Sweet and Sour Pie: A Wisconsin Boyhood Page 2

  didn’t mind baiting her own hook, but she drew the line at bats.

  We spent the rest of the day unpacking. That night Dad built a

  fire in the living room fireplace to drive out any bats that might be lurking in the flue. When the fire was burning nicely he popped

  some corn over it and took a bowl into the kitchen where Mom was sitting at the table, reading through the Manitowoc Herald-Times.

  The front page was full of gloomy news about the Korean War and

  an earthquake, but there were a few bright spots inside.

  “Kroger’s has chuck roast for $0.69 a pound,” Mom said, “and

  Penney’s is selling dress shirts with nonwilting collars for $1.75. And how about this—the Studebaker dealer has a Champion just like

  ours for $1,517.63, brand new and delivered.”

  “Too much,” Dad said. “We only paid $1,450.00 in Lorain.”

  Mom put a handful of popcorn in her mouth and continued to

  read. “Needs more salt,” she said. Suddenly she looked up from the paper and stopped chewing.

  “How did you make this?” she asked.

  “In the wire popper,” Dad said. Mom blew a shower of half-

  chewed kernels onto the table.

  “A bat was in there!” she said. She went to the sink, ran a glass of water, and rinsed out her mouth.

  “Charlotte, I was holding the popper over an open fire. It’s

  sterilized.”

  “I don’t care!” Mom said. “That popcorn has bat stuff in it. Give it to Rip.”

  “The last thing we need in the house is a dog full of popcorn,”

  Dad said. “I’ll eat it.”

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  “Don’t expect a good-night kiss,” Mom said.

  “All right, all right,” Dad said. “I’ll give it to the chipmunks.” He headed for the back door with the bowl. “Not exactly a daughter of the pioneers, are you?” he said.

  “You got it,” Mom said.

  In fact, back in northern Ohio, Mom’s ancestors had been

  pioneers. But 150 years had gone by since then, and most of our

  Ohio relatives were city people who had never been west of Toledo.

  In their minds, “Manitowoc, Wisconsin” called up sinister images of brooding forests and drooling wolves. They suspected that Dad’s transfer had sentenced Mom to a short and nasty life in the woods.

  “Poor Charlotte,” they whispered, as they shot glances at her and tut-tutted sympathetically.

  But Manitowoc was no wilderness. In 1950 we found it to be

  Germanic, gemütlich and obsessively neat, a shipbuilding and manufacturing town of about twenty-seven thousand bounded by Lake

  Michigan on the east, farms on the west and south, and the small city of Two Rivers to the north.

  Our house was a former hunting lodge on River Road, just out-

  side the western city limits and on the edge of a deep, wooded ravine that was the forest primeval to me. Across the road was a dairy farm with craggy Holstein cows and bulls. They bellowed at all hours, made green muffins the size of manhole covers, and occasionally

  rode each other.

  “Circus cows,” I called them, until Dad explained what they were doing. In those days bulls and cows carried out their romances in plain sight, without technical assistance and purely for the fun of it. I felt pretty grown up after I understood what was going on, and appreciated Manitowoc a lot more. One thing Lorain didn’t have

  was cows in love.

  But a certain break-in period was required before we got used to 10

  Beans for Breakfast

  Manitowoc and it got used to us. For openers there was our struggle with Clem Becker, Wisconsin Bell, and Augie from Whitelaw.

  Clem Becker was a wholesale meat dealer in Two Rivers. Farmers

  with cows to sell called him early in the morning to check prices.

  But as soon as our phone was hooked up we started getting calls to Clem from a farmer named Augie who lived in the crossroads village of Whitelaw, a couple of miles west of us. The first day after the phone was installed, it rang about 5:00 a.m. and Dad ran downstairs to answer it.

  “Hey, Clem?” the caller said. “This is Augie.”

  In the background Dad could hear the clang of milk pails and a

  chorus of moos.

  “You’ve got the wrong number,” Dad responded. “This is Dave

  Crehore in Manitowoc.”

  But the farmer couldn’t hear Dad over the noise in the barn.

