Not that he was crazy, but by way of introduction, my father was born in Eldorado, Illinois in 1909. He was the fifth in birth order of seven children, including: Voltaire, Romaine, Lucille, John, (William), Maxine, and Charles. I believe there was another infant who died or was still-born between Maxine and Charles (who was the surviving baby of the family) but he did not survive young-adulthood. He died at 28 from complications of Type I diabetes. During my childhood we would on occasion end up back in St. Louis to visit William's (as his siblings and mother called him) family as well as my mother's remaining family, including her closest sister Hazel. The reason for being there was always an impending death, or a funeral.
The last time I actually lived there, we had initially moved into a third-floor apartment across from the street-car turnaround at the water-tower on East Grand Avenue. The water-tower was a large painted-white-brick monolith in a round-about just West of the point where Grand Avenue headed downhill toward the Mississippi River; at the time, the area was burgeoning with small street-level businesses, the second and third floor apartments occupied by the merchants or transients like we were. This was a predominately Jewish neighborhood at the time. During part of our stay, my mother Goldie worked as an aide at the nearby Jewish nursing home. We had a dog, a black cocker spaniel named Mike, who played on the roof of the second-floor; we lifted him onto the roof through our kitchen window. As I remember our bathroom was a community facility one floor down on the second-floor.
Thankfully, before school started we moved to a ground-level duplex on Blair Avenue where there was something like a yard, our own bathroom, with some separation from family for each of us. In the summer there were nightly visits from street vendors selling hot tamales, or ice-cream, from their respective push-carts. "The tamale man" was frugal with his audible advertising, wasting no words as he promoted his product; perhaps a half-block down the street his voice would cut the evening air and drift in through the open windows -- "HOT!" and then perhaps directly in front of the house, "TAMALES!" I don't remember ever eating one of these delicacies, but during the good times, when my Dad was employed at Small Arms sprayin shellac on ammunition casings, we did regularly (perhaps weekly) get a Fudgesicle from the ice cream vendor, who, as I remember had a bell that was rung by the spokes of his cart.
My memory is that we stayed there long enough for me to start school -- 3rd grade I think -- and have my tonsils removed, and long enough to bury Charles, my Dad's brother. This was my first brush with orderly death from disease as staged by hospitals and doctors...I had seen a child drown when I was 5 or 6 years old in a flooded gravel quarry in St. Anthony, Idaho. But, somehow this staged death was “creepier” - more frightening and unnatural, taking place for mysterious reasons and occurring out of plain sight in a hospital.
My grandmother lived in the brick neighborhood of "Old North" St. Louis not too far from East Grand Avenue, near Florissant Boulevard. By 'brick neighborhood' I mean the streets, side-walks, buildings, backyards, and alleys were brick; this total brick world made sure that the heat of a summer day lasted until well after midnight in the uncooled tenements. There were walkways or as I thought of them 'tunnels' between the buildings running from the street to the back-yards, and no space between buildings except those covered passages.
In my earliest memories, probably 1947 the year my Grandpa died, the vendors -- milkman, iceman, rag-man, glass-man, tin-man, and the like serviced this old neighborhood with horse-drawn wagons, and push-carts. The horses knew the routes and would walk ahead, then pause, to allow the milk-man or ice-man to perform deliveries. Even though Pevely Dairy had motorized delivery elsewhere, Old North continued to employ horse drawn, ice-cooled, wagons in 1947. I think all the horse carts had gone by the way by the time we returned in 1953.
Down the street there was a corner tavern, literally having its front door in the apex of the front corner, and beyond that a major residential thoroughfare. There was a ballpark not too far away where the St. Louis Browns played. On Sundays, I could hear the fans expressing their pleasure or frustration, but I never attended a game. It was either beyond us financially, or possibly it would have exposed us to some sort of real or imagined evil, such as loud, obscene men smoking cigars and drinking beer...men whose taxi cabs I often saw wheeling through our neighborhood on game day. They were citizens of another world, another America, where people had excess wealth for ballgames, cabs, cigars, and beer. But, we had Holiness, which they clearly lacked.
