by Ed Bethune
There was one incident involving a drunk that could have ended badly. One night, after dark, my girlfriend, Margaret McFall and I were sitting in a circle near the bridge with three other couples. We had spent a wonderful day swimming and sunning ourselves, and we had danced in the pavilion to a number of our favorite tunes, including Johnny Ray’s version of “Cry,” a song that was number one on all the charts. A large barrel-chested guy, who was quite a bit older, was just a few feet from us bragging and showing off to his friends. Big Shot was obviously trying to impress our dates as well as his friends, so he began to crow about how many times he had dived off the highway bridge that crossed the river. Soon he drew a double-dog dare to dive off the bridge in the dark. That raised the stakes because it was dangerous to dive from the bridge into the river in daylight, but at night there was always the chance of hitting a floating log or other object. The alcohol took its toll on the braggart’s judgment and he headed into the shadows, on his way to the highway and the bridge. Big Shot was going to take the dare and make the dive. We were interested, which is what he wanted, but it took him some time to get up onto the highway and walk out onto the bridge. It was a dark, moonless night. He could not see us and we could not see him. He hollered to us several times in an effort to determine where he was in relation to the river. Eventually, he figured he was over water so he said, “Here I go!” We were expecting to hear a splash, but instead we heard a loud thump. Big Shot had not walked far enough onto the bridge. His dive ended on the sand bar about fifty feet from where we sat. It is a wonder he did not kill himself. He got up and with a groan skulked off into the dark to avoid further embarrassment. At first, we were concerned but one of his friends caught up with him and shouted back to us that he was fine. We never saw him again but the story of Big Shot’s nighttime dive lives on at Current River Beach.
The pleasures and frustrations of sexual discovery and the attendant heartthrobs and heartbreaks that I experienced at PHS were, as with all teenagers, an essential part of my passage from puberty to early manhood.
Don Cox was in my class and became a close friend for life. His father owned cotton gins, land, and livestock but Don did not act like a rich kid. He had a new car and some other material advantages, but he has always been a regular guy and I have never heard anyone speak ill of him. Another close friend was John “Butch” Stolt. He was a year behind me in school, but he was strong as an ox and a good football player. His father was the night-law in Pocahontas, and his mother, Lucille Stolt, could have been a Bethune. She was warm, friendly, and loving and she opened her arms to me. She seemed to understand that I needed attention and when I was around her, she treated me as if I were one of her own. The girls in my class, Norma Sue, Betty Sue, Betty Lou, Mary Nell, and a long list of other double name sweethearts, were salt-of-the-earth types. All these friends, as well as the Spikes boys, played important roles in my new world.
There was another young man I met because I was on the football team. His name was Clifford, a black youngster who volunteered to serve as our team mascot and helper. Everyone on the team loved Clifford. He was fast and had the potential to be a good player, but he could not join our team or attend PHS. It was 1952 and the country was still following the separate but equal doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson, a case decided in 1896 that provided legal justification for segregation. The United States Supreme Court overruled the Plessy decision in 1954 in the landmark case, Brown v. Board of Education, but the decision to end segregation came too late for Clifford. He got his high school diploma, but only because he was willing to ride thirty-five miles each way every day to Jonesboro, the nearest school for blacks. I think of Clifford nowadays when I see the disproportionately large number of black athletes playing football for the best college and professional football teams. I lost track of Clifford, but I hope he is satisfied with the way things have changed and that he remembers me as fondly as I remember him.
In the summer, I played as much baseball as I could. When I first got to Pocahontas, I bragged to some of the boys on the American Legion team that Coach George Haynie, the remarkable coach for the outstanding Little Rock Doughboy team (an American Legion baseball team that achieved national prominence) had invited me to try out for the Doughboys when I was in the tenth grade. The word spread to Tom Baker who was the best all-sports athlete at PHS and, as luck would have it, he happened to be pitching batting practice on the day I made my first appearance at the plate. All eyes were on me and Baker said, just before he threw me his best fastball, “Hit this one, Doughboy!” If I had whiffed, the catcalling and joking would have stuck to me like glue. I never wanted to hit a ball as much as I wanted to hit Tom Baker’s fastball and hit it I did! My hard line drive sailed into the gap in left field—easily a double or triple at Camden Yards, the home of the Baltimore Orioles. Redemption is sweet.
