Love, Lucy

by Lucille Ball

  Grandmother Hunt didn’t have much formal education—and she hung on Grandfather’s every word. He was the bookish type, interested in words and their derivations, and fond of reading aloud. Sometimes it was poetry, and sometimes politics, or a book like Black Beauty, which he read to us kids. Grandmother would come into the room and sit quietly sewing as she listened. I remember the scratchy sound her work-roughened fingers made as she handled scraps of silk for her quilts. Sometimes, if the story he read was a sad one, tears would slip down her soft cheeks, falling on the silk in her lap.

  My grandparents had little money, but they gave us a richly satisfying family life.

  I was eight and a half years old when we all moved into the little three-bedroom house on Eighth Street in Celoron, which held first two and then three families. I loved every inch of that weathered shingled house. It had a front porch and a back shed, and a small, dark front parlor separated from the front hall by portieres. These were the stage curtains for our innumerable productions as Freddy and I grew up.

  My bedroom was in the rear, overlooking the big backyard with its high hedge of purple lilacs. My bureau had three drawers. The bottom drawer was filled with stage costumes. Old bedspreads, discarded curtains, bits of chicken feathers, ribbon, and lace all found their way into that drawer and were happily put to use.

  No sooner were both families cozily under one roof than Aunt Lola gave birth to a daughter—with the expert help of Grandmother Flora Belle. Since Aunt Lola had a beauty shop to run, her daughter, Cleo, stayed with us and became our baby. Cleo had great dark eyes, black curly hair, plump dimpled little knees, and her mother’s good humor. As soon as she could walk, she was added to our “repertory company.” I would dress her, make her up, and rehearse her lines with her. Since all the adult members of the household worked, I seldom went anywhere without Freddy hanging on to one hand and Cleo the other.

  For as jealous as I was of Freddy at his birth, it wasn’t long before I’d completely taken him under my wing. Not only was he a levelheaded and hard working little boy, he was an amiable costar in all our homespun productions.

  Many of the inspirations for our stage plays came from the fine productions we saw on summer evenings at Celoron Amusement Park, which was just a hop, skip, and a jump from our house across a daisy field and a railroad track. The park was built by the owners of Jamestown’s worsted mills and street railways at the turn of the century. To us, it was as unique and wonderful as Disneyland is today, with its calliope, Ferris wheel, and merry-go-round. Many wealthy Pittsburgh oil families built summer homes on Lake Chautauqua, and DeDe could remember when they came to the park dressed to the teeth, riding shiny carriages with matched chestnuts and liveried grooms. Back then there was a lake steamer which brought in boatloads from the world-famous Chautauqua Institute at the northern end of the lake.

  Sousa performed in the bandshell, and Pauline MacLain performed in Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch in the summer. She stayed in a rented house in Celoron. I used to hang around outside, hoping to catch a glimpse of my idol. One morning she threw open the window and stood there, shaking out her sheets and blankets, in curlers and a dust cap. That was a disillusioning sight.

  There was no admission fee to the park, and any summer evening we could stroll over and watch the fountains of colored water or the spectacular fireworks or see The Perils of Pauline on the flickering outdoor screen. A man named Rex who sported black tights made balloon ascensions in a little basket. After hovering for a while he’d parachute into the park and sometimes, if the wind was strong, into the lake. When its load of gas was spent, the balloon would come down, and there was a reward for anyone who found it. I can still picture it streaking down from the sky like a long black cigar.

  Celoron got its name from a French explorer, a Comte de Céloron. In the late eighteenth century, he paddled down the twenty-mile Lake Chautauqua and landed at the southern end of the lake, which thereafter was known as Celoron. Next the British claimed the land, and then the Americans. Most of the early settlers in the area came from New England.

  This Puritan heritage is deep in my blood; my dearest dream is to live in a little white house in New England with a lilac bush by the front door. My husband, Gary, calls me “one of the Eskimo people.” He dotes on sunshine and hot weather and hates the snow and ice. We really had blizzards in Celoron; the lake froze solid a mile across and was covered with ice-skaters and iceboats and ice fishermen. I’d love to live in New England, where I could have that bright clear air and clean snow and change of seasons.

