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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781468554052 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | AuthorHouse |
| Publication date: | 03/15/2012 |
| Pages: | 148 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.50(d) |
Read an Excerpt
Smiley!
A laughing matterBy Smiley Anders
AuthorHouse
Copyright © 2012 Smiley AndersAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4685-5405-2
Chapter One
Natchez Days
My mother described the day of my birth, Nov. 20, 1937, as a terrible day, weather-wise. (I think that's all she meant by "terrible.")
She said, "It was sleeting something awful, and your daddy had to borrow his brother John's car to get me to the hospital, because we didn't have a car at that time."
Of course, we didn't really need one at that time, because we lived close to downtown Natchez, Miss., and we could walk everywhere.
My mom continued, "We were in John's new Plymouth. It was early in the morning; the sun wasn't even up yet. The streets were slick with ice and we were so afraid we were going to wreck it, and it was a borrowed car, you know. We lived with my mother on Washington Street; we had an apartment in the back of her house. She told me to dress warm and not to slip down on the ice ..." (My mom is inclined to wander a bit while telling a story ...)
She always stressed to me how much trouble I caused by being born on such a miserable day, and I felt a certain resentment towards me for being such a thoughtless son.
The only memories I have of my earliest years come from photos of me—a chubby, cherubic kid with curly hair, stomping around a downtown park in my snowsuit, and later in a sailor suit, looking at goldfish in the big brick fountain or grinning at the camera with an "ain't I adorable?" grin.
We shared my grandmother's house with her and my mother's brother and sister, who were in high school.
My grandfather had split and married a red-haired employee known in our household as "Hag." At that time any divorce was a big scandal, and Natchez was so small that the divorced parties and their families couldn't help running into each other. This made for a terribly sticky situation, as I discovered later.
Once I got old enough to talk, my uncle, a teenager, delighted in teaching me words that would get me in trouble.
My parents told me that after one of his coaching sessions, they took me to the park in my stroller. An elderly gentleman sitting on a bench offered me a cookie, and as I munched on it my mother said to me, "Now what do you say?"
I told the old gent, "Damn good—got another one?"
I must have been very young indeed, and I'm not sure that story is true, but it's one I've heard all my life.
School Days
When I turned 5, I could walk up the hill on Washington Street to kindergarten at Carpenter School No. 2 (No. 1 was on the other side of town).
I have only a few memories of those early school days:
When we talked about ourselves in kindergarten, I meant to inform my classmates that my birthday was three days after my parents' first anniversary. But it came out, "I was born three days after my mama and daddy got married." My teacher called my mama to tell her of the gaffe, and I recall them both laughing over it.
The school must have at one time been heated by coal (or maybe still was),because the playground was covered with tiny black cinders. Falling down on your knees was a painful and dirty business, and I used to come home covered in black grime. This was back when clothes were washed by hand. So much for "good ole days."
The school building was two stories high, and our fire escape was a huge black metal tube in which we were supposed to slide down to safety. I seem to remember that the round door of the tube, which came out on the playground, was kept locked to keep kids out of it. This would have defeated the purpose of the thing in an actual emergency. The entrance to the tube on the second floor was just outside the window of one of the classrooms, and bullies would threaten to put little kids in it. Although that door was probably locked too ...
There was also an unheated swimming pool in the building. There were small windows around the room it was in, but precious little light or warmth got in. I never saw anyone swim in it; that water much have been icy cold. It was a scary place, and figured in more than a few nightmares.
When I got to fourth grade, my teacher was a formidable lady who had also taught my mama. She was a stickler for "penmanship," and hated the fact that I was left-handed. Back then it was common for teachers to make left-handers write with their right hand. This is said to cause stuttering, but since I already stuttered and was never required to change hands it didn't apply to me.
I didn't have to change hands because my teacher had tried to make my left-handed mother write right-handed. My mom cried about it to my grandfather, who was still living with her and my grandmother at that time.
My grandfather, Prospero DeMarco, was a dignified, imposing man who owned a downtown drug store with his optometrist's office over it.
As my mom tells the story, he marched to the school and confronted the teacher.
Whatever he threatened her with, it worked. My mom remained a lefty, and the teacher, while expressing her distaste for southpaws, left me alone. My penmanship grades suffered, but this was probably because I had (and still have) a lousy handwriting, not because I used the wrong hand.
By the time I left the Natchez school in the middle of the fourth grade to move to Baton Rouge, I had suffered two defeats.
I could not for the life of me master the multiplication tables, and realized even at that early age that the life of a mathematician was not for me.
And I came within one word, salamander, of winning the school's fourth-grade spelling championship.
I spelled it "salamandar." To this day I hate those little lizards. Slimy bastards ...
In addition to living in the same house with a doting grandmother, I was fortunate to have a passel of great-aunts and great-uncles in Natchez.
