by Ed Bethune
In 1935, Daddy was busy traveling the state recruiting boys for the program, and Mother was pregnant again. As she neared labor, she headed back to Pocahontas and on December 19, 1935, with Doc Baltz in attendance, Mother gave birth to me in the same bed, and in the same room where my sister had been born exactly two years earlier.
Sheriff Marlin Hawkins of Conway County, a notorious figure in Arkansas politics who played an important role in my life in 1968, wrote a book about his years as sheriff and titled it How I Stole Elections. The sheriff made glowing references to my father and the good work that he did for the CCC. He referred to Daddy as “director of the state CCC” and talked about how they, together, would choose boys for the program. Daddy was not the overall director, but he was the man in charge of selection. It was an important job because the CCC gave hope to young men by giving them a chance to work and break out of poverty. The government paid the boys a small stipend of $30 a month, and most of them sent $25 of that home to their parents. I remember going with Daddy and some other men to visit one of the camps when I was five years old and can still see the boys in their work clothes and the uniformed officers in their campaign hats. I can still smell the fragrance of sauerkraut and weenies cooking in the mess hall. I also remember Daddy telling me when I was six years old that the camps were closing and how sad he was about that because the boys were getting ready to go off to fight in World War II instead of working on the CCC projects. I remember a big ceremony at the Little Rock camp the day it closed when all the boys were in formation and the officers were making their last reports. Daddy’s good work for the CCC was over.
About the time his job with the CCC was petering out, Daddy got the political bug, or at least he saw political office as something that might work for him. It was not his first try for political office. He had run unsuccessfully for state treasurer in 1932, and lost a race for land commissioner in 1936. In that era there were no special programs to protect the disabled, so men with disabilities frequently sought jobs in government, elected or appointed. The voters intuitively understood the need to support disabled candidates. My dad, ever the optimist, entered the race for state auditor in the spring of 1942. I do not remember all the details, but I do remember a political speaking event at the Old Band Shell in MacArthur Park in Little Rock. Political rallies in the days before television were like modern-day rock concerts. There were good crowds and the adults stayed for and paid attention to all the speeches, even those of the lesser candidates. I remember the rally mostly because it lasted through sunset and the mosquitoes were eating me alive. I was miserable, but Mother would not let us leave until after Daddy made his speech. He was running against a powerful incumbent, Oscar Humphrey, and they were among the last to speak because the position of state auditor was an important statewide office. I remember crying and hating the fact that we had to hang out at the band shell after dark. There was absolutely nothing for little kids to do and the grownups kept telling us to be quiet, even at the high point of the mosquito assault.
Daddy lost that race and it was his last. He maintained to his death that he might have won but his opponent, Oscar Humphrey, had an unfair advantage. The campaign ended in a landslide for the three-term incumbent, and Daddy loved to joke about it. He would say, always with a chuckle, “I never had a chance. Oscar had an unfair advantage. He has no arms. Hell, I’ve still got one fairly good leg, both arms, and one eye that works pretty good.” With that, Daddy would crack up laughing, but then wince as he explained how Oscar had lost both his arms in a cotton gin accident when he was a boy.
I learned from Daddy’s willingness to see things in the best light. He was a man of good cheer; not easily offended by references to his physical limitations. Once, around 1940, the Little Rock Travelers, a double A professional baseball team, were struggling to stay out of last place in the old Southern Association. Their miserable showing toward the end of the season provoked an Arkansas Democrat sportswriter to propose a dream lineup for the Travelers. The dream team consisted of disabled persons, mostly well known Little Rock politicians. The writer published a tongue-in-cheek column that had Secretary of State “Crip” Hall as catcher, my dad at shortstop, and of course, Oscar Humphrey, as the starting pitcher. I do not remember anything, ever, that tickled my dad, a huge baseball fan, more than being in the lineup for the make-believe Little Rock Travelers. Nowadays, the newspaper would fire the sportswriter, and lawsuits would follow a noisy outcry by the politicians.
