Rich White Baby Boomer – Page 2

Demonic Attack?

As I sit in our living room waiting for the sunrise, with the right side of my neck covered in steri-strips over just under my partially shorn beard, the still painful reminder of last week’s right carotid endarterectomy, my mind goes not to the ER visit that led to this particular knife fight, but to my first ever trip to an Emergency Room. I was four years old. I was playing in the sandbox, next to the garage, behind our little Dutch colonial on Shoreline Drive in Robbinsdale, Minnesota. My sister, Sue Ann, was swinging on the swing set, which our neighbor, “Grandpa” Olson had made for us. I ran right under the swing and the exposed end of a bolt on the bottom sliced my scalp, right in the middle of the top of my head. I stumbled, then got up, screaming, and ran, bleeding profusely, to our backdoor.

Grandma Ingham was visiting. She grabbed the beautiful afghan she had knit for us, wrapped me in it and scooped me up. I asked her why the afghan. She said it was to protect me against shock. I didn’t understand. It was the middle of summer. Why would I possibly need an afghan? I couldn’t believe she used this and risked it getting all bloody. At the same time, I felt honored and comforted: honored, that she was willing to spend something so precious, that represented so many hours of work, on me; comforted, because it was softer and less itchy than any of our blankets. My mom grabbed her keys, and sent Sue Ann, Alison and Tic over to the Ericsons. I rode in my Grandma’s arms to North Memorial Hospital’s emergency room in our brand new 1959 Pontiac station wagon. The doctor handed me a spool of black suture thread to play with, to distract me, while he stitched up my scalp. He must have used a bit of a local anesthetic, because I remember it just sort of tickled a little while he was working up there. Then we went home.

Thankfully, my blood washed out of that beautiful afghan.

Now, why does my mind go to this when I started out thinking about Sunday’s visiting nurse asking me, “Have you ever considered you may be under demonic attack?” while I was opening the three window shades on the southeast front of the house in the dark? I’m just three months shy of 64 and I can recall those scenes from 60 years ago as if they happened earlier today. Part of me is still that spastic, precocious four year old. And, the nurse asked that irrelevant question after I had already told her I was an atheist. I also explained that when I believed in God, I didn’t fear demons. “The only power they had were lies.” Twisted people were another matter. I didn’t fear them enough to modify my actions, but I received my share of threats. A Mennonite pastor threatened to kill me. The Fruit of Islam leader at Graterford Prison put out a hit on me at one point. A gang of street punks threatened me. A high ex-offender took me from my day job at gunpoint to drive him to a rehab. Bishops, priests and pastors of every stripe slandered me, lied to me, and bullied me. Police under four different mayors of Philadelphia harassed and threatened me. This was just part of my job of serving the poor.

Of course, she was talking about my health history: the mysterious infection on my spine, the vancomycin causing kidney failure, then Stevens-Johnsons Syndrome, the six strokes, the atypical migraines, the 47 TIAs, the damaged aortic valve, the allergy to 12 meds, etc. I don’t think it was demons. I think it was more likely that my shell was softened when I was a young eagle by the spraying of DDT over our house and yard to kill the mosquitoes in the swamp at the end of our backyard. Every day is Earth Day. See what I did there. That was a Rachel Carson reference. Does your brain work that way, or is it just me?

The sunrise was beautiful!