The members of my grandmother's large Italian family had all stayed there, and many of them didn't have children of their own. So they took turns having me over, taking me out to such attractions as Natchez possessed for a child, showering me with gifts and feeding me royally. I was indeed treated like a prince.
I must have been an insufferable little twit ...
Not having any children of their own, my aunts and uncles (I didn't realize the "great" part until much later) had no idea what constituted a children's book.
So at the age of 5 or 6, I owned not only "Tom Sawyer" but the even more adult "Huckleberry Finn" and, most significantly, an illustrated version of "TheArabian Nights" by Sir Richard Burton. The illustrations were lush, exotic and very graphic. They taught me that women are constructed in a different manner from men. It was some time, however, before this knowledge was of any practical use to me ...
More Natchez Memories
I still find this hard to believe, but all the evidence I can gather points to the fact that around the time I entered kindergarten at 5 years of age I was walking a block up the hill on Washington Street to the library at Carpenter No. 2 School and checking out books. Having a good library so close to the house was a wonderful way for a child to learn to love and devour books.
The first book I remember reading was "Winnie the Pooh" by A.A. Milne. I was fascinated by the adventures of Pooh, Tigger, Christopher Robin, and the rest, and didn't realize until later that I had learned to read with a truly classic children's story.
And I also remember this from my Natchez childhood—from age 6 to age 8, when we left Natchez, I read "Huckleberry Finn" six times. I didn't know that many people consider it the great American novel—I just thought it was one whale of a story.
Long before I read Proust, I realized that certain tastes could trigger remembrances of things past.
My great-grandfather John Druetta owned a grocery store on Franklin Street, run by his sons John and David. A stout old gentleman, he dressed every day in suit, tie and vest and sat at the front of the store greeting customers. It was an old-fashioned store—he had a huge mirrored mahogany icebox for milk, cheese, eggs and the few items that had to be kept cool. And despite the urging of his sons, he refused to invest in an electric refrigerator, much less a freezer.
When I visited, he would reach in the big glass cookie jar on the counter and get out a couple of ginger snaps. With a pocketknife on the watch chain across his formidable stomach he would cut a thick slice from a huge wheel of Cheddar cheese, and present me with a ginger snap-and-cheese sandwich. Today that's still how I eat ginger snaps.
The other taste I recall from my Natchez days is the gentle sweetness of feather-light ladyfingers.
I could easily walk to downtown Natchez from our house, and by the time I was in second grade I was going to the movie houses by myself. The Ritz was the home of cowboy movies, while The Baker Grand, an upscale theater, leaned toward adventure movies—Sinbad, Robin Hood, etc. Both had multiple-movie kiddie matinees—two features, a cartoon, a live-action comedy short (Three Stooges were a favorite) and a newsreel (during the war years these were really scary for a little kid).
Between the Baker Grand and our home was a little bakery, where I'd get a small bag of delicate ladyfingers if I had any money left after the movie ticket and the popcorn and Coke. I'd stroll along past the antebellum mansions that I took for granted (figuring every town had houses like that) and rehash the adventures I'd enjoyed viewing in the theater. It was a good time to be a kid.
The only blemish on these idyllic years was a sizable one—World War II.
To us the war meant what it did to other Americans on the home front—victory gardens, scrap metal drives, ration books. But it was more personal, too.
My uncle Prospero Louis DeMarco, named for my grandfather, had joined the Royal Canadian Air Force to get in on the fighting before America entered the war. But he was with the U.S. Army Air Corps, navigating a B-17, when his plane was shot down and he became a prisoner of war in Germany.
My grandmother's brother John had built a house next door to hers, and his son, John Durden, was also shot down and imprisoned at about the same time. So we had two adjacent houses filled with tension and dread. Both returned safely, but it was a bad time for all of us. I picked up on the tension even though I was too young to think of the war as much more than a great adventure.
When I try to recall my early years in Natchez, a few visions jump out at me—the beauty of the bend in the Mississippi River from the high bluff; walks with my mom and dad to cowboy movies on Saturday night; my Aunt Nan's oyster dressing at Christmas time; the family headstones and crypts in the old cemetery overlooking the river; helping Uncle John Anders and Aunt Mollie Belle bottle honey from their hives on Franklin Street; the oily little native pecans from our backyard tree; the black kids singing "Blackberries, sweet blackberries" as they walked down the street on Saturday mornings; Ernest the vegetable man stopping his horse-drawn wagon in front of our house; the ice man handing out slivers of ice to the kids on a summer morning;my grandmother getting me up from my nap and sneaking me past my sleeping mother so she could buy me ice cream from a horse-drawn wagon.
My dad was drafted into the Army at a late stage in the war, and it was over before he went overseas.
A short time after he came back, we learned that the meat company he worked for (Swift & Co.) had an opening in Baton Rouge that he had accepted. So it was on to the (relatively) big city and new adventures ...