My dad's sister Maxine lived with my grandmother her entire life. She never married; she had polio as a child. She was somewhat gnome-like having been stunted in growth by her disease, and as an adult became progressively more immobile though she got around independently on her aluminum forearm braces for as long as I knew her, well into the 1970's. I don't remember ever seeing my paternal grandfather when he wasn't, as they used to say, 'bed ridden.' My only visual memory of him is that of a frail, cadaverous, gray head on a pillow. His bed was in the living room of the brick tenement house where he and my grandmother lived, so he really couldn't be avoided; when I went into the living room I would say, "Hi grandpa!" and he would respond, "Hi grandpa!" At the time, his response seemed truly weird to me. Thinking about it now, his response makes perfect sense; it was likely his 'dry' way of messing with me, though at the time I thought he was a loon. Grandpa was said to have pernicious anemia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pernicious_anemia I don't know if that was true or not. Even today, for many well-known diseases, diagnoses are a matter of exclusion and doctors only know what it isn’t, but can't say with any certainty what is wrong with their patient unless there's a big smoking hole where a pancreas should be...my grandfather's diagnosis was made in the mid-40's...so who knows what he actually was suffering from? He died in 1947 and after he was in the ground, we hauled ourselves back West ever seeking the center of God’s will…trying to find that homing-beam where everything fell into place, and the world made sense…God’s Will…we don’t know the mind of God, but we’ll know His will when we find it.
My paternal grandmother, Lizzie, was not dying of anything. She would live one month short of her hundredth birthday, and even then it seems her brain and heart simply forgot to speak to each other one night as she slept in her nursing home. She had no illnesses. Her daughters had put her there nearby where they lived before she was 90, according to my dad, because the daughters got too old to get into town to visit her, and they were worried about her living alone. Jennifer, Kim and I infrequently drove down to St. Louis in the early ‘70’s from our apartment in the Chicago suburb of Oak Lawn to visit her and other relatives; at that time she lived on The Hill...Dago Hill as the Italian community was called back in the days before humorous prejudice about ethnicity required stern offense. Back then, it seems we were all "something" from "somewhere else" and cruel humor was mostly equally delivered to Heb's Micks, Dagos, and Pollocks alike, though I will say that "Negroes" got the worst of the "malicious humor" in the St. Louis of the time, and well into the ‘90’s when I was last there.
I don't remember how my grandmother came to be in that neighborhood, The Hill, since she wasn't Italian. But, The Hill was safe, orderly and clean, and her neighbor's son checked in on his own Italian mother daily, and my grandma who lived next door, to assure they were safe and supplied. If any of the problems inherent to St. Louis then and probably now came into The Hill, bringing trouble, fear, or even merely inconvenience in the pristine Italian neighborhoods, the plainclothed, informally elected, armed, Italian 'constables' would resolve the issues quickly, then take what remained of the unpleasantry back out into St. Louis proper and call the city police to '...come pick up their trash.' Strangely enough, on The Hill there were never any witnesses to any of the defensive crimes, and the external criminals came to know that it was a place to be avoided unless of course one had a death wish. I’m not espousing this kind of social control, however, I recall that my grandma and her friends sat with impunity on their open porches on Summer evenings. They lived on a peaceful island in a sea of chaos otherwise known as St. Louis in the ‘70’s.
Eating dinner at my grandmother's table was always a treat and an adventure, particularly when I was a small boy. Not only was the food wonderful, but when we gave thanks she might have a very sudden and loud 'Holy Ghost breakdown' (not a description wisely used around my parents) which was so loud and unexpected that I more than once wet myself as a young child...the surprise was made worse because she didn't always do it. So many times I sat rigidly, holding my breath, waiting for the squeal, vowing silently to not be taken by surprise when the "Ooooooo! THANK YOU SWEET JESUS!" came out of this small women, accompanied by the rhythmic, rapid pounding of her feet on the floor under the table. The food was amazing...country cooking, fresh food, gravy with everything, and too much, but the meals were nerve-wracking until the prayer of thanks was well behind us because Gra'ma usually didn't interrupt a good meal with her Holy Ghost breakdowns.