Ericsons, Hostermans, DeLays, etc. (rwbb-3)

I have already mentioned one neighbor. Aunt Helen didn’t have any children; at least none that we children knew of. The families who really formed the neighborhood were the ones like ours: with kids! The mother-lode was across the street, on the shore of Crystal Lake. Immediately across the street were the Ericsons with Carol, Jane, Molly & David. Then the Hostermans with Gretchen and Charlie. Then there were the DeLays with Jimmy and his older sisters. After that, it was Dr. and Grandma Hosterman’s place. He was a hoot! He had been a dentist. He was also on the local school board. He and his wife always had an open door to young people. As Robbinsdale Independent School District #281 expanded and the suburbs were populated with new developments to house all of us Baby Boomers, new schools had to be built. My dad served on the building committee for the new Robbinsdale High School that was finished in 1958, allowing the old high school to become Robbinsdale Junior High. I went to kindergarten at RHS, then returned for 10th through 12th grades. They tucked in a couple of kindergarten classes in buildings all over the district wherever they could for a couple of years. It was an emergency situation, after all. Going to kindergarten in the high school had definite advantages. The high school students were very entertaining. They dressed up in costumes, like the Easter Bunny, or Santa Claus, or Pilgrims and Indians, and came around the corner of the building three floors below outside of our windows. They did dramatic and art presentations in our classroom. It was great.

Dr. Hosterman was one of two people whom two new junior highs in the district were named after. The other was Carl Sandburg. I was at the dedication of both. I had the honor of meeting Mr. Sandburg at the dedication in 1959. He shook my hand firmly and looked me in the eye. He did not pat my head as so many adults did to four year olds wearing suits and ties in those days. He told me to take my reading seriously. How unusual that a junior high would be named for a living socialist in the 1950s in the heart of a solidly GOP district in the McCarthy era. Hosterman Junior High was dedicated in 1962. Our family attended with the guest of honor and his extended family. I still remember the talent show that the faculty put on as part of the evening’s program. I was seven. In September 1967, I would begin junior high at Sandburg. That year, it was the largest junior high on one floor in the nation with 2200 students on one floor. It had been built for 1800. The next year half of my friends would be transferred to the newly opened Plymouth Junior High further out in the suburbs; one of the pitfalls of being born at the crest of the Baby Boom. Hosterman Junior High succumbed to the wrecking ball in 2010, during the tenure of Gretchen Hosterman as CAO of the school district. Sandburg has been used for administration, adult education, vo-tech, etc. RHS has been rented out to the Shriners; been used as a senior center, as a Spanish immersion school, etc. Several of the elementary schools are now old age and convalescent homes. So they have come full circle. Yes, and the Robbinsdale Branch of the Mpls. Public Library that I used to haunt is now the Robbinsdale Historical Society.

I should get back to the neighborhood now.

We all played together. It was expected that the older ones would hold the hands of the younger ones when we crossed the street. We would let our moms know if we were going to the other end of the block, I guess, but not every time, just that we would be going back and forth. There were no “helicopter parents”. There also was no air conditioning, no stereo or loud radio, no daytime TV. So, moms could hear if something were to go wrong.

When we played cowboys and Indians, David Ericson liked to get killed just outside his back door. He would lay down dead. Then he would scramble into the kitchen to get some ketchup to put on his face, just for added realism. He then had to also grab a few potato chips, because, you know, you don’t waste good ketchup.

On the 4th of July, the whole neighborhood (plus some) spread out blankets on Ericsons’ front lawn to watch the fireworks over the lake. They were beautiful, reflecting on the surface of the water. The front lawn was a pretty steep hill down to the lake. It should be noted that the front doors of houses on lakes or rivers or any body of water is the door facing the water. Ericson’s house had screened porches on both the first and second floors facing the lake. Dick and Jane Schirmacher still live in that house to this day. They bought the house from Jane’s parents after her brother David died in a plane crash on Christmas Eve, 1971, in Peru, while serving a gap year mission assignment with Wickliffe Bible Translators. That so tore up his dad, Les, that he retired from Pillsbury Flour. They spent 3 months with their daughter, Carol, and her husband, Jim Daggett, at Wickliffe’s mission base in Peru. Les engineered and installed refrigeration for the medical compound. They sold the house to Dick and Jane and moved to a small farm in rural Minnesota.

