I said to my mother, “Daddy’s crazy.”

 

She replied, “I know.”

 

Summertime. We lived in a rural community called Flatrock outside of Anderson, South Carolina. My father and I were sitting down in the hollow below our home at the picnic table.

 

He told me he had discovered a new idea that was going to change the world for all of humanity. I was so eager to understand his idea. I keep asking him questions for more details. When I couldn’t understand from one side, I would ask questions another way, trying to understand at what he was talking about.

 

Finally, I realized, although he still believed in his idea, whatever it was, it was without foundation. I left my father and went to talk to my mother, who was hanging wet clothes on the line. I said to her, “Mama, I think that Daddy’s crazy.” I was surprised when she replied matter-of-factly, “Yes, I know.” She didn’t say much more than that. 

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I forgot what I knew until...

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Somehow I forgot this discovery, maybe because remembering it would have made me feel too insecure. I didn’t re-remember it until I was 28-years-old and living in New York City. My father, who, later we believed was bipolar, even though he was unwilling to see a doctor, came to visit me in New York City while in one of his manic states. 

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My mother kept everything inside

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My mother later told me that when I came to her with my discovery, her first impulse was to drop to the ground and start crying, telling me how hard it was for her to deal with my father and hold the family together. But then she thought to herself, “I can’t do that to a ten-year-old.” 

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At the time I thought it made our family sort of special, like in a novel

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I remember thinking at the time, “Wow! I’ve got a crazy father. I thought this sort of thing only happened in books.” Somehow it made me feel that our family was special, even in this strange way.

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My mother read "Yellow-Dog Dingo" to us

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My mother laid on her stomach on the bed, propping herself up with her elbows with a pillow. She read to us an hour at a time. My sister Karen, three years younger, lay to her right, with me on her left.

 

I loved the rhythm and sound of my mother’s voice and daydreamed myself into the storyline and characters. She read from the “Just So” stories of Rudyard Kipling, “How the kangaroo got his tail,” “How the leopard got his spots,” and “How the camel got his hump.” She also read us “Little Men” and “Little Women” by Louisa May Alcott. Also "Old Yeller" and “Heidi.”

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Childhood hero: "The Phantom"

 

Sunday mornings I rushed to get the cartoon pages from the Anderson, South Carolina newspaper. The newspaper was delivered to our home only on Sundays.

 

Many other kids preferred "Dick Tracy" or "Superman" for their hero. I didn’t like Dick Tracy at all. I liked Superman, but not as much as The Phantom. Every Sunday The Phantom would solve the cliffhanger from the previous Sunday and then create a new cliffhanger that I had to wait one week to find out what happened. 

 

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Dumping the church

 

I quote from one of my mother’s letters written years later, recalling “David Fletcher’s mother told Ray," my then two-year-old brother, "that he must do thus and so in Sunday School so as not to make Jesus sad and cry and he didn’t want to make Jesus sad and cry, now did he?

 

"And that was the last Sunday you, Dwight, and Karen and Ray ever darkened the door of the Flatrock Presbyterian Church. I told Jack if he wanted to go, keep right on but MY children and I were not going and that was that. One of the few times in my married life I ever told Jackson this is the way it is buddy boy and that’s it. Jack quit the church, too.”

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My fifth-grade teacher gave me a Bible for memorizing Bible verses

 

Mrs. Doggett was the only elementary school teacher I could say I liked. My mother thought she was the best teacher I had in grammar school. I was pretty good at memorization if I had some interest. I recited several Bible verses from memory to my fellow students and my prize was a new Bible from the teacher.

 

Did she pay for it with her own money or was it reimbursed by the school? I suspect the former. Although it could have been donated by her church.

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"Three times in the rain" is your limit 

 

Unlike other mothers, my mother thought that playing in the rain was good healthy fun for kids. She trusted our bodies and our own judgment to tell us if it were too cold or not. She poopooed the idea that we would get sick from playing in the rain, “You don’t get sick when you take a shower...it’s the same difference.” 

 

She did have a “rule” however. She was willing for us to go out, get soaking wet, and then come back in to put on dry clothes and then she would later wash and dry the wet ones. Then we could go out again to play in the rain and return to put on another set of dry clothes. She jokingly, I think, said her limit was three times out and three times back in. We never reached her limit. 

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We got our first telephone, one of the last families in the neighborhood

 

But it was a "party line" with seven families sharing the same line. When it rang for one of our neighbors, it was two short rings and we knew not to pick it up. When it was one long ring, it was for us.

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One time my mother needed to reach someone in an emergency and some kid on our party line refused to hang up so she could make the call.

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It felt like Sunday was different from other days, but was it?

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Is Sunday really a special day, or did we humans just make that up? After a bit of thought, even though it had seemed special, I decided that it was by convention only. Otherwise, Sunday and Monday were not any different.

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Adventures with a four-foot black snake

 

On my grandparent's farm, I discovered a non-poisonous black snake in their side yard. I took an egg, running hot water over it to warm it up. Placing the egg six inches from the snake’s head, I watched in fascination as the snake unlocked its jaws and swallowed the egg. Once the egg was inside its body, the snake twisted its body to break the egg so it could be digested.

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The enemy of the wasps 

 

I became the enemy of the wasps. Wasps would often build their nests under the eves of my grandparent’s chicken houses. Collecting a pint of gasoline in a jar, I would get as close to a wasp nest as possible without too much danger and then quickly douse it with the jar full of gasoline. If I did it well, I got away without being stung, killing all the wasps on the nest.

 

A few times I was not so lucky or skillful. My grandmother would apply a paste of baking soda and water to the stings that I got in my battles against the wasps. I was never told to "be more careful."

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My mother insisted on clean language

 

Even though my mother was an agnostic, she insisted that we never use expressions like, “God damn it!” or even “Oh, my God!” Instead, we could say, “Darn it” or “Oh, my gosh!” She said that people who used such words were not smart enough to use better ones.

 

When I was fourteen and I heard my mother’s cousin’s husband, Bob Ray, using some of those "un-intelligent" words, I asked my mother about it, since I thought that she thought he was intelligent. She didn’t deny that he was intelligent, but she still expressed her disapproval.

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Dateline 1954

 

1954 Women's clothing

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"Father Knows Best"

On October 3rd, “Father Knows Best” comes to life in this TV series hit sitcom about a wise family man, Jim Anderson, his common-sense wife Margaret and their children Betty, Bud and Kathy. Whenever the kids need advice on anything at all, they can always turn to their father, because father knows best. I loved watching this show once we got a TV, even though in our family, I thought, “Mother Knows Best.”

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Boeing 707

America's first jet airliner, the Boeing 707 takes its maiden flight.

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TV without vacuum tubes

The first all-electronic color television goes on sale from RCA the CT-100 selling for $1,000. Today (2021) that would cost $10,333. The screen was 15-inches.

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World population

OMG, 2.72 billion people!