by Barry Moser
I had my fair share of insults to my young self-esteem, the same as Tommy. In the classroom some of my classmates called me “idiot” and “imbecile” under their breath because of my inability to memorize state capitals and the parts of speech. On the playground I was called “fatso” and “lard ass” and “slowpoke,” because I was a fat kid and couldn’t run very fast.
I didn’t enjoy recess very much because I didn’t have many playground skills. I was always the last boy to be chosen for the softball team because I was slow and I couldn’t hit the ball. And I had absolutely no sense of strategy. I was at my best when pretending to be a horse for the girls. And for this I was called “mama’s boy” and “sissy.” They giddyapped me all over their side of the playground with imaginary reins and bits. I could swing and seesaw pretty well, too, especially when I was swinging and seesawing with the girls. It seems that I have always enjoyed the company of women over the company of men.
If the temperature outside dipped below forty degrees, we had to stay indoors at recess and after lunch when normally we would be outside playing. As I think on this now, having lived through forty-eight cold New England winters, I wonder if the forty-degree rule might have had something to do with the kids who lived in the Chandliss Home, an orphanage that was across the street from Sunnyside. Perhaps they didn’t have clothes that were warm enough to withstand even a moderate forty degrees.
SUNNYSIDE DIDN’T HAVE an art room, so when we had our rare art lessons we worked at our everyday desks. I might have looked forward to school more had there been art or craft lessons every day—or even once a week—but there weren’t. Our curriculum was typical of the time—the three Rs, as our teachers called it: Readin’, Ritin’, and ’Rithmetic. Art and music were nonessential frills to the overall program, much like Bible lessons—though I am sure that our Bible lessons were considered far more important than our art lessons. This was the South, after all, where religion is like summer humidity (if you will allow a Faulknerian allusion)—you just can’t get away from it, as hard as you might try.
No matter what grade we were in, we used the same uninspiring materials in our art lessons: colored construction paper, scissors, glue, poster paints, cheap brushes, and crayons. Despite the mundane materials, this is where I was first told that I had a talent for drawing. I don’t really believe that I drew any better than any of the other kids, and I certainly did not draw better than Tommy. I just drew things that were more “realistic” than my classmates, and my teachers, thinking that a gift for verisimilitude was synonymous with artistic talent, patted me on the back. It was rare that I ever got academic pats on the back, so those occasional approbations felt good. And it’s worth mentioning that I was fortunate that I never had a teacher “correct” my drawings. No one ever told me that I had drawn something wrong—as if any child could ever draw anything wrong.
I may have been the last boy chosen to play a game of softball, but I was always the first kid chosen for a team when it came time to paint the Thanksgiving or Christmas mural, and that made me proud. The only thing that did. I don’t know if anything at Sunnyside ever made my big brother proud. If it did, he didn’t brag or go on about it, and that would not have been like him.
AIRPLANES
IN THE SUMMER OF 1949 OR 1950 Tommy and I had our first airplane rides. Our uncle Bob knew a man, Frank Earhardt, who owned a 1946 Piper Cub Sea Scout. Knowing our fascination with flying (mine especially), Bob, ever the salesman, talked his friend into taking us boys up for a spin. We had to go one at a time since the Sea Scout had only two tandem seats, one for the pilot and one for a passenger.
Tommy went first, as usual. They taxied away from the dock, picked up speed, and lifted off the water. It climbed, banked to the left, and was soon out of sight. I waited for what seemed a very long time for that little yellow plane to return so it would be my turn to go up. I don’t think ten minutes had passed when it touched down on Lake Chickamauga and taxied back into the Harrison Bay marina. When Bob and Daddy had it tied up to a cleat on the dock, Earhardt got out and helped Tommy out of the cockpit. He was smiling ear to ear and popped me playfully on the arm as he passed by me.
Then it was my turn.
We taxied out of the marina, took off to the west, and climbed up over the lake. It wasn’t a long ride—we probably turned back four or five miles out, somewhere over Booker T. Washington State Park more than likely—but it was a glorious experience for me.