  There’s another New England thing about me, and that’s a strong conservative, Puritan streak. I’ve always known right from wrong and I’d like to know how I learned this, to make sure my kids do. I’m the most conservative member of my family. Grandfather Freddy was a progressive and a freethinker; DeDe was a product of the Roaring Twenties. She believed in letting go and expressing yourself; bang your fist and let your feelings out. She never gave a fig what other people said or thought.

  My mother gave us kids freedom and was permissive. DeDe says she knew what stuff we were made of and trusted us. I do know that growing up right next to an amusement park can be very bad. Some of the kids ran wild there; and although I appreciated the magic of the place and the spell of make-believe it cast, it’s hard to develop a real sense of values growing up next to a commercial carnival. But apparently I profited from the experience. I am not easily taken in by anyone.

  The little red brick Celoron schoolhouse which we attended from kindergarten through high school was just half a block from our house. I was lucky to grow up in a regular little United Nations: kids of old Anglo-Saxon stock and kids whose fathers or grandfathers came from Italy, Albania, Greece, Germany, Poland, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. Jamestown is a great furniture center, and skilled woodworkers came there from all over the world, so many of my classmates had fathers who were highly skilled craftsmen. Like my grandfather, they took great pride in their work.

  Grandfather had a little workshop at home, where he made us all kinds of things. He built us sleds and wagons and wheelbarrows, and stilts, pogo sticks, swings, teeter-totters, and treehouses. And just for me he made the most absolutely marvelous doll furniture, some of which I still treasure. Using fine pieces of cherry and walnut and mahogany, he turned and scrolled the tiny posts of doll beds and chair legs.

  Gradually, mass production methods displaced the old slow, careful, finicky ways of making fine furniture. My grandfather learned to run a lathe, but he missed the satisfaction of transforming a piece of wood into something of elegance and beauty with his own hands. He wound up as a factory worker before the days of the unions and saw many abuses of authority. And because he was an idealist, a sincere humanitarian, he became a follower of Socialist leader Eugene Debs, the fiery defender of all underdogs.

  I remember the glorious day in Celoron when the indoor bathtub arrived. We already had an indoor bathroom with a toilet, to put it indelicately, but no tub since we had no hot water. Saturday-night baths meant heating the water on the big iron wood-burning kitchen stove. When we were small, I got first turn in the galvanized washtub, followed by Freddy. In the summertime, Grandfather wouldn’t let us go swimming in Lake Chautauqua without taking along a cake of soap for shampooing our hair and washing all over. So we really felt like celebrating when hot water and a tub finally arrived. It was a new luxury to soak and scrub in privacy.

  We kids always called Grandfather Hunt “Daddy,” and kept calling him that to the end of his days. He was our daddy in the sense that he was the man of the household, whom we loved and obeyed. He was great on discipline and if you didn’t hop to it at once, wham! you got it. Once I dillydallied too long getting to the dinner table and Daddy spanked me with the gravy spoon—with gravy still on it! There was hot chicken gravy all over the dining room and my Sunday dress, too.

  The great thing about my grandfather Hunt was that he took such good care of everything. He taught us the same
pride of ownership. Once I slid down the coal bin in the cellar, tearing my dress and ruining my white shoes with coal dust. I really got it good. That cellar was a fascinating place to me: mysterious, and at the same time so planned and orderly. There were the empty boxes left over from one Christmas waiting for the next, the fragrance of freshly cut wood, rows of Grandmother’s canning, the damp smell of the earth floor. Eggs were kept in a pottery crock. It was kind of spooky reaching down into the cold brine, getting wet to the elbow. And those damn spiders, how I hated them! Snakes would crawl in there too. “Look,” Daddy would say, picking one up, “it’s just a garter snake, don’t you see? He’s harmless.” Of course, there were rattlesnakes and copperheads in the area, and he taught us to recognize them, too, as he taught us to know the poisonous kinds of mushrooms.