I loved the Ericsons’ house. Many times, when my mom was working for the 1960 census, she let me stay with Lois. My sisters and brother and all the Ericon kids were in school. I remember playing with David’s Lincoln Logs on the floor of their living room while Lois was baking in the kitchen. Their house was one of the few places I felt safe as a child.

Jim DeLay was in the grade between David’s and mine. David graduated RHS in 1971, with my sister Sue Ann. Jim was in the class of 1972 and I was in the class of 1973. Jim was always a friendly and expressive kid. He got into acting in our high school, starring or playing supporting roles in several school plays. We had a fantastic theater program there. By high school, Jim was pretty flamboyant and made no attempt to hide the fact that he was gay. His strict, Catholic father had beat Jim his whole life. On several occasions in our teen years, Dr. Hosterman could hear Jim and his dad fighting in their house next door. He would call my dad, even though we had moved to Golden Valley in 1961, to come over to intervene. At least once, Mr. DeLay’s service revolver was brandished by one of them. My dad could talk Jim’s dad down. Jim was among the first wave of AIDS related deaths in Minnesota, in the 1980s. His dad died in 2016 or 2017. His obituary did not even list his son, Jim.

My sister Sue Ann committed suicide on Nov. 30, 2000, at age 47, leaving behind three children and her husband. After being sober from alcohol for several years, she had succumbed to a gambling addiction. When her boss discovered she had embezzled a large sum of money from him, she took a drug cocktail, leaving her note as the final entry of her diary.

So, in our little neighborhood, after what looked like a fun, balanced, playful childhood, we have had our share of tragedy.

“A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”

I have already relayed the fact that I was named for both of my grandfathers. What I haven’t mentioned yet is that I did not learn what my name was until after my 6th birthday.

When I was born at Swedish Hospital in Minneapolis, on June 14, 1955, my parents, B.J. and Charlie, had not yet agreed on a boy’s name. So the discussion continued. My mom, B.J., wanted to name me after her father, Cranford. Now Cranford Williams Ingham had never used his full first name. It was always shortened to “Cran”. Interestingly, his middle name was the last name of the doctor who delivered him, who was one of the few women doctors in Wisconsin in 1900. Charlie couldn’t stand the name Cran, so he said, “No son of mine is going to be named Cranford!” He wanted to name me Joseph, after his father. As I mentioned before, Joseph never used his name, either, except for perhaps as a child. People called him “Free” or “Freeman”, because he was a “free thinker” or atheist. He died two years before I was born of a heart attack. B.J.’s response to Joseph was, “Joe’s Bar, Joe’s Hardware, Joe’s Diner! It’s too common!” They kept arguing for three days after I was born. This is when I remind the readers that my parents met in law school. The hospital had to fill out the birth certificate before we were discharged. They told B.J. and Charlie that if they could not agree, they would just fill it out as “Baby Boy Coulter” and that would be my legal name until I was 16, the minimum age to legally change a name in Minnesota. (That wouldn’t have damaged me a bit.)

My folks arrived at the compromise and I was named “Cranford Joseph Coulter” with the agreement that I would be called “Ford”. The name Cranford was never spoken in our household. My sister, Sue Ann, who was almost 27 months old when I was born, got her F’s and S’s mixed up, so she called me “Sord”. Everyone thought that was cute, so they all called me Sord as well. It took a concerted effort to correct everybody, including me, to pronounce my name correctly as Ford, before I started kindergarten at Robbinsdale High School on Tuesday, September 6, 1960. That’s me (above) in my kindergarten picture wearing my Nixon-Lodge button on my wool tweed sport coat, like a proper little WASP.

During the summer of 1961, we moved out of the small, Dutch colonial on Shoreline Drive, Robbinsdale, and into the spacious, four bedroom colonial that my dad “built” at 4845 Lowry Terrace, Golden Valley. Charlie had acted as his own contractor, using the plans he had purchased from American Home magazine. It had won the prize for “Best Home for the Midwest”. It was the first home featured in a magazine to have a family room. It was a great house to entertain in. It had a formal living room and dining room, two fireplaces: one in the family room, and one in the basement. It had a master bath, a kids bath with two sinks, and a powder room just inside the back door and by the doors to the garage and the basement. My brother, Tic, and I each got our own bedrooms, since we were six years apart. Our sisters, Alison and Sue Ann, were just two years apart, so they still had to share a room until Tic went to college.