In early 1942, after the Japanese Empire had attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, our federal government rounded up people of Japanese descent, citizens as well as aliens, who were living in the United States. The government sent them to euphemistically named War Relocation Centers. Daddy’s campaign for state auditor was over, so he applied for and got a job at the new War Relocation Center in Rohwer, Arkansas. The center was over a hundred miles from Little Rock in Southeast Arkansas, and the only way to get there was over a dusty, rough gravel road.
Daddy took me with him to Rohwer during the summer when school was out, and it was there that I saw my first real life Japanese people. The theatres in Little Rock never missed a chance to show newsreels portraying “Japs” as evil people. Our government told us through posters, news stories, and radio shows that “Japs” were mean—not much better than a bunch of wild monkeys. One movie—maybe it was a newsreel, or maybe it was my childlike imagination distorted by wartime propaganda—showed a Japanese soldier tossing a Chinese baby into the air and catching it on his bayonet. Another poster challenged us to, “Stay on the job until every murdering Jap is wiped out!” That poster had a picture of a Japanese soldier torturing an American soldier on the Bataan Death March. Everywhere I looked, with the exception of school where the poster-focus was on pure, positive patriotism, there was someone or something teaching me to hate and fear the “Japs.” I came to believe they all had buckteeth and wore big, round horn-rimmed glasses.
My visits to Rohwer gave me a chance to see the Japanese in a different way. They were living in tarpaper barracks divided into small cubicles, but each family had a door to the outside. You had to step up to get into the living space, and the ground outside was hard and dusty except when it rained, then it was soggy and muddy. The Japanese made well-kept vegetable gardens all around the compound, and there were occasional flowerbeds. I was glad that I did not have to live there. At first, I was surprised to see the internees laughing and joking with my father; they obviously liked him even though he had power over them. Daddy taught me they were good people, and that they were just like us, except for their looks. I could see that he respected the internees. He said they were “good Japanese” unlike the “bad Japanese” from the other side of the world, the ones who attacked Pearl Harbor. Daddy said our government, thinking it best for national security and the safety of the good Japanese, wanted to get them off the streets and out of sight.
I had some playtime with the Japanese kids when I visited Rohwer. We quickly forgot our surroundings, or at least I did, and I do not think we saw each other as different. The one exception came when they tried to teach me how to use an abacus, the toy-like computing gadget that Asians have used for centuries to calculate numbers. I could not figure out how to use it, and my confusion made me feel different because it made me feel dumb.
The conflict between wartime propaganda and real life was troublesome because of another, similar experience. On several occasions, I saw truckloads of German prisoners of war on the streets of Little Rock. The U. S. Army hauled them to worksites and back to the prisoner of war compound at Camp Robinson. They were always in blue overalls with a big white P on their back. I learned they were “bad Germans” because our soldiers captured them in Europe when they were fighting for the Nazi regime of Adolph Hitler. Hitler, with a moustache and evil look, was the poster-boy for the Nazis. The posters about the Nazis, unlike the posters about the “Japs,” seldom indicted all people of German extraction. That made sense to me becau
se many “good Germans” lived in Pocahontas, Arkansas. The DeClerks, Blissenbachs, Gschwends, Junkersfelds and many other German immigrants had helped settle the little community. They founded St. Paul’s Catholic Church and the parochial school that my mother and her brothers had attended when they were older. Doc Baltz, who delivered my sister and me, was one of the “good Germans.” The lesson for me out of World War II: There are good Germans and bad Germans, just as there are good Japanese and bad Japanese. Unlike many children who grew up during World War II, I was fortunate to learn the difference between the prejudice of propaganda and the fairness of truth.