It is true that I was an excellent player, and Coach Haynie did want me to play for the Doughboys, even though I was not a particularly fast runner. Raymond Mock, who claimed to have played professional baseball in the minor leagues, first saw me play when I was catching for the Pocahontas American Legion team. He believed I was good enough to make it to the “Bigs” as a catcher. Raymond was in his forties when I knew him, but he was still playing semi-professional ball on the weekends. He was too old to play catcher, the position he played in his early years, but he was still a good hitter so teams would hire him to play outfield. Most every town of any size had a semi-pro team and the games drew good crowds in those days before television. Raymond took me under his arm and when my Legion team was not playing, we offered our talents to the semi-pro teams. There was a team in Corning, about thirty miles north of Pocahontas that liked Raymond and took his word that I could help the team. We played for them several times. To get there we would ride the bus from Pocahontas and the manager of the team gave us cash to cover the cost of our tickets, with a little pocket change left over. Once, on the bus trip from Corning to Pocahontas with Raymond I remember stopping in the little community of Datto, Arkansas. The driver shouted back to a black man in the rear of the bus, “Do you want to get off here?” The black man was sleeping and did not hear the driver. Raymond Mock told the driver: “He doesn’t want to get off in Datto, they don’t allow niggers here.” Everyone on the bus laughed, but I was embarrassed. I thought of Clifford, but to my shame, I did not tell Raymond that I did not like it that he called the man a “nigger” and ridiculed him in public. It reminded me of the way people hated the “good Japanese” and the “good Germans.” Still I said nothing. I did not like myself for not saying something, but I took some comfort with the fact that I was uneasy with what had happened.
My semi-pro baseball play probably violated the rules that amateurs were supposed to follow, but I loved to play so much that I really did not worry about it at the time.
In the summer of 1952 my football teammate and friend, Bill Templeton, and I spent several days floating down the Black River in an old fourteen-foot wooden boat that Temp had scrounged from somewhere. The boat was waterlogged and heavy, and it leaked like a sieve but every five minutes or so we bailed it out with old coffee cans we kept at the ready. We fished with cane poles and used worms that we dug for bait. We had no motor so it was a job to get from one side of the river to the other. All along the way, we fished the snags and the treetops keeping the sluggish boat in place with our paddles. We usually caught a good mess of fish—all kinds—but predominately catfish, bream and bass.
Our biggest challenge was logistical. We started our trips by tying the boat on top of Temp’s 1940 convertible and driving to a favorite spot upriver where we would put-in. After a lazy day of floating and fishing, we took-out at the Highway 67 Bridge, a distance of ten miles downriver. We secured the boat, hid our catch in the river on a stringer, and hitchhiked back to the spot where we had left Temp’s car. Then we drove back to the Highway 67 Bridge to retrieve, clean and dress our catch, pull the boat out of the water and tie it on top of the car. W
ithin minutes, we were home and Delta Lew was frying the fish and making corndodgers. To top it off she would slice some tomatoes from our garden and cut a big onion. The feasting did not end until we were all stuffed.
Most importantly, perhaps because of all the good things that happened to me in this little town, I suddenly stopped wetting the bed. I still had an occasional mishap, one (which I will tell about later) that almost brought me down, but for the most part, I seemed to be through with that particular problem. I now believe, based on all that I have read, that my bedwetting may have been physiological in the beginning, but it was surely aggravated by the separation and divorce of my parents and the battle that raged deep within me to reconcile the conflicting Vermilye and Bethune worldviews. The best evidence that the bedwetting problem was largely in my head was that it went away as soon as I began to find my place and purpose in life in the little town of Pocahontas, Arkansas.