My father had left his family suddenly when he was a young man of perhaps 17. He confided in me on an occasion when I was old enough to add my own lusty imagination to his sparse facts, that he had to "...leave town in a hurry..." because he got on the wrong side of a young woman's father. I suspected he had got on the girl's 'right side' and the father might not have been fond of the 'class difference' between his deflowered princess and the young Bill Karns, son of a tenant farm family. So my father-to-be fled the town where he lived and went on the road. I've always felt that this may have set into play his life-long pattern of avoidance and flight...perhaps also encouraged by the societal and cultural chaos that was soon to follow, for it couldn't have been too long after that until the banks and markets crashed and the Great Depression came and stayed until the economy was resurrected by FDR and a world war on both sides of the globe. In any case, my father used to speak of 'riding the rails', in other words, using freight-trains to get around the the West and Midwest, from town to town, odd-job to odd-job, until he (and his brother) met my mom (and her sister) and became an extended family.
We sometimes drove through these rail-road towns from his past as we moved from place to place when I was a child, though we never actually lived in any of them. We traveled by car, sometimes dragging a utility trailer full of household goods, other times only the back seat contained my sister and me, and our pared down belongings. Many times when we were traveling we'd come to a town and he'd remember coming there on a train, and might say, "Spent a night in jail in this town for vagrancy...food was pretty good as I remember!" Or, "Got kicked off the train outside this town here. They made us walk around and stay outside the city limits." My mother was not entirely appreciative of his past, nor his tales. Goldie was not a prude, but I guess she just felt it wasn't necessary to celebrate your crude beginnings. I remember her being a “class act” though not at all snobbish, judgmental, or uppity. I will say she had a way of transmitting disappointment without seeming to blame the offender.
Goldie Lucille McKinnon was born in 1915 in West Imminence, Missouri. Why there would be a West Imminence as well as an Imminence, I can't fathom. Neither place merited a visit much less separate names and city governments. My mother never talked much to me about her early life before she met my father. Her own father Ike McKinnon and at least one of my mother's sisters still lived there in West Imminence when we visited the final time. I was 15 that year, and Ike was already terminally ill. As near as I could tell Ike was just a mean drunk, and something of a bully. He may be the reason my mother left home at 15 to go to the city to live with another older sister Hazel. In 1959 my mother's oldest sister, Faye Culpepper, lived with her husband Olin and any number of children, grandchildren, chickens, dogs and other critters in an unpainted wood-frame house, with perpetually askew screen-doors letting in flies and various animalss. If memory serves, she and some of her family worked the town's telephone switchboard back when calls were placed and connected manually by a central operator. The town's operator was a very powerful and knowledgeable person because she connected all the calls, and most of her customers were on "party lines" with 2 or 3 other households. The town operator didn't necessarily disconnect herself expeditiously after the call was connected with her customers. Even if a town was too small to have a newspaper, it usually had an operator who readily distributed the "news."
I have two distinct memories of Ike...both from my 8 or 9th year well before he got sick and died from stomach cancer, which according to the story, was caused by drinking his own home-made whiskey. In one instance, we had gone '...down to the country...' as the saying went, from St. Louis. We went there to visit family, and all the McKinnon "girls" were gathered with their husbands, if any, and kids in Ike's slab-cabin.
Ike got tired of hearing all the chatter and didn't like the meal that the women were planning, so he got his rifle and announced, "Billy I'm going to go get a squirrel for dinner...come along with me!" (Ike was not big on asking children if they wanted to do something). So I went along with him. Once out in the fields and the oak trees, we encountered a fat squirrel probably 20 or so feet up on a substantial limb. Ike promptly shot the squirrel in the head. However, it clung to the limb of the tree in a death-grip and would not fall. Ike waited a while to see if gravity would join death in providing a solution to his dilemma. When death and gravity failed to resolve the situation, he tried carefully head-shooting the squirrel off the limb. That squirrel was glued to that limb! Now a lessor man would have turned to the kid and said, "Billy, there's other squirrels out here...let's go find one!" Instead, Ike turned to me and said, "Billy! Run back to the cabin near the wood-pile (he heated and cooked both food and sour mash with wood) and get my axe!" which I did, knowing Ike expected immediate satisfaction. Ike cut down that oak tree, perhaps 6-8 inches through at the ground, rather than let that squirrel "win." I mention this to say that perhaps I come by my stubborness somewhat naturally, though I've not read that the stubborn-gene has yet been isolated in the human-genome.