The CCC and Rohwer Relocation Center jobs were perfect for my father. He understood people and cared about them, and people liked him. It gave him great pleasure to find and select poor boys for the CCC where they could get good meals, a new pair of shoes, and clean work clothes. In addition, he did everything he could to make life better for the Japanese-American internees who had lost everything they had, including their freedom. The acts of generosity were natural for a man who did not have a malicious bone in his body. Daddy had suffered all his life with physical disability. It bothered him greatly to see the poor boys of the Depression, the good Japanese, and the good Germans suffer for things beyond their control.
Meanwhile, Daddy and Mother did everything they could to keep their differences hidden from my sister and me. The problem of their conflicting personalities and viewpoints on life paled in comparison to the need to survive the Great Depression and the early years of World War II. Daddy’s ability to hold a job and put food on the table during tough times deferred the inevitable.
4
FAMILY LIFE BEFORE THE TROUBLES
The happiest moments of my life have been the few which I have
passed at home in the bosom of my family.
Thomas Jefferson
When I was an infant and all during World War II, we lived in Little Rock. First, we lived in an upstairs apartment and then in a small two-story rent house at 216 W. 14th Street, just two blocks from the South Main streetcar line. It was not a high-quality house, but it did have open-flame gas stoves in the main rooms, an important feature in those days. In the early-forties, my mother started renting rooms to make ends meet. She rented mainly to the young women who came from the rural areas of Arkansas to Little Rock to find work in the bomb factory or with some branch of the wartime government. In the war years, there was a shortage of housing and young people coming into the city to work in the war effort needed an economical place to stay.
Daddy was only with us on weekends, and he sometimes missed those. First, it was his job at the CCC, and later it was his job at the War Relocation Center. Mother told Delta Lew and me he had to travel the state when he was finding boys for the CCC. Later, after he got the job at Rohwer, she said he was gone a lot because it was a long way to the War Relocation Center and the roads were terrible. Even so, there were times when I went with Daddy to the CCC camps and on a couple of occasions I spent several days with him at the War Relocation Center.
There was, of course, a more significant reason for his absence from our home in Little Rock that they kept from us. Daddy and Mother were struggling to reconcile their differences and keep their marriage together. In the early days of their struggle, my sister and I had no idea that trouble was brewing.
Daddy hired a black woman named Viola to help my mother. There was not a lot for Viola to do, but Mother used to say it made her feel like the “Queen of Sheba” to have a maid who would clean and cook meals. The arrangement only lasted a few months. I am not sure, but I suspect Viola’s disappearance had something to do with the fact that my mother had never been around black people and simply did not know how to treat the woman. There were only a few black people in Randolph County and they pretty much kept to themselves in the area near the little AME Church, which doubled as their school building in the old days when segregation was in full sway.
We lived downstairs in the rent house, crowded into a parlor that Mother converted to a bedroom with one double bed and two baby-beds that my sister and I slept in. Our room-renters shared a bathroom upstairs and we used a half-bath downstairs. When the renters left for work Mother would take us upstairs to use the tub. That is how we managed, and I do not remember it as a hardship—it was just what we had to do.
At bedtime, Mother read to my sister and me until we fell asleep. I especially remember Mark Twain’s, The Prince and the Pauper. Mother used the story to explain the advantages of living on a shoestring. She was right. The lessons from Twain’s classic served us well. Our life before we knew about the trouble was austere but good.
It was my job on cold winter mornings to get up, pull on my clothes, and light the open flame gas stove with a match. As soon as I got it lit, I would back up so close to it that the calves of my legs would turn beet red, partially roasted from just below my corduroy knee-length knickers to my shoe tops. From that vantage point, I had a good view of the waking habits and movements of my sister, my mother, and the most interesting of all, my dad.
