by Ed Bethune
We revolted, but Mother gave us a speech on the necessity and value of frugality and made us wear them to school. Delta Lew figured out a way to get out of it after a couple of wearings, but I did not. I was the laughing stock at Rightsell Grammar School for a long time thereafter. It took awhile, but I finally convinced Mother to let me stop wearing the Farmer Jones Jeans. I swore off blue jeans and never wore them again, except to work in our backyard. It was thirty years before I wanted to wear blue jeans, even Levis.
Summertime was special. We were out of school, baseball and swimming were in season but everyone was worried about polio, the disease that showed up every summer and was an epidemic throughout the 1940s. Many kids died or spent months in iron lungs. If they survived, they wound up with distorted limbs, like Daddy’s, that would be useless for a lifetime. Polio, of course, had a special meaning in our house because of Daddy’s medical history. Mother assured us that it was not hereditary, but Delta Lew and I were scared anyway. I am sure Mother was worried too, even though she maintained her customary, stoic Vermilye approach.
Summer also brought the annual trip to Pocahontas. Now, after the separation, my secret place above Lewallen Café took on greater importance. It was a place where I could spend time thinking, grieving, and crying in private about what was happening to my family. Even though Toni and her River Rat family were gone by the time the war was over, I continued to think about her and their life on the river. This good memory served a special purpose. I compared my family life, as screwed-up as it seemed, to the much harder life the River Rat kids had. It did not fix my problem, but the perspective comforted me.
My Uncle Lloyd, Mother’s youngest brother, decided to open a secondhand furniture store as soon as he graduated from high school. He rented an unfinished space in the basement of a building on the corner of the square across from the café building, got himself a used 1931 A Model Ford truck, and headed to St. Louis to buy his first load of used furniture. A few days later Lloyd returned with his truck piled high with furniture and wood-burning stoves he had bought at auction in the big city. I helped Lloyd by cleaning and painting the stoves—cook stoves and regular ones—with stove-black, a messy liquid that looked and smelled like shoe polish. He cleaned and refinished the furniture, and when necessary he reupholstered it, a skill he taught himself. I liked painting the stoves because I could make them look like new but I got about as much paint on myself as I did on the stoves. My payoff for helping Lloyd was to go along on deliveries. The A-Model truck had no doors, and the trips outside town frequently took us over unpaved roads. What could be better for an adventurous boy?
When I was in the fifth grade, Mother decided that I should learn to play the clarinet, mainly because she liked Benny Goodman, the great clarinetist. She bought me a second-hand metal clarinet at Bean’s Music Store. She got the metal one because it was cheaper than the wooden clarinets that produced a higher quality sound. Then in her demanding way, she stayed after me to practice, practice and practice. Her persistence and my willingness to work paid off. I made first chair clarinet in the East Side Junior High School Band as a seventh grader. I was good at it, but I did not like the commitment that was required to be in the band because I wanted to play sports, all sports, any sports.
A motto painted on the wall near the ceiling of the band room proclaimed: A winner never quits, and a quitter never wins. I loved reading that and I liked the band room and the fact that I was the best clarinet player in the band, but I wanted the motto about quitting and winning to work for me in sports, not music.
We had sex education at East Side Junior High School, but it was not part of the official curriculum. It took place during recesses and lunch breaks, usually near a tree in the northwest corner of the playground. It was easy to tell when class was in session because a cluster of fifteen to twenty boys, all whooping and hollering and pushing to get to an inside position, encircled whoever had the latest textbook, one of the two-by-five-inch eight-page booklets of pornographic cartoons. The booklets, commonly known as Eight-Page Bibles, featured the well-known cartoon characters of that era: Moon Mullins, Tarzan and Jane, and Popeye and Olive Oil. Enough said.
