A Buckeye Boyhood

Copyright © 2008 by R. Lamar Kilgore

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This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

ISBN: 978-0-595-50510-4 (pbk)

ISBN: 978-0-595-61540-7 (ebk)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This collection of memories is dedicated to my Dad and Mom, Acy and Mae Kilgore, whose gift of genes and living example of courage and determination provided me with an expanded horizon.

Eleanor provided me a family when I had none, always encourages me to do the right thing and is a living example of goodness and kindness for me to follow. The contribution of my resident computer techie, Patricia Lucy Sierzant, Gernie, cannot be measured. Words are insufficient to value her patience and indulgence of me in the lengthy, often redundant process of self-publication. She says that she still likes me just as my dog Tillie does, no matter what.

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

FOREWORD

THE STANDPIPE

MAE

MAE & THE

PREACHER—AGAIN

ONE BOSS

KEEPING HOUSE

Bonnie

My Room

The Bully

A Different Monday

Miss M.

Jackie, Oh Jackie!

Orlie

An American Gothic

Sunday

The Champ

Louie

An Enduring Golf Lesson

A CADDIE’S REMEMBRANCE OF

Rich

Dreams

The Rack

Something Told Me

The Line

Clifford

A Smoky Mountain Vacation

A MIND CAPTURED

A GIFT FROM ESTHER

DAD AND SON

MEANT TO BE?

ELMER, A COLORED MAN,

BEN HOGAN AND ME

THE BAR EXAM

DID YOU SEE A BIRD?

A $20 INVESTMENT

THE HUSTLER

THE LOVE OF THE GAME

THE COURT ROOM

RITUALS,

RECRUITMENT

AND THE REALITIES OF WAR

ARE WORDS ENOUGH?

AFTERWORD

PICTURE CREDITS

FOREWORD

FOREWORD

MOM AND DAD

In 1955 when I left my Ohio hometown, my Mom and Dad, Mae and Acy, were standing behind the screen door waving goodbye. With my freshly minted Bachelor of Arts degree in hand, I headed for Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania Law School where I spent four of the most miserable years of my life. But law school and the practice of law is another story. Mae, Acy and Ohio need to be remembered.

Fast forward thirty-nine years to 1994. Mom and Dad had both been gone for more than fifteen years. I had remained in the Philadelphia area since 1955 returning home only for class reunions and obligatory visits to Mom and Dad. By this time, Dad had been gone for almost twenty years and Mom had passed on in 1980. Suddenly, my interest in the importance of their lives was awakened by a clipping from my hometown newspaper. It appeared unexpectedly in my mail with a note from a boyhood friend. A grainy newsprint photo showed Acy in the center of the back row of the employees, perhaps numbering twenty, of the circa 1940 Eagle Tool and Machinery Corporation, one of many small machine tool shops which were thereafter soon to flourish in the WWII defense manufacturing boom. With his cap at a jaunty angle and arms folded, he demonstrated a proud and confident manner born of a life of hard won accomplishments.

Dad was a machinist. He liked to call himself a tool and die maker. However modest or lofty was the appropriate title of his job description, he fully enjoyed and took great pride in his work. At the time of the photo the war time economy had not yet mobilized and this employer was only the latest in a series of small shops where Acy plied his trade in the feast and famine cycle of available work. It worked like this: the shop owner wins a contract to supply a certain number of machine tool parts, then he hires an enlarged work force to meet the need and then when the work is finished, he lays off the extra workers, perhaps literally hoping that they will remain unemployed and available until the owner lands another job.

My older brothers were also machinists/tool and die makers. Both were adults when this menopausal child of the Great Depression was born. The family supper table was a working man’s forum. The talk evoked the pride of highly skilled craftsmen who worked with steel which allowed very little margin for error. They spoke of demanding dime raises in their hourly rates. More often than not they grudgingly accepted nickels. They did not conceal their contempt for and fear of tyrannical shop foremen. The fear of layoffs was seldom far from their thoughts. During the war time boom I enjoyed the wonder and adventure of the sights, sounds and smells of an active machine shop when Mom allowed me to deliver Dad’s fried chicken dinner when he worked all day on Sunday.