10
OFF TO COLLEGE AND
OUT OF COLLEGE
I never let schooling interfere with my education
Mark Twain
As I approached high school graduation, I had to come to grips with what I was going to do next. No one on either side of my family had graduated from college and only a few had graduated from high school. I would have to figure out the business of going to college for myself and that was hard because I had absolutely no idea what college was like and the only thing I knew anything about, other than sports and public school, was the second-hand furniture business.
From the time I was a little boy, it was apparent that we could not afford college, so there was little talk of it. Mother kept telling me the main reason to finish high school was, “You need to get an education because they can’t take that away from you.” On the rare occasion when I did talk to Mother about college she insisted that if I did go I should learn to be a dentist. In her mind, Dr. “Booge” Spikes, of Pocahontas had it made and that is what I should be, a dentist. Never mind that I had no aptitude for science or the regimented life of a dentist.
Most of my high school classmates did not go to college. A few did talk about it and planned to go. Don Cox, one of my best friends, was one of those and he encouraged me to go with him. I had no other plans and the only practical alternative was to go into the military. I did not know how I would pay for college, but tuition to the University of Arkansas was only $50 a semester. Maybe there was a way I could do it.
College did not start right away, so my classmate Cecil Keith and I got a job at a lumberyard in Hoxie, Arkansas, about fifteen miles from Pocahontas. We were stacking lumber all day long. I would use a metal jack to hoist the planks to the top of the stack and Cecil would catch them and lay them out. Occasionally, Cecil and I would switch jobs, but I did not like being on top of the stack because it was rickety and the higher it got the more chance there was that it would topple over. This hard labor work experience, coupled with the prospect that I might end up working a jackhammer or something equally as bad, made going to college look better and better.
Mama Lewallen, Mother and Delta Lew came up with the money to pay my tuition and the first couple of months at Pop Gregson Hall, a boy’s dormitory. I decided to join Don Cox as a freshman at the university. We enrolled in summer school to get a head start on other freshmen. I made passing grades in English and a required history course, Western Civilization.
Then I enrolled in the fall semester and pledged Kappa Sigma fraternity. I was bleeding my mother and sister dry and the odd jobs I had picking up laundry and cleaning and working on lawns simply did not cover the essentials. More importantly, I was only seventeen years old and I was not ready for college. The undisciplined fraternity house environment did not help. I spent most of my time goofing off and I was using too much of the money I made from part-time jobs for beer and cigarettes, bad habits I picked up after finishing high school and what I thought would be the end of my athletic career. Moreover, because Mother wanted me to be a dentist, I enrolled in the School of Arts and Sciences. I was required to take freshman biology and chemistry, two courses that absolutely mystified my unscientific brain. My fate was sealed. It was easier to duck out than to grapple with those courses. I was well on my way to flunking out of college.
11
SEMPER FIDELIS
The Marines I have seen around the world have the
cleanest bodies, the filthiest minds, the highest morale,
and the lowest morals of any group of animals I have ever seen.
Thank God for the United States Marine Corps!
Eleanor Roosevelt, First Lady of the United States, 1945
It was apparent as I neared the end of the fall semester that I would flunk every science course I was taking, so in late December 1953, I joined the United States Marine Corps. Not knowing any better, I did a dumb thing after I signed the enlistment papers. I just dropped out of the University of Arkansas. I did not go back to school after the holidays. I did not formally withdraw nor did I tell anyone at the university that I was leaving. I just left. I did not appreciate it at that time, but failing to go through the formal withdrawal process put twelve hours of F on my transcript. Later in life, when I returned to college and started making good grades the twelve hours of F were a constant drag on my grade point. My stupid decision was just another example of how I, with my Vermilye hardhead, had to learn the hard way.