It was the last week of August, 1961, when B.J. took me to register for 1st grade at Noble Avenue Elementary School. We were standing just inside the doors at the end of a long hallway. A woman was sitting at a card table with notebooks with all of the pupils’ names and information in them. When it was our turn, the lady at the card table asked my mom for her child’s name. My mom said, “Coulter, Cranford.” I pulled on my mom’s arm and said, “My name isn’t Cranford.” She turned to the woman at the card table and said it again, “Coulter, Cranford.” This time, I hid behind my mom’s skirt and tugged on her arm, and exclaimed through tears, “MY NAME ISN’T CRANFORD!” She turned to me and said, “Your name is Cranford. Your nickname is Ford.” Then she turned to the lady at the card table and said, “His name is Cranford. His nickname is Ford. Mark his file.”

That’s how I learned that my name was Cranford. That evening, at dinner, my dad told me not to worry. As soon as I turned 16, we could legally change my name to Ford. All through grade school, none of the other students found out my real name. None of the teachers ever called roll with anything but “Ford Coulter” or “Coulter, Ford”.

On September 5, 1967, I started 7th grade at Carl Sandburg Junior High, Golden Valley, across the street from the Honeywell factory, where they manufactured the MIRV devices for nuclear warheads. Because of that factory, we were told, Golden Valley was the #16 priority target for a nuclear attack by the U.S.S.R. We were told a lot of things. Some of them were true.

Sue Ann had warned me that I had better talk to my teachers before they took attendance if I wanted to keep “Cranford” secret. I made sure to dash to every class on the first day of every semester in junior high to notify my teachers to mark their files with my name as “Ford”. None of them ever called “Cranford” out loud in my three years there. One leak did happen, however, at the beginning of second quarter in 7th grade. To be more efficient, homeroom was incorporated into 1st period. In my case, that was Mr. Nordstrom’s “Project Social” Sociology class. I was in the “Enriched Program” for Science, Math, Social Studies and English. The rule was that if one did test to qualify for all four subjects ‘enriched’, one was only allowed to take three of them and had to opt out of one of the subjects. However, there were ten of us, out of a class of 750 who scored so high that they allowed us to take all four subjects enriched. Two of the other boys also took German and choir, as I did, so we ended up with identical schedules for three years. The school wanted me to skip 7th grade, but my mom wouldn’t let me.

Back to the story. One morning at the beginning of the 2nd quarter, before the beginning of homeroom, I heard someone say, “Who is this Cranford Jose’ character?”

Mr. Nordstrom had posted the computer printout of the class’s grade point averages for the first quarter. The printout didn’t have enough character space for my entire middle name, so now I was the British-Mexican foreign exchange student. A few of my guy friends called me Cranford Jose’ or just Jose’ from then on. Half of the students from that class ended up going to the new, Plymouth Junior High for 8th and 9th grades. I stayed in touch with several of them. When I was starting my second year of college, I went to visit a couple of my high school friends at the main campus of the University of Minnesota. I was about to enter the Coffman Memorial Union, when I hear someone holler “Cranford Jose’!” from across the commons. It was my old, Finnish friend from 7th grade, Tapani Temul Lahti!