Acy’s accomplishments in life were won over formidable obstacles. He was born in 1891 in the crossroads town of Jeffersonville, Ohio, the youngest of nine boys born to Cyrus and Martha (Mock) Kilgore, who were desperately poor tenant farmers. According to the oral history of the family, Acy was one of the first of the boys to summon the courage to escape the bare subsistence of the farm. He and older brother Orlie made the then enormous journey of more than twenty miles to Springfield hoping to realize all of the advantages of the Industrial Revolution. Imagine, work paying wages.

The escape from the hard scrabble life as a farm laborer was a process, not an event. First, he traveled the several miles to South Solon, Ohio where in 1910 he met and married Mae (Steen), whose sharp mind, steely determination and uncommon wit were to be very substantial factors in the transition. After their marriage, there were stopovers on the path from the farm to the city as they hired out as resident laborers to more than one land-owning farmer, Dad in the fields and Mom in the kitchen.

The courage and foresight which were required to fuel this then great effort should not be underrated. Because of their families’ poor circumstances and the number of mouths to be fed and because both suffered in childhood from very poor eyesight, neither Mae nor Acy had any formal education beyond the third grade. But do not think that both could not cipher. For more than thirty years, Mae was the treasurer and chief custodian of the funds of the Ladies’ Bible Class. Through lessons received by mail from the then popular International Correspondence School, Dad taught himself basic arithmetic and developed sufficient skills in basic geometry, even trigonometry, which were necessary to do advanced machine tool work. Armed with only these basic self-taught skills, it required a lot of guts to step forward the first time and say to a shop foreman, Yes, I can run a vertical boring mill, and yes, I know that if I ruin one piece of very costly steel, I will be fired.

Acy was justifiably proud of his vocabulary which he grew and nourished by crossword puzzles and his faithful study of Reader’s Digest’s monthly articles on growing your vocabulary. Much later in life, he passed the written examination for licensing as a real estate broker, an achievement which was proclaimed to the world by a sleek custom made sign mounted on the front porch of the modest frame bungalow which was the homestead for more than thirty years.

Dad was a died-in-the-wool union man. His heroes were John L. Lewis, the mine workers’ champion, and Walter Reuther, the man who gave birth to the CIO which later combined to form the AFL-CIO. Despite his humble beginnings on the farm, Acy had an instinctive understanding of the concept of collective bargaining, although that phrase was probably not a part of his active vocabulary. Both on the farm and in the factory he had experienced the powerlessness of trying, alone and hat-in-hand, to negotiate with a shop owner. Nothing made him angrier than the words of my older brother, an unrepentant individualist, who disparaged the unions who take your money and don’t do anything.

Before finding a secure job with a union shop, Dad lost more than one job as a result of his standing up for his principles and his sometimes exaggerated sense of his dignity as a working man. A case in point is the employer in the 1940 newsprint photo. Although only nine years old, I have a very sharp recollection of the scene at the supper table when he announced that he had quit at Eagle Tool. While he tried mightily to show no remorse, in retrospect I believe that Dad regretted his fit of indignation which caused him to, figuratively, tell the foreman to take this job and shove it. You see he was greatly disappointed, embarrassed and humiliated by being offered a raise of five cents per hour, when he had asked for twenty-five and believed himself entitled to ten.

Hourly rates were not the only subject of Acy’s disagreement with a nonunion employer. Before I was born when the labor movement was in its infancy, Dad lost a well paying and sorely needed job because he objected to unsafe working conditions. Very heavy iron castings were transported by conveyer directly over the heads of the machine shop workers. After more than one casting fell, he attempted to organize his fellow workers in the machine shop to protest the failure of the company to install safety netting. He was fired. Across the years, he told and retold this tale, probably his finest hour as a working man. In a very real sense, Acy was a one man labor pioneer.

Now, Mae. The collection of stories to follow will tell much about this lady, my Mom. If Acy was steel and he was, Mae was tungsten steel. If Acy was determined, and he was, Mae was relentless, incapable of being deterred and more than clever in working toward her objectives. In the marriage and particularly in the context of any dispute involving her sons, Acy was the clay and Mae the sculptor. She was The Boss. She was the embodiment of the country music refrain, He wears the pants in the family and I tell him what pants to wear. Read and you will see.