My main recollection is how, in the morning, Daddy would sit on the side of the bed and cough, cough, and cough. He coughed so long and loud that I feared one of his vital parts would come up and he would keel over dead. When—after a few minutes—his coughing subsided Daddy would strike a match and light up a hand-rolled cigarette. Then, after the first puff, he would cough some more, even worse than before. Mother always said, “Cough it up; it may be a Ford car.” I did not understand that until she explained that the first gas-powered cars, which showed up when she was a little girl, used to backfire a lot. Daddy’s coughing meant there must have been a Ford car inside of him that was trying to get out. Gallows humor, but that was her way. When Daddy finally collected himself, he would finish his cigarette and then reach for his artificial leg that was propped against a nightstand. He then pulled the artificial leg, which had spent the night in one leg of his trousers, over the felt sock covering the stump of the leg amputated in 1923. Then he put his good leg in the other leg of the trousers and put on his second shoe matching the one that was already on the foot of the artificial leg. With that, he pulled up his trousers and made ready for the most precarious part of the operation. With the balance of an Olympian, Daddy pulled himself up to a standing position using a triangulation technique—one hand on the bedstead, his good leg on the floor, and one hand on the bedside table. Once erect, he grabbed his canes and off he would go, contorting his way to the bathroom.
Once he had peed, Daddy would sit on the commode and lean over the lavatory to shave. I loved to watch him shave because he had the routine down to a science. Daddy used and reused the new-fangled double-edged razorblades by running them around the inside of a drinking glass that he said, “Sharpened them as good as new.” Nevertheless, I noted that Daddy would wince with pain when he shaved and he always cut himself, usually more than once. He sealed the cuts with a styptic pencil that contained a chemical that stopped the bleeding. To a youngster, it was magical, one minute he was bleeding and the next minute he was not. Styptic pencils were an essential part of a man’s shaving kit.
I also, for some reason have an early memory of Daddy sitting on a wooden box in the doorway of our kitchen pantry with a hammer in his hand. Mother was demanding that he kill a foot-long rat that had taken up residence there. It took him a good half hour and fifteen or twenty swats with the hammer, but he finally got the rat. He was laughing like crazy throughout the process, and when it ended, he summonsed me into the pantry to see the corpse, a few chunks of rat meat. Daddy could turn anything into a fun project.
An early image of Mother is from the time she took care of me when I was sick with what I later learned was double pneumonia. To this day, I can see and taste the bowl of soft-boiled eggs laced with pieces of buttered toast that she brought to me when I got well enough to eat. She did the same when I recovered from chickenpox, the mumps, and measles. When I was little Mother was always there for
me, especially when I was sick, and in my mind’s eye she was the most beautiful woman in the world. Even so, there was not a lot of hugging and kissing. Mother drove it into our heads that we were engaged in the serious business of making ends meet. She loved me, I knew that, but she was entirely different from my father. She was all business most of the time. That was her default position. After all, we were in a death-struggle with “them.” There was no room for failure or idleness because it led to sloth. Those with sufficient will who were willing to work, according to her, could and would make it to Nirvana. Frugality, focus, discipline, grit, and scores of other hardcore character traits were her hallmarks. Curiously, these qualities coexisted with an artistic streak that produced, in her early life, some wonderful paintings and in later life an abundance of afghans, crocheted bedspreads, and handmade stuffed dolls. Pluto, Mickey and Minnie, and a giraffe came to life at my mother’s hand. She sewed and stuffed them and they are still around some sixty-five years later.
Mother made a garden every year, even before the Victory Gardens of World War II were all the rage. She canned food for many years after others had given up such practices. She sewed our clothes, a practice that caused some anguish for Delta Lew and me because we had to wear them instead of “store-boughts.” We ate fried tripe (put enough ketchup on it), beans, cornbread, fish caught by neighbors, and anything else that was cheap and available. It was our way of life, before, during and after the war.
My sister and I sat on stools we pulled up to the kitchen table, and we ate the lesser portions of whatever was available. If chicken was the main course, then we ate the back, neck, the gizzard or the asshole, literally. If lucky, we might get a wing or a thigh. Kids ate leftovers. Grownups got first pick of the food so they would have the energy they needed to work and provide. No one questioned this rule of survival. Mother taught us to have good table manners, but we never said grace in thanks for the food; after all, the food was there because of hard work, effort and enterprise. It was not there because of God or anyone else.