On To Baton Rouge
The move to Baton Rouge must have been a wrenching one for my parents: my dad, a country boy from Gloster, Miss., was taking over the job of superintendent of the Swift meat operation, with a dozen or more men under his supervision, and my mom, who had never lived outside Natchez, was moving to a bigger, strange new town with me and her newborn baby.
Yes, when I was 8 I became an older brother. Louis came along after Daddy returned from his stint in the service. I can't say I welcomed the squealing little bundle of joy. I enjoyed the life of an only child; I was born to be spoiled. I had as little to do with the baby as I could.
Later, though, Louis and I would grow to be great friends. As I recall, this occurred when I was around 30 ...
Our first home in Baton Rouge was an attic apartment on East Boulevard, walking distance to downtown.
I was impressed with the size of downtown Baton Rouge, with its bustling Third Street, several big movie houses and department stores that seemed to sell everything imaginable.
Two things stand out about my first days in Baton Rouge: telephone numbers there had five digits, compared to only three in Natchez (our number on Washington Street had been 619); and there were dark, mysterious places called "cocktail lounges" all over the place.
Natchez was officially dry, although bootleggers were numerous, and booze was ridiculously easy to obtain. My uncle Harry stocked bourbon by the case, and when he ran low he picked up the phone, gave the operator a number, said "Bill, this is Harry. We need a delivery." A short time later there would be a "thump" on the front porch and we would go out there to find a case of Early Times in front of the door.
Some of the cocktail lounges served food, and sometimes my folks would take me with them when they went out to eat and quaff a few brews.
At one of them, the Liberty Lounge, my mom ate her first boiled crab (yes, a single, lonesome crab). Natchez wasn't a big seafood town, and Mama loved all kinds of fish, so Daddy ordered her a crab and got a big kick out of watching her try to eat the hard-shelled crimson crustacean.
My folks soon learned that spending the summer in an un-air-conditioned attic apartment wasn't going to work, so Mama, baby Louis and I returned to Natchez while my dad worked and shopped for a house.
When we returned that fall, we had a pre-World War II asbestos-sided two-bedroom, one-bath home in North Baton Rouge, near the Esso refinery and petrochemical plants. My dad never tired of telling people the dimensions of the lot: 60 feet wide and 125 feet deep. I soon learned that all that lawn just meant a lot of grass to be mowed.
Back To School
I started fifth grade shortly after we moved into our house on Sherwood Drive. I had not had time to make friends, and my first few days in school did not go well. In Natchez, wearing blue jeans to school was, if not forbidden, at least frowned on. In North Baton Rouge, populated by industrial workers from rural Mississippi, the dress standards were considerably more relaxed. I quickly learned that corduroy knickers, common in Natchez, simply would not do in North Baton Rouge.
My school was Gilmer Wright Elementary, named for a former school superintendent. At that school I had my first experience with racial injustice.
Gilmer Wright had been built as a school for black students, and it was surrounded by the modest frame homes of black families. But after the war, as white families began to fill up the old and new homes in North Baton Rouge, Gilmer Wright was turned into a white school.
This meant that the black kids who lived across the street from the school had to be bused out to black schools several miles away, as they watched white kids going to "their" school.
Long before busing became a big issue, I saw it working not to bring the races together but to keep them apart.
At that age, I can't claim to have thought much about the segregated society I was in; everybody I knew accepted it, and did their best to justify it. But something told me the black kids who lived across the street from Gilmer Wright were getting screwed. As indeed they were ...
Two big things happened during my Gilmer Wright days. My folks got their first car and I got to be a Quiz Kid.
Living so near downtown Natchez, we walked everywhere we needed to go, and my great-uncles from my grandfather Druetta's store delivered our groceries, which we ordered daily by phone. But in the suburbs of North Baton Rouge, a car was a necessity. (My dad had a company car, a red '46 Plymouth coupe, but he wasn't supposed to use it for personal use, and was not happy when he had to haul us around in it.)
The shiny black '49 Plymouth he drove home in that historic day wasn't exactly a luxury car, and would be regarded as boxy today. But to us it was our chariot, our freedom machine. It meant trips to the stores, Sunday drives, and best of all, nights at the drive-in movies.
So what if summer heat and mosquitoes made the movie visits uncomfortable, and so what if the sound coming over the speakers you put in your car window was often fuzzy—by God, we were at the movies, munching Mom's homemade popcorn and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and drinking her homemade Kool-Aid out of plastic cups. It was heaven!
About the time we got the car, I found that my teacher had put me up for the Quiz Kids radio show on WJBO, which broadcast the show live before a sizable audience in its auditorium. It was sponsored by Jack's Cookies, which meant that even if I flamed out I would get a goodly supply of vanilla wafers.
But I surprised myself by winning Quiz Kid of the Week and Quiz Kid of the Month. I thought I was on my way to winning Quiz Kid of the Year and a trip to the national radio show in Chicago. But I lost for Quiz Kid of the Quarter.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Smiley! by Smiley Anders Copyright © 2012 by Smiley Anders. Excerpted by permission of AuthorHouse. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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