My best friend was Billy McMillan who lived just two blocks away. He also played the clarinet, but his instrument was made of wood. I envied him for that, but I would not have traded places with him for anything because he had a terrible stuttering problem. Billy was a nice kid and popular, but nine times out of ten when he tried to talk he would go into a stuttering fit. He would roll his eyes, turn red in the face, and look as if he was about to pass out for lack of breath. It was not funny, but some kids—adolescents can be mindlessly cruel—would mock him, tease him, and laugh at him. It was similar to the way some kids treated my father when they saw him struggling to walk with his canes and artificial leg. Billy and my father never let it bother them. On the contrary, I marveled at how they frequently acknowledged the crudeness with a knowing smile or a wink of the eye.
In the summer months, Billy and I spent hours practicing on our clarinets, playing monopoly, or figuring ways to make money. He did not play baseball or other sports, so our times together coincided with foul weather or days when it was too hot to get out of the shade. Our most productive enterprise was our shoe-shining business. We knocked on doors in the neighborhood offering to shine shoes for twenty-five cents a pair. We made good money doing that and came back to it every time we could not find a yard to mow. I loved my friend. He would do anything for me and I would do anything for him. We played mostly at my house because Billy’s mother monitored what we were doing when we played at his house. If Mrs. McMillan thought we were wasting time, which is what we were usually doing, she would try to get us to do something more constructive. I thought she was weird because she fed Billy stuff I had never heard of like egg & olive sandwiches and fruit salads, and she made Billy rest for thirty minutes after each meal so that his food could “settle.”
It was about this time in my life that I had my first experience with religion. Mother insisted that my sister and I go to Sunday school. She did not go, but she sent us. To make it attractive she would give us twenty cents apiece that we could use for a Sunday afternoon movie at the Arkansas Theatre. We went first to the Baptist Church, then later on to the Methodist Church.
Delta Lew and I enjoyed church and Sunday school because of the friends we made. I did learn a little bit about God and Jesus when I was a kid. The introduction to the Gospel was a good thing, and it helped me with the pain I was feeling as a child in a busted family. Even so, and I have no guilt about it, I did not understand or accept the Gospel in the way that I would later in life.
My occasional attendance at Winfield Methodist Church led me to join the Boy Scout Troop that met there. Our scoutmaster was an old man, so actual leadership of the troop fell to our assistant scoutmaster, Dick Neal. Dick Neal worked for his parents who operated a luggage shop on Main Street. He was a little peculiar, but we all liked him and he worked hard to be a good scoutmaster. Even though I never got past the rank of Tenderfoot, I won first place in a statewide contest at the annual Boy Scout Jamboree for making the fastest and best blanket roll. It was my high-water mark as a scout.
In my second year, our scout troop took a long hike down Arch Street Pike south of Little Rock. When we took a break, Dick Neal walked through the campsite reporting that he had just heard a radio report that Babe Ruth had died that day, August 16, 1948. We found it hard to accept. How could he, The Sultan of Swat, be dead? I had lost family members, but I had watched them grow old and expected them to die. The death of Babe Ruth was different. I did not think of the Babe as old. We heard he had throat cancer but never thought it or anything else could bring down Babe Ruth. He was invincible. How could he die?
A few months after Babe Ruth died, I experienced yet another shock. Charles Vandament, a classmate and fellow scout, called me at 6:00 a.m. on April 21, 1949, to tell me that the Little Rock Police had found the body of Dick Nea
l on a lonely road near the Arkansas River. It was murder. An unknown assailant had knifed him several times and left him to die. We learned that same day that Dick Neal was a homosexual. There had been whispers that he was a “queer,” but we were not sure what that meant. The police supposed his homosexuality was a cause for his death but they never proved it, and they never caught his killer.
We got a new assistant scoutmaster but scouting was never the same. Shortly after Dick Neal’s murder, I dropped out of Boy Scouts and filled my life with other diversions.
I made model airplanes using balsa wood, tissue paper, and glue, lots of glue. It was long before label warnings so, as I bent over my work, I discovered glue sniffing at an early age.