On January 20, 1954, I reported to Robinson Memorial Auditorium in Little Rock, where former Governor Sid McMath, a World War II Marine who had just finished his second term as governor, swore me and seventy other Arkansas boys in as recruits in the United States Marine Corps. We spent the night at the YMCA on Sixth and Broadway and early the next morning we met at the Rock Palace Café for breakfast. We boarded buses that took us to Adams Field where we caught an American Airlines flight that would take us to San Diego via Dallas, Texas. It was my first flight in a real commercial airplane and the thing I remember most is the drop-dead beautiful American Airlines flight attendant (she called herself a “stewardess”) who was taking care of us and calming our nerves. A photographer for the statewide newspaper boarded the plane and took a picture of me after I buckled into my seat. The flight attendant was helping me settle in so she was in the picture that appeared in the newspaper the next day. The caption noted that I was part of the Arkansas Traveler Platoon that had joined the U. S. Marines. The flight to Dallas seemed long even though we were in a new four-engine airplane, but the trip from Dallas to San Diego was longer and scary because we were plagued with rough thunderstorms along the way. In those days pilots could not detect storms as well as they can today, and the old gasoline motored planes could not fly high enough or fast enough to get around the trouble. The pilot did the best he could but it was a bumpy ride.
When we arrived at Lindbergh Field in San Diego around 1:00 a.m., a sergeant met us and loaded us onto a bus that had no seats. He unceremoniously told me and the other recruits, “Get your dumb asses on the cattle-car.”
After a short ride, we passed through the main gate of the Marine Corps Recruit Depot (MCRD) in San Diego, California. I saw the unmistakable gold and red signs of the United States Marine Corps. My new and different life as a brand-new boot camp recruit was underway. I would never be the same.
The sergeant got us off the cattle car and herded us into a barracks. We formed a line to get our fart-sacks and pillows, one each per recruit. We each found an empty bunk, quickly put on the fart-sack and pillow, and collapsed into a deep sleep. At 4:00 a.m., a terrible racket awakened us. One of the Marines was sliding a Coke bottle around the inside of an empty metal, corrugated garbage can. The racket was interspersed with him, in a rude voice, growling to us, “Hit the deck, shitheads.” It was a culture shock for me, a boy who had had no parental supervision for several years. I was unprepared for the harsh discipline that began the moment we got off the bus at MCRD. I knew it would be tough, but you never fully understand Marine Corps discipline until you experience it person
ally. After rousting us from our bunks, they ordered us to “Get outside and fall-in on the grinder.” We did not know what they meant by grinder, but we had enough sense to go outside. When we were out of the building, they told us to put our feet on pairs of yellow feet that were painted on the tarmac. That forced us into four rows of seventeen each. The enlisted Marine who would be our drill instructor, Staff Sergeant Lorres, suddenly appeared before us.
He was dressed in starched, freshly laundered dungarees, the pale green fighting outfit that Marines had worn all through World War II and the Korean War. The trousers had a sharp crease and he wore a campaign hat that marked him as a drill instructor. He was not a big man but he was in perfect physical condition. He had an aura of authority that never diminished; in fact, we gained respect for him as we learned more about him. It turned out that he was a survivor of the Chosin Reservoir, one of the great battles in Marine Corps history.
Sergeant Lorres ordered us to snap to attention. I, fortunately, had taken a few classes in ROTC at the University of Arkansas and had marched in the band at East Side Junior High School, so I had at least a working knowledge of what to do when told to stand at attention. I froze, but the boy next to me did not. He and some of the other boys had no idea what to do. They made the mistake of moving and mumbling. Sergeant Lorres repeatedly barked the command, “Stand still and shut the fuck up.” He then disappeared behind the four lines and it was still for a moment, except for the faint noise made by those who were still mumbling and moving. Suddenly, out of the corner of my eye I saw a boy near me propelled forward head over heels. Sergeant Lorres had rushed through the ranks and plowed into the hapless recruit from behind. He then reeled off a string of obscenities that made no sense. The stunned recruit jumped up and got back in formation. We did not understand Sergeant Lorres’ cusswords, but we all got the message. We were in for a tough new way of life and it was definitely a good thing to do whatever the drill instructor seemed to want.