The other instance that characterizes Ike in my memory was on perhaps the same visit down to the country, when he stomped angily away from the dinner table and out the door, because his daughters had used his whiskey-makin's (corn) for a dinner entrée (corn on the cob). Ike couldn't tolerate using good whiskey-making corn to feed humans or animals, yelling as he walked off in his tantrum, 'It's a pure waste of good corn!' at least that's how I remember it. My Dad often spoke about Ike, but not in admiration. Ike was feared, but not respected, even by his own daughters. Ike was the town 'bully' who prospered and persisted because law enforcement people were also his ‘shine’ customers, and afraid of him.
My mother and her sister Hazel, had married brothers -- my dad and his brother John -- making my sister and I 'double cousins' to Hazel and John's son Wayne Karns. The relationship with Wayne did seem to me more often like a brother. Hazel and John's marriage hadn't lasted too long. I think Wayne was hurt deeply by the divorce of his parents, and the apparent rejection of his father John during his early years. Maybe they reconciled a bit later on. My guess is -- after listening to 'discussions' between my dad and mom -- that John felt Hazel was using little Wayne as a means to manipulate him, and he declined to be manipulated by anyone, in particular a woman. In any case, Wayne seemed to me at the time quite tough and cavalier...stoic and impervious to pain...showing total disdain for the adult world and any punishment "they" might deliver. He was my hero at 8 and 9 years old. I saw him cry only once...that was the morning he heard on the radio that Hank Williams had died...and given the seriousness of that somber event, his open tears did not reduce his stature in my young eyes at all.
I looked up to Wayne. He had carefully oiled and combed hair, in that 1950's 'rebel without a clue' style. Adult authority rolled off him without sticking! He drove his mother's car without permission or a driver's license; he rolled up his pack of unfiltered Lucky Strikes in the sleeve of his white T-shirt for all the world to see, and smoked openly and anywhere except inside Gra'ma's house and church, to the despair of his holy grandmother and concerned mother. He smoked for more than 50 years I guess. When I last saw him in July 1991 he was suffering from end-stage emphysema, and was concerned about becoming disabled and losing his job at the May Company distribution center. He died of a heart attack some years later in the parking lot of a Shonie's restaurant after eating breakfast. That seemed somehow fitting and almost a tribute to the way he lived his life. I like to think of him emerging from the Shonie's, stepping into the fresh air, and lighting up one last unfiltered Lucky Strike before collapsing and dying in the handicapped parking spot by the door. I would have hated to know he died in a nursing facility or hospital sharing tubes with sucking machines, while bored strangers pretended to care, for an hourly wage.
I never knew my maternal grandmother. I think my mom was 15-years old when her mother died. The story I remember is that she died of leukemia...again likely a questionable diagnosis, perhaps made by a country doctor who also looked after the health of livestock in Southern Missouri. I know she came from a respected family in a nearby town, with a Matriarch named Sarah Davis who was a community pillar. How Josie Davis ever got seduced by Ike McKinnon is probably a tragic love story which someone would pay to read, but I never heard the story. In any case, shortly after Josie's death, the perpetually drunk Ike, now unsupervised, began showing "unnatural" interest in his two remaining daughters, my mother and her next older sister, Hazel. They ran away from Ike, and moved in with the oldest sister Faye and her husband in St. Louis. The were soon employed as cigarette packers at the Leggett-Myer Tobacco Company.
I want to say to any reader who happened to get trapped in this article: I have no lack of respect for any of these people or roots they came from, though I may find pity and entertainment in their traits and events. These were tough, resilient, uncomplaining folks from Northern Arkansas and Southern Missouri. This generation never asked for anything from anyone, especially the government. They took care of each other, and their neighbors, and for the most part their children carried on with that same pride in independence and frugality...with the possible exception of Ike. As for Ike, I don't think he would have wasted a drop of urine on another human if they burst into flames in front of him, and my guess is he'd would have stolen anything that was not nailed down or under lock and key. Near as I can remember, he was a pure waste of protoplasm, and yet one of the most graceful and kind people I've ever met, my mother Goldie, came from his union with Josie.
Somehow, through culture and biology these people continue living through me...like it or not, I see them often in the mirror. I recognize them in my reactions, my behavior, even my purposeful thought. And, even though I'm not comfortable with seeing "them" it seems we're stuck with each other.
Knowing that Ike is in my background, upstream in my DNA and cultural history, reminds me to not be too proud because the squirrel doesn't fall far from the Oak tree.
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