Piper Cub Sea Scout, c. 1950
I SPENT COUNTLESS HOURS drawing airplanes, of which the Piper Sea Scout had become one of my favorites, along with my favorite warbirds—Corsairs, Spitfires, and Mustangs. I even equipped some of those with floats when it struck me to do so. I drew airplanes on everything I could lay hands on: stationery that Daddy or Uncle Bob brought home from their travels, wax paper from Mother’s kitchen cabinet, butcher paper from the grocery store, paper sacks, walls.
Occasionally Daddy brought home long pieces of brown Kraft paper they used at his sporting goods store to wrap parcels. Tommy and I each took one or two pieces and drew alone, or if Daddy brought home only one long sheet, we often spread it out on the living room floor and drew together.
The drawings were usually based on the radio programs we listened to, like The Roy Rogers Show, The Lone Ranger, and Sergeant Preston of the Yukon (who flew a Cessna 310 named Songbird and was accompanied by his malamute, Yukon King, and his niece, Penny King).
But this was in the aftermath of World War II and so we based many of our drawings on the newsreels we saw at the movies: Paramount News, Pathé News, the March of Time, and the many recurrent clips of victorious Allied battles in both theaters of the war.
Sometimes we based our drawings on the movies we saw: Fighter Squadron, Battleground, Home of the Brave, Halls of Montezuma, The Desert Fox, and John Wayne in the Flying Leathernecks. Of course, the sanitized film clips and the patently jingoistic movies gave us no sense of the true, horrific nature of war, so Tommy and I found it all very heroic and exciting, especially when the clips and movies involved aircraft and American victories.
We spread out the four- or five-foot piece of paper on the floor and lay down next to each other. Daddy sat in his favorite overstuffed chair, smoking his pipe and reading the evening paper, the Chattanooga News-Free Press.
Tommy, more often than not, was the Americans, and I was the Japs or the Krauts, unless I whined about it and he let me be the Americans. We drew our airplanes in flight. Bombers and fighters. Mine flying in this direction, his in that. We drew tanks and troops on the ground or ships and submarines at sea. We took turns opening our bomb-bay doors and dropping our bombs. We alternated turns opening fire from our fighter planes. All this was, of course, accompanied by the best sound effects we could muster. Rata-tat-tat. KaBOOM! KaBOOM!
Machine gun bullets were indicated by dotted lines that rarely went straight. We bent the trajectory at will in order to hit our targets. A drawing like this could take half an hour or better, and by the time Mother called us to the table for dinner, the entire surface was usually scribbled on and punctured all over where the crayons and pencils had torn through the paper in overly enthusiastic explosions.
Tommy always drew better than I did. That he was three years older than I was certainly a factor—though I think that his natural meticulousness had as much to do with it as anything.
When Tommy drew bombers he included details like insignias, machine guns and machine gun turrets, serial numbers, trim tabs, pitot tubes, antennae, and radio wires. And if his drawing was large enough, he drew in the flight crew. When his airplanes opened their bomb-bay doors, the bombs fell away in straight, evenly spaced, perfectly vertical files. Neat and orderly, his natural proclivity that would serve him well when, a few years later, he would attend a military school. I envied him and did my best to emulate his detailed and orderly drawings. I couldn’t do it. My planes were drawn sloppily and disproportionately. My bombs fell away from my bombers in clutte
red, backward-sweeping, ragged arcs rather than neatly spaced vertical rows like his. My bombs fell in graduated stages from the horizontal as they departed the belly of the plane to the vertical when they struck their targets—which, actually, is the way such bombs behaved. The best part of my drawings were the scrawls I made when my bombs struck their targets. But in trying to draw like he did, I think my skills improved, even at that age, like a tennis player who plays best against a better player. That meticulousness stayed with Tommy all his life. As an adult he spent hours polishing his shoes, cleaning his guns, and trimming his hair. Every Sunday he ironed fifteen shirts. Five for him and five each for his boys. His son Tyson told me that his Daddy put so much starch in their jeans before he ironed them that they could stand up all on their own. Nothing in Tommy’s world was ever cluttered or messy—even the clothes in his closet were organized by kind and color, his shoes orderly on the floor—quite the opposite of his younger brother, then or now, whose closets are more like Fibber McGee’s.