  “Whatcha payin’ for canners and cutters today, Clem?” Augie

  asked. “I got a load ready to go.”

  “I’m not paying anything,” Dad said. “I’m not in the cattle

  business.”

  “What did you say?” the farmer asked. “You’re not in business?

  Chrissake, Clem, what happened?”

  Dad gently hung up the phone, went into the kitchen, lit his

  pipe, and put the coffee on. Just about the time the percolator began to gurgle, the phone rang again.

  “Hey, Clem? Augie!”

  “This isn’t Clem. You’ve got the wrong number again. This is

  2-3515 in Manitowoc. If you want to talk to Clem, call his number.”

  “I am calling his number,” the farmer said. “Been calling it for years. I got it written right here on the milkhouse wall. It’s 2-3515 in Two Rivers!”

  “That’s my number too,” Dad said, “but 2-3515 in Manitowoc.”

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  “Well, that’s a helluva note,” Augie said. “I’ll call Clem and get it straightened out.”

  “No, don’t call Clem, you’ll just get me again!”

  “I suppose so,” Augie said. “Hey, it was nice talking to you, anyway. I gotta finish milking. Good-bye!”

  “Yeah, good-bye.”

  Dad figured Augie’s calls were just a one-time comedy of errors

  until the same thing happened the next morning. Then he called the phone company and got a supervisor. The supervisor seemed to

  think Dad was pulling her leg.

  “You’re telling me that calls from Whitelaw to a butcher in Two

  Rivers are going to you in Manitowoc?” she asked.

  “So it would appear,” Dad said. “Some of them, anyway. We’ve

  got the same number, and your equipment can’t tell the difference.”

  “Mr. Crehore, that is impossible.”

  “Tell you what,” Dad said. “You be here about five o’clock

  tomorrow morning and find out just how possible it is.”

  “Now, let’s not lose our tempers . . .”

  During September, we heard from Augie once or twice a week.

  He always apologized and made some small talk before getting

  back to his milking. In October and November his calls dwindled

  to one a month, and we got what turned out to be his last call in late December.

  “Hey, Clem?”

  “Nope, you’ve got Dave again.”

  “Jesus Christ, I’m sorry.”

  “It’s OK, Augie, I’m an early riser anyway. Merry Christmas!”

  “Hey, Merry Christmas, Dave.” Augie said. “Good-bye—I gotta

  finish the milking.”

  We never heard from him again; either the phone company had

  solved the problem or Augie had sold his cows. We kind of missed him for a while.

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  There was some trouble with the mail, too. Our Ohio friends

  and relatives could spell Crehore, of course, but they had a lot of trouble with Manitowoc. And our new Wisconsin friends could

  spell Manitowoc but insisted on translating Crehore, which is Irish, into various German equivalents. In early January of 1951, we got a blizzard of Christmas cards forwarded to us from various Creagers, Cramers, and Crugers
, and from places like Manawa, Manistee, and Manistique. Mail from people who couldn’t spell Crehore or Manitowoc wasn’t a problem, since it never got to us.

  Finally, there were difficulties with the spoken language. Among other things, we faced the pop/soda confusion and the mystery of

  “enso.”

  A few days after we moved in, Dad drove to Felix Woytal’s Clover Farm Store in the nearby hamlet of Manitowoc Rapids to pick up

  some groceries. Rip loved to ride in the car, so Dad took him along.

  Among Dad’s purchases was a six-pack of Coca-Cola, which

  in those days cost about a quarter and came in eight-ounce glass bottles. Felix punched the price of each item into the register and hit the total bar. The cash drawer jumped out and Felix made change.

  “Two forty-nine, two fifty, three, four, five,” he said, as he dropped the coins and singles into Dad’s hand. Then he began bagging the cans and boxes. When he got to the Coke, he paused.

  “You want the soda in a bag?” he asked.

  Dad looked at his shopping list. As far as he knew, soda was a

  white powder that came in an orange box with an arm and hammer

  on it. Every now and then Mom asked him to buy some. But he was

  sure he hadn’t bought any that day.