When I got back to Robbinsdale High School for my sophomore year, I decided to drop out of the enriched program for everything except math. (Math had been accelerated by a year since 5th grade.) I also decided to stop ‘correcting’ my name with the teachers. So any students who met me for the first time were introduced to me as Cranford (the kids from Robbinsdale Junior High). So half the kids knew me as Cranford and half knew me as Ford. I would sometimes encounter a group of kids and someone would address me by name, and the light would go on with someone, “Oh no! This Cranford person and this Ford person are the same person!” I had reputations. When I turned 16 just after my sophomore year, Charlie was ready to take me down to the courthouse to change my name. I disappointed him by letting him know that I preferred Cranford and intended to keep it.

My wife’s middle name, given to her at birth was Williams, for the woman doctor who had helped her mother survive several miscarriages and a still birth after the birth of her older sister Susan and helped her mom finally come to term and deliver a healthy baby girl, ten years later. Bethann dropped that name and has used her maiden name, Reber, for her middle name, since we got married in 1975. When we went to North Memorial Medical Center to deliver our first child, our doctor was out of town, so his partner showed up to deliver April. His last name was Williams. April’s middle name is Marie.

Scott

Scott was a good friend of mine in junior high. He was on the ski jump team. At Theodore Wirth Park, there was a huge, wooden ski jump. Next to it, was a smaller jump built into the hill. Scott would be there, training with his jumping skis. I would be skiing on the downhill slopes on the park board slopes on the Saturdays I couldn’t get away to Wisconsin, or after school. One Saturday, Scott found me and let me use his jumping skis on the smaller jump. What a thrill! He tried to coax me to go off the big, wooden jump. I knew I didn’t dare. The likelihood would be I would jump off the wrong side of it. Another Saturday morning, Scott finished with his jumping practice. He had forgotten to bring his downhill skis and didn’t have a ride home until later. He found me and persuaded me to share my skis. He let me use both my poles. He just used a single downhill ski. He taught me how to ski downhill on one ski! That was a useful skill. The rope tows were a little tricky. I would end up slowly wilting to one side and pull all of the other passengers on the line down with me into the snow.

Scott was a beautiful boy, and charming. He had a fort he had built behind his house. In the summer after 8th grade, guys and girls would hang out at his house. Couples would use his fort to make love. I was not aware of this until my girlfriend told me it was “our turn”. I declined. I was caught completely off guard. That ended my relationship with that redhead. That was OK. I am so glad I waited until marriage.

During junior high and into high school, Scott was one of those who called me on a few occasions contemplating suicide. My sister, Sue Ann, and I, it seems, were known as the suicide counselors for our junior high. How that came to be is anybody’s guess. All I know is that Scott and I spent time talking, listening, crying, laughing, renewing a reason to live.

We went to different high schools. The night in 1972 in our junior year when Scott killed himself, he did not call me. It still hurts. Scott was the fourth of my friends to commit suicide.

(You may purchase this painting on my art sale site: www.shoutforjoy.net )

More than Pearl Harbor Day

As I start to write this, it is the 76th anniversary of the Japanese bombing of the US Navy base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941. This was the provocation that galvanized the US public to get behind World War II. My parents remembered where they were when they got the news, just as everyone in my generation can recount where they were when they learned that JFK was shot, and the next generation knows when the Challenger blew up, and so on, until the post-modern world is ensnared together by a single polarizing event on 9-11.

December 7th is more complicated in our family than Pearl Harbor Day, however. Ironically, it became the day I learned to bake Christmas cookies. You see we had to, because my mom’s mom died, and she was too sad to make the krumkake, rosettes, spritz, jam thumb prints and bourbon balls. I was 12. My sister, Sue Ann, was 14. We were not going to have a cookie-less Christmas. Grandma Ingham had died in the wee hours of the morning. My older brother had driven (since he was sober) to the nursing home with my dad. She had been in physical therapy for a broken shoulder. The therapist didn’t heed her cries of pain, and forced it, and broke her spine. It was gruesome.