Our drawings were done when Mother called us to dinner,
“Tommy. Barry. Ches. Y’all come on in and sit down and eat now.”
TOMMY’S DRAWINGS WERE informed by his methodical and military wont and sense of order, precision, control, and regularity—a perfectly valid point of view from which to work, and a sensibility that served him well in his life in the world of finance and real estate. Had Tommy gone on to become an artist I imagine him in the camp of Josef Albers or Frank Stella in the sixties, or perhaps one of the hyperrealists like Richard Estes or Richard Haden.
My drawings, on the other hand, were informed—or so it would seem—by logic, spontaneity, and observation, which is an equally valid point of view from which to work.
THERE WAS ONE DRAWING I remember doing all by myself lying there on Mother’s Karastan rug. I don’t know where Tommy was that afternoon, but I had this big piece of Kraft paper all to myself. Daddy was smoking his pipe and reading his evening paper as usual. Mother was fixing dinner in the kitchen. This was four or five years after August 5, 1945, and I was trying to draw a Boeing B-29 Superfortress as accurately as my ten-year-old skills allowed. I had seen a B-29 in a newsreel (probably the Enola Gay or the Bockscar since it was carrying an atomic bomb) and was struck by the rounded, heavily glazed nose assembly. I was drawing it as large as I could and imitating as well as I could my brother’s use of insignias and other details. I drew the bomb-bay doors opening accompanied by a loud “skreeeeeak” that I thought might come from the metal-against-metal noise bomb-bay doors might make as they opened and locked into position.
Below the open bomb-bay doors, I drew one very large bomb. It was nearly half the size of the B-29 itself and was falling parallel to the fuselage, just like Tommy’s bombs did.
On the side of this big bomb I wrote “A-TOMMY” in big letters because I thought it was named after my big brother.
THE MITCHELL
ONE SUNNY DAY IN 1949, Tommy and I were just home from school and were outside playing in the plum tree between our house and Floyd’s. We had tired of our game and were lying in the grass trying to find animal shapes in the scattered clouds as they scudded overhead.
All of a sudden, a North American B-25 Mitchell, a World War II medium bomber, came into view from the north.
It was on fire.
We watched the white smoke trailing from the burning plane. It was losing altitude fast. We watched as men jumped, their parachutes opening and then dancing white against the cobalt sky. We saw something small fall from the plane, but couldn’t tell what it was. Just before the plane disappeared over Missionary Ridge, the port engine fell off and we watched it drop, white smoke trailing after it. When the Mitchell passed from view, the smoke trails from the port wing and its lost engine dissipated in the early autumn sky. White parachutes bobbed and lingered below the scant, lazy clouds.
The plane was piloted by William E. Blair of Dallas, Texas, a thirty-year-old Army Air Force Captain. He had taken off from Augusta, Georgia, and was headed for Spokane, Washington. There were two other crew members, a copilot and a flight engineer. And there were six passengers aboard, all military policemen. An hour out of Augusta a fire broke out in an oil line inside the port wing. Blair dived to eight thousand feet trying to extinguish the flames, to no avail. At six thousand feet the fire had spread into the fuselage and Blair ordered everybody to bail out, which they did. Alone in the plane, Blair circled the city in an attempt to approach Chattanooga’s Lovell Field, the municipal airfield that was only a few miles from where Tommy and I stood watching the drama unfold.
Magazine and newspaper accounts reported that the copilot parachuted safely and came to rest tangled up in a tree; that one of the MPs, Robert Hamby, slammed into the side of a bank building before landing on the sidewalk; that another landed on top of a school; and that yet another got caught up in telephone lines. Another man, Norman Henson, jumped from the rear of the plane, but his parachute didn’t open. Nobody knows exactly what happened, but it seems likely that he failed to attach his parachute harness properly and when he bailed out it slipped off. He fell to his death in the playground of Ridgedale Elementary School on Dodds Avenue. Witnesses said that when he hit the ground he bounced six feet in the air and left a depression several inches deep in the playground. One horrified schoolboy who saw it happen reported that when Henson hit the ground there was a loud “pop” that sounded like a gun.