  Daddy’s truck garden drew admirers for miles around. He kept us in fresh vegetables and berries all summer, and the rest was canned for good eating all during the long, hard winters. During the cold weather the cat always gave birth to a litter of kittens in the cellar and hid them down there. Then some evening when we were all upstairs she would cry at the cellar door. When one of us let her out, she’d carry her brood up one by one, by the scruff of the neck, so we could admire them.

  While Cleo was still a baby, Grandmother Flora Belle gave up a lot of her nursing jobs and stayed home to look after her. But then Grandmother’s health began to fail, and looking after the younger kids and getting supper on the table became my responsibility.

  I couldn’t understand why Grandmother’s nerves would sometimes snap—but her pain and our racket must have been unbearable at times. DeDe said that I had to practice the piano for one hour every afternoon after school. She was a wonderful pianist and insisted that I had music in me—and that’s where it stayed: in me. Grandmother used to encourage me to practice too, but once she fell ill, my playing only seemed to irritate her.

  I just couldn’t understand the change in my beloved grandmother. Then one day I learned that she had uterine cancer and wasn’t going to get well. She got weaker and weaker. Toward the end, she lay all the time in her big mahogany bed in the front parlor.

  Grandmother Hunt wasted away. When she died, released at last from her suffering, I was not allowed to go to the funeral. I took little Cleo and Freddy by the hand and followed the funeral procession down the street, crying my heart out. Grandmother Hunt was only fifty-one when she died. Because of her, I have a special place in my heart for cancer research. Although she knew her own case was hopeless, she prayed to the end for a cure for others.

  * * *

  Each Memorial Day we would cut great branches of blooming lilacs from the purple bushes in the backyard and carry them to Lakeview Cemetery to Grandmother’s grave. Since those days, lilac has become almost an obsession with me; someone once interpreted my passion for it as signaling a return to the womb, to Celoron, to the innocent happiness of childhood. Whatever the reason, the emotional tug is so overwhelming that I’ve been known to plan trips to New England in May just to see and smell lilac in bloom. It’s difficult to grow in California, although I’ve been trying for many years. There are actually male and female bushes, although nobody seems able to tell them apart. We just plant them all together in the sunniest corner of the garden and hope. This year they bloomed for the very first time. They don’t have the fragrance of lilacs in the East, of course. Still, I was delighted!

  After Grandmother Hunt died, there was no adult in the house during the day. I suddenly found myself in her shoes, at the age of eleven. Freddy was then seven, and Cleo three.

  DeDe was certainly a powerful example of a woman’s dedication to her family. She could seldom get home from her job selling hats until six or six-thirty, including Saturdays. So it was my job to make the beds, do the dusting, make sure the table was set, cook dinner, and do the supper dishes. Then DeDe would be up past midnight scrubbing and ironing clothes, mending and sewing. She had two dresses to her name, both black, which she kept brushed and clean, and wore with white collars or pearls. At this time, DeDe was thirty, still a handsome woman, with an infectious laugh.

  Selling hats was tedious work. My mother was on her feet long hours, and the pay was low. She never complained, and always put on a good front, but we knew how the fatigue and worry of making ends meet aggravated her excruciating migraine headaches. I’m a headache sufferer myself, so I know what she went through, but luckily for me, today headaches can be better controlled.

  I can still see DeDe now, on Sunday afternoons, parceling her weekly earnings into little envelopes. There would be $1.25 for insurance, or $4 for a new clothes washer, or $2 for a new set of porch furniture, everything bought on time. But I had the most beautiful clothes of any kid in school. I was always the first with the latest, be it a raccoon coat, open galoshes, or the blue serge middy blouse to go with my short, boyish bob. DeDe always wanted the best for her children, even if it meant going into hock to pay for it.

