Boys Fighting and the Bridge Party Part 4

My childhood friend Kenny Williams lived on the corner of Estacado Dr. and Fuller Dr. His home was a very foreign place to me—a seeming well lighted place where both parents created a very structured life for their three children. As Kenny’s chum, I accompanied him to many activities—-Sunday school, church summer day camp, Cub and Boy Scouts, church baseball and basketball leagues, and Demolay. Most of the time, Kenny’s mom did the driving though my mom did some of the time and Kenny’s dad did some of the chores for the young manhood activity of Wednesday night Demolay meetings. Kenny’s parents, unlike mine, were deeply involved in all these activities. For the most part, I didn’t or wasn’t made to feel as a tag-along, except maybe to church. The scouts and the teams were just as much mine as Kenny’s. I felt a bit uncomfortable one time when Kenny told me his mother [or perhaps his father] resented driving more than my Mom, but that passed soon. In retrospect, I think Kenny’s mother was always kind to me because she was a kind person but also because she was focused on cultivating her first born son, her son wanted his best friend to accompany him, and it was just easier for everyone if I came and no one complained.

While Kenny’s well lighted home was perplexing to me and no place I wanted to spend much time, across the street from Kenny's house on the parkway somehow not part of any residential yard, the older boys gathered at the Dallas Times Herald delivery point. Six afternoons a week and early Sunday mornings, the truck dropped off all the bundles for Mr. Kuhn’s district. My brother, five years older than me and probably about 15 at the time, worked hard to gain a route that included Fuller, Eastwood, Naylor, Pinecrest, and Sylvia. It was one of the smaller and less income-producing routes, but my brother felt it fit him because he was a small teenager, and the pivotal factor in being a paperboy was if you were strong enough to carry all your folded and banded papers in your bag for the entire route, Thursdays and Sundays being the most heavyweight days and Saturdays the lightest.
















Other big boys hung out at the paper corner and did a lot of big boy things like smoke, talk about sex, and ride motorcycles and even drive hot rods. So I was fairly cooperative in helping my brother and hanging out with the big boys, even if my brother abused me by not paying me and making me do all the work.

So on a schoolday afternoon, as I was walking along the sidewalk on the east end of Eastwood toward the paper corner, Kenny walks up and offers me a piece of candy. It was a plate of hard candy, maybe three by three inches and on first taste I didn’t find it very sweet or easy to handle. As we licked our candy, here comes one of the big boy paperboys on a Moped. He stops beside us and asks if I can help him by giving him some of my brother’s rubber bands from our house. I’m flattered and also excited to get a first-time ride on the back of a motorcycle. As I climb on the back behind him, I’m not sure what to do with the big piece of candy. It is too big and sticky to put in a pocket, so I throw it to the concrete, clutch the big boy's waist with my two free hands, and accelerate behind the big boy down towards home.

Later that afternoon, as I walk back up to the paper corner, Kenny confronts me. He’s pissed off because I threw the candy to the ground. I’m not real proud of doing it but also not going to apologize or anything. So we get into one of those interminable wrestling matches which ended, as usual, in a draw with both of us exhausted but neither giving in. What I did not know at the time was that the next afternoon, my Mom had been invited to Mrs. Williams’ afternoon bridge party.

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To Be Continued

Boys Fighting and the Bridge Party Part 3

From The Feminine Mystique
"A number of women told me about great bleeding blisters that break out on their hands and arms. ‘I call it the housewife’s blight,’ said a family doctor in Pennsylvania. ‘I see it so often in these young women with four, five and six children who bury themselves in their dishpans. But it isn’t caused by detergent and it isn’t cured by cortisone.’”

To Be Continued

Boys Fighting and the Bridge Party Part 2

From The Feminine Mystique
“Sometimes she thought the problem was with her husband, or her children, or that what she really needed was to redecorate her house. Or move to a better neighborhood, or have an affair, or another baby. Sometimes she went to a doctor with symptoms she could barely describe: ‘A tired feeling. . . I feel like crying without any reason’ (A Cleveland doctor called it ‘the housewife syndrome.')"



To Be Continued

Boys Fighting on the Streets and Moms Fighting at the Afternoon Bridge Party

Since my late teens, I’ve pretty much turned away from my early life, seeing as bleak and sterile those years in my suburban neighborhoods and shopping districts, in the schools overflowing with baby boom kids, and within my at times twisted nuclear family. As I have been reading the 1963 book The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan, I’m coming to another point of view, a view on how my parents might have seen things in the 1950s, that makes me accept that my little neighborhoods were the fulfillment of an American dream. My parents, married during World War II, with a first son born while my father was in the service, came from homes that suffered from extreme poverty during the depression. Both also came from homes where much brutality and suffering took place—brutality from the father against a suffering mother. So their new life in a new home in a new Dallas suburb must have been a great adventure, going forward but perhaps more significantly getting away from a past that had been traumatic.



From The Feminine Mystique—The Problem That Has No Name: “The suburban housewife—she was the dream image of the young American woman and the envy, it was said, of women all over the world. The American housewife—freed by science and labor-saving appliances from the drudgery, the dangers of childbirth, and the illnesses of her grandmother. She was healthy, beautiful, educated, concerned about her husband, her children, her home. She had found true feminine fulfillment. As a housewife and mother, she was respected as a full and equal partner to man in his world. She was free to choose automobiles, clothes, appliances, supermarkets; she had everything that women ever dreamed of.” p. 13

Our memories of childhood are selective and some of my most pointed memories are times when my mother lost her temper with me and/or my brother. She generally was a kind, nurturing and generous, though tight lipped and high strung, woman. So this is a memory of how the bridge party Mrs. Betty Williams invited my mother to led to one of those infrequent losses of temper. My father complained to me once that he couldn’t understand why she sometimes was so unhappy; he would find her crying and she could give no explanation for what was wrong.

To Be Continued