  “I don’t believe I had any soda,” Dad said.

  “Well, here it is, right here,” Felix said, and picked up the Coke.

  “Oh,” Dad said. “See, where I come from we call that ‘pop.’”

  Felix narrowed his eyes and gave Dad a once-over. “Pop?” he said, doubtfully. “Where do you come from?” he asked.

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  “Up the hill and a half-mile east on River Road,” Dad said.

  “I mean before that,” Felix said.

  “We just moved here from Ohio.”

  “Ohio,” Felix said, as though that explained a lot. He smiled and pushed the bags of groceries toward Dad. “That’s the one that’s

  round on the ends and high in the middle, enso?”

  Dad smiled back, but he couldn’t laugh at Felix’s joke, which was old even in 1950.

  Felix didn’t mind. “Well, it’s a nice day, enso?” he said.

  That made two “ensos,” thrown in for no apparent reason.

  Dad had understood Felix to say “and so . . .” and waited for him to finish his sentence.

  There was a short silence. To hurry things along, Dad asked,

  “And so . . . what?”

  “And so nothing, just enso,” Felix said. Exasperation was creep-

  ing into his voice. Dad picked up his groceries and left.

  Outside, he found the windows of the Studebaker fogged with

  beagle breath and smeared with nose prints. Rip was jumping from the backseat to the front and back again, barking and keeping an eye on two scruffy terriers that were peeing on the Studie’s tires.

  “Beat it!” Dad said. “Enso, or whatever the magic word is.

  Scram!”

  The terriers ran to a bucket by the side of the store to tank up on water, and then came back and flopped down in the shade of the gas pumps to sleep until the next car pulled up. Dad bent down and

  fondled their ears while they smiled and panted at him.

  It occurred to Dad that having your tires peed on by gas pump

  dogs was part of the small-town life he was learning to lead, and he kind of liked it. “Such a deal, boys,” Dad said to the terriers. “Nothing to do but drink, eat, sleep, bark, and piss. A lot of people would trade places with you in a minute.”

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  A few days later, a neighbor translated “enso” for us.

  “My wife spoke German at home,” he said, “and she says ‘enso’

  comes from nicht wahr? which is German for ‘not true?’ When Germans talk to other Germans, they stick nicht wahr? on the end of every other sentence to be polite. So in English it probably started out as ‘ain’t it so?’ and finally got worn down to ‘enso.’”

  Once we knew what it meant, we were tempted to say “enso” just

  like the natives, but we never really got the hang of it.

  While we were moving in, one of the first things Mom unpacked

  was her Sears and Roebuck Silvertone radio. When Dad was gone

  during the war she had left it on all day, just for company, and got hooked on soap operas like Ma Perkins, The Romance of Helen Trent, Just Plain Bill, Our Gal Sunday, Portia Faces Life, and Young Dr.

  Malone. She usually followed six soaps at a time, somehow keeping track of the characters’ tangled lives and endless disappointments.

  Dad preferred the evening comedy shows like Duffy’s Tavern and Fibber McGee and Molly and comedians like Fred Allen, Jack Benny, and Red Skelton. But he admired Mom’s ability to keep up with the flimsy plots of her soaps. “It beats me, Charlotte,” he used to say,

  “how you can remember all those stories at once.”

  “It comes from having a degree in English literature,” Mom said.

  “If you can follow Jane Austen, you can follow Helen Trent.”

  One afternoon during our first week in Manitowoc, Mom was

  trying to tune in Ma Perkins and got classical music instead. She listened for a while and learned the source: WOMT, the voice of

  Manitowoc, at 1240 on the AM dial.

  If Ma wasn’t available a little culture wouldn’t hurt, Mom figured, so she left the music on while she was getting supper ready. The announcer was a local man who had a good radio voice but was

  more at home with polkas.

  “And-a now,” he intoned, “that wartime favorite, the symphony

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  number five by Ludwig van Beethoven, played for your listening

  pleasure by Arthur Toscanini and his orchestra.”