Henson must have been that small thing Tommy and I saw falling to the ground.
The disjunct engine fell on a house on East Twenty-first Street, tearing off a corner of the porch and part of the roof before hitting the ground six feet away. It was reported that it bounced ten feet into the air, and then rolled smoking into the street.
Blair’s shirt, his captain’s bars on the epaulets and identification cards in the pockets, was found on top of a car on Twenty-fourth Street. Both sleeves were burned. He must have ripped off his burning shirt and thrown it out the window. He stayed with the plane as long as he could, all the while desperately trying to find a field or some open space to set his dying aircraft down without killing a lot of people. He jumped at the last minute. The plane crashed into the east side of Missionary Ridge near the Bachman tubes on Highway 41. Captain Blair’s body was found a few hundred yards from the smoldering wreckage of his Mitchell, the ripcord of his parachute was still in his hand.
When he got home from work, Daddy took Tommy and me to see what was left of the B-25. On the way Tommy and I were excited about seeing a real bomber up close. But when we got there, there was nothing to see but the clear-cut swath chamfered into the local vegetation, and parts of the plane strewn all over the hillside, some still smoldering. I can’t say that either of us sensed the tragedy that all this implied, nor how much worse it could have been were it not for the remarkable courage of William Blair, but I can say that we were both very quiet as we surveyed the ravaged and blackened earth from which heat was still rising. Daddy tried to talk a cop into letting us get closer but we really didn’t want to get any closer.
NIGGER TOMMY
RAIN WAS ABOUT THE only thing that could keep Tommy and me from playing outside in the summer, though some rainstorms invited us to build small and unsuccessful dams to hold back rivulets of rainwater that flowed down our short gravel driveway.
The backyard of our house was tiny compared to those of Velma’s and Floyd’s, but since the three yards were fenceless and contiguous it was like one big yard. A big yard attendant to three small houses, a dilapidated garage, a chicken coop, a badminton court, a rose trellis, a dog run, and an enclosed chicken yard where our aunt Grace raised chickens for Sunday dinners. Tommy told me many years later that watching her wring the necks of those hens on Sunday mornings was what turned him against eating anything with feathers on it.
It was in those yards that Tommy and I and the occasional friends, James Hoyt and Marlowe Mayfield, or Jimmy and Dickie Livingood, played dodge ball, passed footballs, and where
I learned how to ride a bicycle. It was where, in summer, we captured June bugs, tied a piece of thread on a hind leg, and flew them in circles around our heads like tiny model airplanes. It was where on summer evenings Tommy and I caught lightning bugs, put them in mayonnaise jars with holes punched in the lids, and went to sleep with their eerie phosphorescence pulsating in the darkness of our room. We played cowboys and Indians and jumped out of Floyd’s plum tree with bath towels tied around our necks pretending to be Superman or Captain Marvel. We rode our bikes up and down, and threw sticks and balls for Lady, Velma’s German shepherd, and our runty bulldog, Pinocchio. They were buddies, Lady and Pinocchio.
I wish my brother and I had been buddies, but we weren’t. Now that I am old and Tommy is dead, I wish more than ever that we had been close when we were kids. But the fact is that my older brother played with me when he had nobody else to play with.
In the hottest part of the summer we ran a garden hose out to the side yard and filled a big galvanized washtub with water and splashed around in it. We hunched our thumbs over the end of the hose and squirted each other. We ran back and forth squealing through the spray and jumping in and out of the tub. If we got the grass too wet it turned sludgy. And if he happened to be home and noticed, Floyd came out and yelled at us.
“Go play somewhere else, goddammit! You’re making a mess of my yard!”
One summer afternoon a little black kid stopped and watched us. He stood on the gravel shoulder of Shallowford Road, peering over the top of the privet hedgerow that grew at the top of the yard, alongside the street. He must have been standing on tiptoe because all we could see was his head bobbing up and down, kind of peekabooing us.