  Every afternoon we’d telephone her at Marcus’s, the elegant dress shop where she worked in Jamestown. As soon as she heard we were all safely home from school, she’d hang up. Then we’d playact the rest of the afternoon, until we saw DeDe step off the trolley at the end of the street. Then Freddy would rush to set the table, and I’d throw together the beds. Then I’d get out the dust mop. When DeDe walked in, she’d first look up the stairwell to see how many clouds of dust were still dancing in the light. I don’t remember her ever being upset about it, but she’d have some remark that let us know we hadn’t fooled anyone. I missed not having her around all the time—that day-to-day closeness I try to give my own children—but even then I understood why this was just not possible.

  About this time, when I was eleven or twelve, I tried my first cigarette. DeDe came into my little back bedroom and found it blue with smoke. “Oh, so you’re smoking now,” she remarked pleasantly. “Let’s have one together.” She kept me inhaling one cigarette after another, until I turned purple and then green. I was eighteen before I tried smoking again.

  Aunt Lola often let me help out in her beauty shop. I’d operate on the customers’ children, frizzing their hair with a smoking-hot marcel iron and nicking their ears with the shingling shears. I think I actually put Aunt Lola out of business. The children’s irate mothers just refused to come near the place. Ultimately Aunt Lola closed up shop and went into nursing. However, I still love everything about the beauty business. I have a roomful of hairdressing equipment and give permanents, hair sets, manicures, and pedicures to this day. Only now, I’m good at it.

  When she left to enter nurse’s training, Aunt Lola also got a divorce from my uncle George. He moved away and out of our lives, and Cleo stayed with us. She was a cuddly, affectionate child, who often crawled into DeDe’s bed or lap to be comforted. Our pet name for her was “Cleo-baby”; Freddy was “Fritzie-boy”; I was “Lucille-what-the-hell-are-you-doing-now?”

  Among the things that made life interesting in Celoron were the train wrecks. The Erie tracks ran around the lake from Mayville, the county seat to the north, and passed just a few hundred yards from our house. One day Mrs. Curtis, the only wealthy member of our community, got stuck on the tracks in her electric car. She lived in a big stucco house which took up a whole block, surrounded by a high fence. She was a mysterious person to us kids, since we knew so little about her.

  Apparently she was slightly deaf, for she never heard the train coming before the collision. The car was demolished but Mrs. Curtis, merely injured. The train conductors loaded her into the baggage car and chugged off to Jamestown and the hospital.

  At the scene of the wreck, I found some amber beads. I toyed with the idea of keeping them, but in the end, honesty prevailed. After Mrs. Curtis got home from the hospital, I marched through her impressive front gate and rang the doorbell. She turned out to be a sweet and charming lady. She gave me the most thrilling gift I had ever received—a reward for returning the beads: a real gold wristwatch.

>   Another time an Erie freight car became uncoupled and rode up over the flatcar in front; there was a tremendous crash and sound of splintering wood as twenty-five freight cars toppled off the track. People came pouring out of their homes and so did I, but not empty-handed. I bounded across the field with a bucket of water in each hand. No homeless tramp was going to burn up in one of those freight cars if I could help it.

  Being the eldest, I had to keep track of the two younger kids. Luckily, they were both easy to manage and seldom got into mischief. DeDe really loaded me with heavy responsibilities, but more important, she trusted me to make the right decisions. My childhood was challenging, but not backbreaking. DeDe set the challenges, and I pretty much met them and grew stronger.

  People with happy childhoods never overdo; they don’t strive or exert themselves. They’re moderate, pleasant, well liked, and good citizens. Society needs them. But the tremendous drive and dedication necessary to succeed in any field—not only show business—often seems to be rooted in a disturbed childhood. I wasn’t an unloved or an unwanted child, but I was moved around a lot, and then death and cruel circumstances brought many painful separations.

  My adolescence was about as stormy as you might imagine. I had a redheaded temper (though no red hair) in those days. Cleo remembers me as a creative, strong-willed teenager, whirling like a pinwheel. I can remember kicking, rolling, biting fights on the school grounds; there were some girls I certainly had some rounds with, and a few boys, too. There was an Italian typing teacher I was crazy about, but once she made me so mad I threw a typewriter at her.