Sue Ann and I just took over the kitchen, read the recipes, baked cookies for four days. Tom, Alison and Dad were taking care of the details that needed taking care of; talking to relatives and friends, etc. Mom just shut down. She looked more like her mom than ever I had seen her. Her mother suffered from chronic depression and alcoholism. We didn’t have a single picture of her without a look of sadness in her eyes. Now that same look was in my mom’s eyes. It stayed there almost uninterrupted for at least two years.

All of the cookies turned out well, except the spritz I made. The dough was so hard I nearly broke the spritz press forcing the dough out of it onto the cookie trays. I had added green food coloring to make them festive. When they came out of the oven they had not spread and were a bit scorched. Most of them were now green and brown. We put them in a box and added them to the assortment when we put plates of cookies out. Everyone complimented us on our baking. Nobody broke any teeth on the spritz, thankfully.

We went through the visitations and funeral at the funeral home. The younger cousins learned from the two oldest cousins, my brother Tom and cousin Deb, that our grandpa had had another wife between our grandmother, Jane, and our step-grandmother, Wathena (whom we all called “Aunt Wathena”). They were only married for about two years. She wanted to move to California. Cranford just couldn’t do that, so they divorced. I didn’t cry over Grandma Ingham’s death until Christmas Day, when the maple rocking chair where she always sat when she came to our house was empty. One of the afghans she had made was draped over its back. (I cry and sob whenever I read this sentence to this day.)

On December 7, 1978, our second daughter, Rosalie, was born, at home, during a blizzard. The midwife was the ever vivacious, traditionally built Sandy Perkins. She arrived at our front door in East Greenville, PA, and immediately asked if I had water boiling. I replied, “What for? That’s just what they assign men to do to get them out of the way.” In her best black mama voice she said, “You mean to tell me you just made me drive over 45 minutes in a snowstorm, and you don’t even have my coffee ready!” Rosalie was born in our bedroom without complications. Sandy weighed her by hooking a blanket to a fish scale forming a sling and placing Rosalie in it and holding it up.

In late November, 2000, my sister, Sue Ann died. She was 47. It took my older sister, Ali, and me a month and a half of research to uncover the fact that she had committed suicide. Our dad wanted to keep that hidden. I flew out to Minnesota for the funeral. On the morning of the day of Sue Ann’s funeral, I went into Minneapolis to visit Grama Ethel Haanpaa at the Lutheran Home, the high rise retirement community where she had lived for several years. Ethel was not our grandma by blood, but by adoption. She was actually Becky Shostrom’s grandma. I had been engaged to Becky when I was a senior in high school until finals week of my freshman year of college. That’s when she told me she had fallen in love with the bus driver on the spring break choir tour. Grama Ethel and her husband, Emil, kept inviting me to all of the special occasions at their chocolate brown house on 25-1/2 Avenue North. We had become good friends, along with Ethel’s first husband, Al Shostrom, and his girlfriend, Mamie. We were a strange lot. When Bethann and I got engaged, I introduced her to Ethel and Emil. Ethel welcomed Bethann to the family with open arms. Emil passed away shortly after we moved to PA in 1977. Ethel became another grandma to our four girls. We exchanged Christmas gifts and birthday cards, letters and phone calls and always visited her when we got back to Minnesota.

When I got to the Lutheran Home, I did not find Ethel in her apartment. I inquired at the desk and discovered that she was in the hospice care unit. I visited her and can remember our conversation like it was yesterday. She told me that she didn’t want to take the pain meds, because they made her befuddled. She was dying and didn’t see any point wasting what little time she had left being befuddled. She said she needed to settle her accounts and needed a clear head to do that. She then recounted to me what she considered to be her failings and sins. Now she had been a Baptist all her life. Baptists don’t do confession. But I heard hers. We cried together. I assured her that God loved her and she was forgiven for all her failings and regrets. At the time, I was an Orthodox Christian layperson. When I got home, I told my priest, Father Boniface, about how I had heard her confession and assured her of God’s forgiveness. He said, “You did good.” As I left to go to my sister’s funeral, I knew that this was the last time I would see dear, sweet Ethel. She would never bless my “pointed little head” again. In fact, that was the last conversation she had. She slipped into coma and passed away a few days later, on December 7, 2000, at age 92.