  He cued up the first 78-rpm record and started the thirty-minute symphony with only fifteen minutes left in the show. Mom gritted her teeth when he faded out of the andante con moto and into a

  commercial for Dick Brothers Bakery. But after a while she got used to it. Beethoven with commercials was better than no Beethoven at all.

  School started right after Labor Day. Because we lived outside

  the city limits, I had to go to the State Graded School in Manitowoc Rapids, about a mile and a half away. It was a two-story yellow brick building with an aroma of fuel oil, floor wax, old sneakers, and chalk.

  There were three classrooms: kindergarten through second grade;

  third grade through fifth, taught by Mrs. Eberhardt; and upstairs, grades six through eight, taught by Mr. Lensmire. I do not mention their first names because in those days teachers were called Miss, Missus, or Mister. As far as kids were concerned, teachers did not have first names.

  My first day at Rapids State Graded was a triumph. When I got

  there in the morning I was nominally a second-grader. Mr. Lens-

  mire, the principal, looked over my school records from Lorain and handed me a copy of The Poky Little Puppy.

  “Can you read this?” he asked. Could I read it! The Poky Little Puppy was a particular favorite of mine.

  I began the first page of gentle, flowing prose. “Five little puppies dug a hole under the fence and went for a walk in the wide, wide world.”

  I turned the page. “Through the meadow they went, down the

  road, over the bridge, across the green grass, and up the hill, one after the other . . .”

  “Very good,” Mr. Lensmire said. He took some change from his

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  pocket and put a half dollar, a quarter, a dime, a nickel, and three pennies on his desk. “How much is this?” he asked.

  “Ninety-three cents,” I said. He removed the quarter. “Sixty-

  eight.” He removed the dime and one of the pennies. “Fifty-seven.”

&nb
sp; “Excellent,” said Mr. Lensmire. “Two more questions. Do you

  know your phone number?”

  “Yes, 2-3515.”

  “And when were you born?”

  “November 17, 1942.”

  “You belong in third grade,” he said. He took me by the hand

  and we walked down the stairs to Mrs. Eberhardt’s room.

  That morning, Mom had driven Dad to work at the shipyard

  and then dropped me off at school. Before she left, she asked a boy in the playground when the school day was over.

  “The little kids get out at three and the big kids at three thirty,”

  he said. Mom figured I was a little kid, so she came back at three, but not in the Studebaker. In the meantime her father, my Grandpa

  Lester, had arrived from Lorain on a visit. He was a tall, austere man who wore dark suits and drove a Packard Clipper, a bulbous bathtub of a car that competed unsuccessfully with Cadillac.

  When I got outside, kids were standing around, admiring the

  Packard. I climbed into the backseat and the kids murmured.

  “Where have you been?” Mom asked. “We’ve been waiting since

  three o’clock.”

  “Oh, don’t you know?” I said proudly. “I’m in third grade now,

  and the big kids don’t get out ’til three thirty.” Grandpa began to snort, which was how he laughed.

  “Get back in there,” he said. “In a week you’ll be all done!”

  The next morning Grandpa drove me to school in the Packard.

  Kids were waiting for us to arrive.

  “Jeez, kid, is that your show-fer?” one of them asked. “No, that’s 17

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  my grandpa,” I said. They seemed relieved, but a grandpa with a

  Packard still made me a rich kid by Rapids standards. The Packard was a barrier between us.

  Our relations were cordial but distant for a couple of days. Then Dad drove up one afternoon behind the wheel of a 1925 Model A

  Ford he had bought for fifty dollars as a go-to-work car. He was wearing greasy coveralls and a hard hat, and from then on I was one of the gang. Rapids kids understood old cars and coveralls and hard hats.

  There were about thirty of us in Mrs. Eberhardt’s room, ten or

  eleven in each grade, and it was a good system. When third grade was being taught, I had the advantage of individual attention, and when the fourth- or fifth-graders were reciting I could do my home-work, look at green and purple countries on the big pull-down maps of the world, read library books, or listen in to get a head start on what I would learn the next year.