no one else wanted to go always puzzled me. Maybe they preferred hunting strawberries or black raspberries with him, which also grew wild along the track. Picking something sweet had to be more appealing than hunting for something most of us didn’t like. Sometimes Mom would fry the asparagus, which was tolerable, but creamed asparagus made me gag. 

I liked hunting asparagus with dad. He had a slow and steady gait and didn’t miss much. We were silent most of the time, but when I would ask a question, he would answer. It’s a memory I cherish.

“Cherish” is the point here. Memories of Dad bring up words like that, cherish, warmth, gentleness, emotions about Dad that I share with my siblings. Memories of Mom bring up thoughts of admiration, respect, even awe. I can’t speak for the rest of my sibs, especially my sisters, but Mom was more complex. (No doubt you’ll hear more about this in a later post.)

Other memories of Dad bring up different emotions, though. I feared his anger, which could boil up suddenly, over milk spilled at the supper table or an insolent child. At times he whacked us on the butt with a stick, a 30-inch piece of plaster lath that he kept above the kitchen counter. His spankings touched all of us, except the two girls. And there was anger in his whacks, never an empathetic comment like “This will hurt me more than it hurts you.” The spankings hurt! But they weren’t hard enough to leave any marks.

As serious and emotionally laden as the spankings were, my fear of them and of his anger didn’t linger after childhood. With Dad’s anger, it was quick and furious, and then gone. That was just how he was.

Even as kids, the harshness of his actions didn’t linger after the spanking. I remember how my younger brothers made up a skit and song about the “stick,” which they performed for the family, even when Dad was around. As adults, we still joke about the stick. I wish that I could carry my anger so lightly.

—Bob

Delivering Newspapers

 

 My paper-boy career started with my subbing for my two oldest brothers, Dan and Bill, earning dimes and quarters. But I didn’t achieve the elite status of an income earner until I had a route of my own. That happened at the start of the fourth grade.

I don’t remember how I got that route. Maybe Mom made phone calls to the Sidney Daily News circulation manager, maybe she didn’t. But I had a SDN route and I was cool.

 Carrying a new, white canvas newspaper bag to school with my books in it meant I had joined the world of workingmen. (A world I still like to think I inhabit today.) I felt like I wasn’t a kid anymore, even though as a shrimp of a kid, my route bag hung nearly to the ground. Not only did I have a job, but I had the accoutrement to prove it. Ahh, status!

When I first had a delivery route, the carriers picked up their papers at the SDN office in downtown Sidney. It was here that I spent a large chunk of my earnings. There was a bakery across the alley and an ice cream parlor three doors down. Plus, on the way to my route there were two gas stations that sold sodas and ice cream.

Being a wage earner meant that I could be a consumer of other things, too. Soon I had a used but nice red Huffy Flyer and then a basket on the front to hold my paper bag. Using a bike to deliver papers meant doing the route faster, but I learned walking had it advantages, too. My aim for tossing the papers onto the front porch was much better while walking, and missing a porch while riding meant getting off my bike, correcting my bad throw, and returning to my bike. It probably didn’t take that much time, but an errant throw interrupted my day-dreaming, a habit I frequently engaged in as a child.

My favorite time for flights of fancy was on a rainy fall day, when the street gutters ran with rain, carrying fallen leaves with it. I liked making leaf and stick dams, patching the leaks until my dam could hold no more, then breaching it. I would fantasize about what would happen to the townspeople, houses, and cars carried away in the flood. Delivering papers was where I really honed my fantasizing skills. And it made the route seem shorter.

There was a down side with being a paper carrier, too - collecting payment for my deliveries. Every Friday I had to knock at each customer’s door and ask for money. This wasn’t too much of a concern with most of my customers because I had a “good” route. This meant clean, stable, middle-class families who didn’t move out without paying, who answered the door on the first knock, and didn’t say, “Come back next week, I don’t have any money.”



I had a few of these customers, enough to affect my income a little and my equilibrium a lot. Because the next week when they asked what they owed, I’d reply, “One week, 42 cents.” I was too afraid to ask for two weeks’ pay. Or more probably, I’d just skip collecting there the next week. The best solution (and the weasel -iest) was to pay my younger sister Nancy to collect for me.)



The trauma of collecting from overdue customers left me with “collecting dreams” for decades. Several of my brothers recently told me that they too had the same problem with some of their customers - they wouldn’t always collect from them either. And they had the same type of dreams. Even so, I still feel that I was a wimp back then. But hey, that was back then. These days I don’t feel like a wimp, very often.

--Bob

The Paper Route Dynasty

Kids seem to need money. It helps them feel like an adult. If they earn their own money, it helps them feel like they have status outside their home. So it was with us Kerbers, certainly it was with me.

Delivering newspapers brought in the first regular income to all ten of us Kerber boys. (Sorry, no girls need apply – we’re talking the 1950s and 60s.) My oldest brother Dan got his first route in the early 1950s, delivering the Dayton Journal Herald, a morning paper. His route was a twenty-minute walk or a ten-minute bike ride from home.

The rest of us boys followed in his footsteps, often literally. When Dan eventually got an evening Sidney Daily News route, Bill, the second oldest, took over Dan’s morning route. This turning over of routes from one brother to the next continued through Gary, the last born.