So I lost two grandmas on the same day, 23 years apart, and gained a daughter in between.

First Haircut & Robin Center

Mrs. Pool lived next door (on the back door side). All of us kids called her Aunt Helen. Her husband, at least I think he was her husband, who had very little hair, gave me my first haircut in a little shop in the back of the house. I’m not sure of the relationship. I didn’t like him. I am told that I cried and screamed when he cut my hair. He didn’t seem to be around much. It wasn’t a regular barber shop. He was very quiet, unlike any other barber I’ve met since. Aunt Helen’s house was the one house in the neighborhood that was the typical cottage style, with a white picket fence. She baked cookies for the kids, too. It was a little creepy for a lot of the kids. I liked Mr. Kuperman much better. He had the shop in Robin Center. We could walk down there. It was only a block and a half away. He would always wink at my mom and give me the quarter change from the haircut, if I “was a good boy.” He was Jewish and had escaped from a concentration camp in Germany. He talked with a Yiddish accent, I ended up going to kindergarten and all through school with his nieces and my older sister was in his son’s class. I think his son and my sister ended up practicing medicine in the same hospital for awhile.

Robin Center was built in 1955, the same year I was born, the crest of the Baby Boom. The land it was built on had been turned over to the state as useless swamp land by someone who was fed up with paying city taxes on unbuildable land after the town had encroached on what had been a rural area prior to WW2. An enterprising citizen of Robbinsdale redeemed it from the government; then shipped in fill. At some places the swamp was forty feet deep. The shopping center had to be built on pylons. It has stood the test of time. It has had two face-lifts, one in the 1980s and one at the turn of the millennium. At this writing, it is still prospering.

Mr. Kuperman’s shop, the Mother Goose Stride Rite shoe store and the Fanny Farmer candy shop were all in a row there. A giant goose in the middle of the shoe store would dispense a genuine, 1921 or 1922 silver dollar each time we bought a pair of shoes. I was born with malformed joints in my ankles, knees and hips. Until I was three, I had to wear braces on my legs and feet when I slept. Whenever it was time for me to get shoes, there was only one choice for me to make: brown or black. They were always corrective wingtips. I couldn’t wear them home, because the special heels had to be installed. For all the good they did! I spent my entire childhood with bloody ankles because of those shoes! I remember the feeling of jubilation of successfully rounding the landing going up the stairs in the house on Shoreline Drive, only to have my face firmly hit the top step as my right toe predictably hooked my left ankle.

More than three decades later, October 1993, in a follow up visit with an orthopod after my acetabulum had been shattered and my ilium fractured in a motorcycle accident, the doctor asked me if I could walk. I told him that I had walked into his office, so, yes. He was looking at my hip X-rays and told me that this was impossible. He had been practicing his specialty for over 40 years and had never seen anything like this. I told him that it was rather difficult for the first three weeks after the truck hit me, but I was OK now. He said, “No, I’m looking at your good hip. You should not be able to walk!” I told him that I have congenital hip. He said that he knows congenital hip, and that there is no way I should be able to walk with these hips. This is not that. “Are you sure you can walk?” I told him that I used to run cross country. He looked at the X-rays again and just shook his head and said that it was “weird” and asserted again that with my hips, it should be physically impossible for me to walk. That’s how I received a professional evaluation that I am weird to the bone.

Revisiting that first haircut, many children have traumatic reactions to the first clipping of their hair. Tonsuring in the taking of monastic or priestly vows in various religious traditions is rooted in this primal, childhood reaction to this. The first haircut signifies the infant’s entrance into the community. All transitions have their measure of stress or trauma. There was always a small clipping of hair, or tonsure, at infant baptism in the ancient church, and to this day in the Orthodox Church. Growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, hair, length of hair, hair styles, were all a big deal, and focus for fashion, discussion, and even conflict.