Baseball was my true love as it has been throughout my life. There is nothing like baseball. The struggle between a batter and a pitcher is the ultimate sports challenge. The first organized baseball I played was in the Midget League, run under the auspices of the Little Rock Boy’s Club. We called our team the Pirates and, on our own, stenciled our team name on white T-shirts. That was our uniform. Later, moving up, I played for the Rocket 88’s, a team my friends and I put together. We found our own sponsor, Balch Motor Company, and Mr. Balch bought us official team jerseys. On the back was the name, Balch Motor Company and on the front, Rocket 88’s. That was our uniform and we were proud of it. It was the first real uniform we ever had. We did not have baseball shoes; we just wore our tennis shoes. We played our games at MacArthur Park or Lamar Porter Field. We had no adult coaches or managers and parents did not come to the games. We kids were in charge of and responsible for everything and we won the city championship two years running.
My friends and I would ride the streetcar to Traveler’s Field at Fair Park. We would hangout outside the fence and try to catch balls knocked over the fence during batting practice. Willie, a skinny old man from the nearby State Hospital, was usually there, and we teased him for acting funny, as he strung together incomprehensible sentences. We could get a seat in the bleachers for twenty-five cents but most of the time we just looked through the knotholes and cracks in the fence and used our cash for other things.
In my early years, I was smaller than the other kids were, so they called me “Shorty.” I was a well-coordinated, savvy ballplayer so most of my coaches and friends figured I would be a good athlete when I got bigger. I was barely above five feet in the seventh grade and I only got to 5’ 7” and 120 pounds by the time I was in the tenth grade. Nevertheless, I dreamed as hard as I could about becoming a major league baseball player. My fallback dream was to become a sports trainer for the New York Yankees. I spent every available moment studying the box scores and bios of the big players of the day.
In my unrelenting effort to become the best baseball player in Little Rock, I quit the band and sold my clarinet after I finished the seventh grade. Mother did not want me to quit, but I argued that the effort to blow the horn was busting blood vessels in my eyes and that is why my eyes were bloodshot most of the time. I do not think she bought my argument, but she let me quit the band.
Now free to focus on baseball and other sports, I busted my nose five times, broke my right arm once, and strained my right knee so badly that I could not put any weight on it for two weeks. Mother was furious when I broke my arm because that necessitated a costly trip to the doctor to have it set and cast. The broken noses looked OK after I pulled my nose back into position so I never went to the doctor for those injuries. I paid for that later on when I tried to become a Marine pilot and they rejected me because I had a deviated septum, which meant that one side of my nose was completely blocked. The naval flight surgeon took the position that I needed two holes to be an aviator, so I flunked the flight physical. I asked him if he could fix it for me and he declined, saying I only needed one hole in my nose to be a Marine. When I was next on leave in Arkansas, I got a private doctor to fix it. It cost me $175 that I paid out of my own pocket. A year later, when I was in the middle of my tour of duty in Korea, I got an offer to go to Naval Air Cadet School in Pensacola, Florida. My new nose and I passed the flight physical, but I turned down the offer for NavCads because the program required me to extend my enlistment so that I would have a total of four years to serve. By then I was half way through my three-year enlistment and could see the light at the end of the tunnel. I decided to pass up Naval Air Cadets. To this day, my nose swoops slightly to starboard, but I do have two holes for breathing.
The best way for me to get around town was on my bike. I did not like my bike because it was a girl’s bike. Mother bought it for $10, second-hand. She said I would have to get used to it because she could only afford one bike and if she had gotten a boy’s bike Delta Lew would not have been able to use it. It took awhile, but my friends finally quit teasing me for riding a girl’s bike.
I got quite good at riding, particularly riding without touching the handlebars. Once, all puffed up with pride, I waved to a carload of girls as I was riding with no hands. I ran full speed into the back of a parked car. I learned it is not smart to show off or take your eyes off the road. I broke no bones but it hurt my pride to find myself spread-eagled on the trunk of the parked car.