This wasn’t as smooth as it may seem. Lots of boys wanted paper routes, not just us Kerbers. Those first SDN routes were acquired through regular channels, by being on a waiting list until one became available. I suspect, but don’t know for sure, that John and I got our routes with the help of a phone call from Mom. By the time I stopped delivering papers at the start of my 11^th grade—when I got a job packing groceries—Mom, via the telephone, lobbied the circulation manager to let John carry both routes with a little help from George, Mike, and Fred (brothers # 5, 6, and 7). I also had a JH morning route at that time, which I passed on to George, who passed it on to Mike who passed it to Fred.

When John graduated from being a paper boy to being a grocery packer, Mom “talked” the SDN circulation manager into splitting John’s route into three and giving them to George, Mike, and Fred. A precedent had been set and eventually the routes trickled down to Alan, Joe, and Gary (brothers # 8, 9, and 10).

The route passing was an ongoing negotiation between Mom and the SDN circulation manager. We Kerber boys were reliable carriers, Mom saw to that, so keeping it in the family worked well for the SDN, too. But it was also favoritism, which is never good for a small-town business.

But their most memorable clash came over the rubber bands used to fasten the papers into a roll. The bands came in a Kleenex-sized box, and when a carrier ran out, he’d call the circulation manager. Once the manager harassed a Kerber carrier for ordering a box too soon, implying that he was wasting rubber bands. (We did have rubber-band wars, but always picked up (most of) the ammo when we were finished.) He insisted that a box contained so many bands, and that they should last a certain amount of time.

Mom, never one to back away from someone challenging the integrity of the Kerber family, decided to count them. Spreading a box of bands out on the dining room table, she had us kids count them. She was right; there weren’t enough bands to last as long as SDN said. Her call back to the circulation manager vindicated her accused child, and that’s the last we heard of that issue. I don’t think she ever lost a fight with that poor manager.

In the end, Kerbers delivered newspapers for twenty-plus years. Carrying papers gave us kids a little spending money, and it taught us responsibility, punctuality, simple mathematics, and other skills. I also learned that having a supporting authoritative person in the background (Mom) makes life a little easier.

This particular legacy is a mixed bag for me. What makes one a “mama’s boy”? Where one’s battles are decided by the adult in the background. And where is the line between “supportive” and “pushy”? I’m sure Mom stepped over that line whenever she felt she had to; and I can’t picture her stepping over it only because she knew she could. In the end, all I really know is Mom was Mom, and I am me.

        --Bob

Thoughts of spring... and of Mom

A robin bumped against my bedroom window this morning. It happens every year around this time. The bird must hate hitting a cold hard surface as it forages for food, but I like knowing it’s out there. It reminds me of the coming of spring, and of Mother.

I think of Mom often at this time of year, for it is when she died. She’s been gone eight years today, Feb. 24, but the events surrounding her death remain crystal clear.

 It was 2008, and I was at work when my sister Nancy called to tell me that Mom wasn’t doing well. Congestive heart failure. I didn’t know exactly what that meant then, but I knew from her voice it was serious. Mom had been in a nursing home for five years, so it wasn’t a shock to hear she had a serious health problem. But it still hit hard. Aren’t mothers suppose to live forever?

 At the hospital the next day, Mom had a brief period of awareness. My brother Fred, his wife Julie, and I were standing by her bed. And once, when I moved from her line of sight, she called my name. “Linda.” She said it three times, weak and distant. “Linda.” That was the last distinct, physical connection I had with her.

Mom lingered another twelve days, and as her death seemed more certain, some of us stayed through the night. On her last night, a Saturday, Fred, Julie, Nancy, and I were there. We took turns sleeping in a chair or on a small mattress I’d brought to the nursing home. But one of us was always by her side. 

Very early Sunday morning, Fred woke to be with Mom so Nancy and I could sleep. The three of us stood together in the middle of the room talking quietly, a short distance from where she lay. When Fred moved towards her, though, I touched his arm to slow his progress. “Wait a moment,” I said.

Did I want to tell Fred something, or was I remembering what Mother had told me when she and her siblings were with their mother when she was dying—that when my aunt left the room briefly to use the bathroom, Grandma died.

As Fred, Nancy, and I stood together in her darkened room, Mother let go. When we looked again, she was gone.

 Mom’s dying moments are crystallized in my mind’s eye by the beauty of that early morning. Looking through the nursing home window, past two empty bird feeders that stood like sentries outside her room, I saw the frost-covered earth and ice-laced branches sparkling in the first light. It was a surreal moment. Cold and barren yet breathtakingly beautiful.

Returning to Pennsylvania following the funeral, I remember seeing a large flock of robins in a field near our home. I’ve always thought of robins in the singular, like the ones Mom pointed out to us kids when we were young. “Come look,” she’d say, “See. The first robin of spring.” And there would be a lone robin hopping across the brown grass or tugging at a worm in our back yard.

Mother liked robins, especially in early spring. But seeing those robins in the field, hundreds of them, I felt the full force of my loss. But feeling this, I also understood that she was with me in many of the things we shared. Our appearance and mannerisms. Our love of literature and writing. In the way we lived our lives and managed our homes. And in the joy of seeing a robin in spring.

—Linda

Nancy (right) and I in a lighter moment at the cemetery