Dad died in 1976 at age eighty-five and Mom in 1980 at age ninety-one. So far as I know they never spent one night apart during sixty-four years from 1910 until 1974 when Dad had to go to a nursing home. The amusing but well established fact is that they seldom agreed on anything, but they shared a lifetime of devotion to marriage and family. This collection of memories and ruminations on matters great and small is offered in most humble celebration of their steely determination and will to improve. In the brief space of little more than one generation, they put the writer in a position to benefit from many more of life’s opportunities than they. Their experience is only one of many such stories reflective of the history of small town America in the first half of the twentieth century.

THE STANDPIPE

… not just a water tower

THE STANDPIPE

Our town was surrounded by seemingly endless fields of wheat, beans, alfalfa, corn and grazing farm animals. It was the birthplace of the 4H Clubs of America. But it was an industrial oasis. At one time the rival of Chicago, we had foundries, we assembled trucks, and we manufactured everything from piano plates and lawn sweepers to diesel engines and road rollers. We had the carpenters, masons, bricklayers, machinists, draftsmen, pattern makers, tool and die makers and the unskilled laborers to get these jobs done. Everybody’s Main Street, The National Pike, Route 40, ran straight through the middle of our town east to west.

In the distant past, we were a part of the farm land. Then the Industrial Revolution began a migration from the farms to the factories. Successive World Wars further increased the demand for manpower. The farmers left behind the grinding poverty and tyranny of tenant farming. The coal miners of Kentucky and West Virginia escaped from the collieries and company towns. They came to town to work for wages. They supplied the sweat and strength which enabled the manufacturing entrepreneurs to build their factories and fortunes.

The workers rented and later purchased modest homes in the East and West Ends of town, while the owners of the factories and shops built mansions on the North Side. Then, there was the South End where the Colored lived. East, West and South neighborhoods were ends; North was a side of town.

The Standpipe was the most prominent architectural feature of our town. Standing atop Main Street hill at Florence Street, it rose about five more stories. When erected in 1882 at a cost of $88,500 it represented the cutting edge of water supply technology, and its 500,000 gallon capacity replaced springs, wells and cisterns as the city’s principle source of fire control. By the late 1940’s the Springfield Water Works lettering had faded and flaked and it was just a dirty gray cylinder. But it still towered over Main Street hill and its morning and afternoon shadows remained a part of our lives until its demolition in the early 1990’s.

It was not just a water tower. It was not just a counterpoint to the elegant white spire of the college campus chapel dominating the North Side of the town. The stuff of which the standpipe was constructed—cast iron plates welded, riveted and bolted together—were the all too familiar components of the daily lives and livelihood of the East Enders, the working class of our manufacturing town.

At the base of Standpipe hill there was a dusty, weed-infested municipal playground complete with rusty swings, teeter-totter and a merry-go-round. Our makeshift softball field was not one for sluggers as the straight line from home plate to center field ran directly up the hill. The base paths were clearly defined by thousands of footsteps which wore away the field grass.

It was convenient that the Standpipe stood in a direct line from the playground to our neighborhood. Even more fortuitous was the fact that the metal stairs rose on the face of the Standpipe which could not be seen by the potential tattletales still occupying the swings and teeter-totters when we ballplayers headed home past the base of The Pipe. The locked enclosure at the foot of the stairs was easily breached by any self-respecting thirteen-year old who could (with sure-footed, circa 1945, Joe Lapchik gym shoes) climb about ten feet on chain link fencing. It is not an exaggeration to say that the climb to the catwalk at the top was the Everest of the East End. Climbing to the dizzying height was strictly forbidden. The dark waters inside could claim your life with one false step on the decaying wooden catwalk. Only the most courageous of us looked down into the cylinder to see how full it was. The wind seemed to blow at hurricane force at the top and could claim your life but for a white-knuckled hold on the ornate but now rusted iron work railing. But, can you imagine how far we could see? We were certain that we could see farther than anyone else had, EVER. Decades of rust proved that maintenance men seldom ever scaled these heights. Clearly no previous generation of kids could have possessed our daring. You see, we were the Hillary’s and Tenzing’s of the Standpipe. Our horizons would be forever extended.

From the Pipe’s catwalk, large portions of three-fourths of the town could be seen. Perhaps, if you stared long enough, with the aid