My young life included ping-pong-ball, a game similar to baseball that my friends and I invented. We played with badminton rackets and a ping-pong ball and the favorite venue was my backyard. It is amazing how much movement the pitcher can put on a ping-pong ball. Curves, sinkers, and sliders are easy. The hardest thing to throw is a straight fastball.
One day, right in the middle of a serious ping-pong-ball game, Elizabeth “Tissa” Wilson and two other girls opened the gate and walked into my backyard just as Edwin Spann was getting ready to pitch to me. We began the nervous chatter common between boys and girls of that age. Tissa, in the midst of that, made a comment that cut to the quick and still rings in my head. She said, “Edwin Spann’s voice has changed, but Edwin Bethune’s voice is still high and squeaky.” The passage through puberty is tough enough without such insults. I was tempted to tell her that my voice was lagging behind the progress I was otherwise making with pubescence. I was tempted to brag about my recently discovered virility, but that would have been bad form.
The truth is I matured later than most of my friends, but my development rapidly picked up steam after I accidently busted in on one of Mother’s room-renters. I thought Jo Bell had gone to work, and I wanted to get to an upstairs porch that was unreachable without going through her room. To my great surprise she was not only in her room, she was standing in front of the dresser mirror, admiring her gorgeous, completely naked body. I panicked. I knew I was in trouble so I immediately ran downstairs and told Mother what I had seen. It was my first look at a naked woman, a live one at least, and it stirred me up in ways I had never experienced. I do not know what I expected Mother to say, but she gave me Hell for opening the door without knocking and asking permission. I think she was more worried about losing a tenant and $10.50 a week in rent money than the shock I got from seeing a busty, beautiful woman in her mid-twenties, naked as a jaybird. Soon thereafter, with hard work, I managed to make my voice drop an octave.
7
MY VERY SECRET STRUGGLE
The truth of a matter will always haunt you, no matter how
secret the hiding place.
Anonymous
The minor skirmishes I had with Mother were symptoms of a deeper divide that showed up after Daddy left. I was living with her, but like my father, I was a dreamer. My dreaming seemed to drive Mother to the brink of insanity. I think that when I did a lot of big talking about my dreams I reminded her of Daddy. She wanted me to succeed, and she was convinced that dreaming would not get me anywhere.
Fortunately, my sister always took my side. She never faulted me or made fun of my dreams. I could come out with the zaniest ideas and Delta Lew would defend me, arguing to Mother that it was a good thing for me to think big thoughts and dream big dreams.
Mother was not buying. She was frust
rated that Daddy’s big dreams had not panned out, and she feared I was destined for a similar fate. I know she loved me and cared for me, but she never let up. She was constantly preparing me for the certain battle I would have with “them.” I heard her say a million times, “You are going to turn out just like your father; those dreams won’t amount to a hill of beans.” Mother, a devotee of the Vermilye approach to solving life’s problems, believed in practical goals, doing things that were useful, not dreaming.
As a child, I excelled in school, the band, sports, and in my friendships. I was a “cute” kid by most accounts, and people seemed to like me but I had a recurring, dominating sense of shame and inadequacy stemming from a personal problem known only to my mother, my father, and my sister.
Some kids stutter, like my friend Billy McMillan. Others have problems that are just as conspicuous. My polio-stricken father, for instance, could not hide the way he had to walk with an artificial leg that fit over the stump of his amputated leg. Their flaws are out in the open and there is no way they can escape derogatory comments about their appearance, their behavior and their physical limitations. Kids can be cruel, so it was particularly difficult for Billy and my father, but I admired the way they dealt with it.
I, on the other hand, had a problem that I could and did keep secret. If the truth had come out, I would have caught unmerciful ridicule and mockery. The fear of exposure and embarrassment haunted me day and night. I figured my plight would be even tougher than that faced by Billy and Daddy because they had dealt with meanness since infancy. It hurt them, I am sure, but they had learned to deal with it. Exposure of my problem would have been sudden and the meanness would have been unrelenting. If I kept my problem a secret, I would not be humiliated.