In Minnesota, it was against the law for women’s beauty shops to cut and style men’s hair or for barber shops to cut and style women’s hair. I knew this, because my mom told me about her beautician’s (who was a gay man) after hours business for gays, transvestites, etc. My parents were very active in the Republican Party. They had met in law school. They had no fear or problem with homosexuals. They would have defended this man had he ever gotten in trouble for his practice. I ended up disagreeing with almost all of their political views, but I am indebted to them for my basic sense of justice and the respect of true equality of all regardless of race, gender, mental ability, nationality, birth status, or age. They taught us very clearly that no human is illegitimate! Our next-door neighbors, who had escaped Auschwitz, were shining, ever present examples to never let anyone tell you that anyone else is sub-human!

How’d we get from haircuts to here? This is how this memoir will go, I’m afraid. I am in tears and catching my breath.

Why write?

For years, in all sorts of conversations, all sorts of people told me I should write my life story in a book. Perhaps they were suggesting this because a book silently sits on a shelf and gathers dust. It is much easier to ignore than a living, breathing, speaking, shameless agitator. I have read a few memoirs, many biographies, and several autobiographies. Not all of them were by famous people. Several of them became famous after their memoirs became bestsellers. I don’t hold any illusions of grandeur on that account. I’m not from the right demographic. I was born at the peak of the baby boom, in a lily white suburb in middle America to parents who met in law school, the youngest of four children: two girls, two boys, evenly spaced, two years apart each, boy, girl, girl, boy.

My folks came from very different backgrounds. My mom grew up in a small town in Wisconsin until she was about eight, when they moved to Edina, the new, rich suburb of Minneapolis. They had live-in maids and nannies all through the Great Depression. Her father, my first namesake, Cranford Williams Ingham, was an executive with State Farm Insurance. Cran considered himself to be a very proper man. He smoked a pipe, was Episcopalian; to say he was thrifty would be a major understatement. He couldn’t bear to watch or listen to children eat, so he made my mom and her younger brother, my uncle Pete (Cranford Arthur Ingham) stay in the kitchen with the help to eat. They received quite an education on the ways of the world from the help. By the time I was born in June of 1955, Cran had married his third wife, Wathena Meyers Ingham, whom we all called “Aunt Wathena”. She had been one of my dad’s legal secretaries and my folks set her up on a blind date with grandpa, and they got married within the year, and it lasted until they died, he in 1977, she a couple of decades later. Aunt Wathena became my godmother at my infant baptism in the Episcopal Church.

Cran divorced my grandma, Jane Edith LeMay Ingham. She suffered depression and was alcoholic. Of course, Cran was also alcoholic, but he was higher functioning. Jane’s mother was a nasty woman who destroyed both of her daughter’s marriages and lives by never accepting their husbands and always saying terrible things about them and setting up impossible situations, etc. It was so bad that before my older brother was born, my mom told our great-grandmother that we would never know that she was related to us. She had ruined her daughters’ lives and damaged her grandchildren’s lives. She was not going to have a shot at another generation. My mom was good to her word. As it turned out, we did meet her once without knowing who she was. We did not find out that we had a living great-grandmother until we went to her funeral in Menomenie, WI, in 1969. It turns out, she had outlived both of her daughters, so it fell to my mom to make the arrangements. We stopped by the funeral home on our way out to Ohio to visit my dad’s mom. The place was empty for the visitation. I wandered into another room. It was set up with an old man half sitting up in an open casket for a viewing. That was the first time I saw a corpse. I hung out alone there with him until it was time to go. It was more comfortable than with my family and the closed casket in the next room.

We proceeded from there to Racine, WI, to pick up my dad’s older sister, Aunt Betty Lund. We continued on to Youngstown, Ohio, to visit my dad’s mother, Mae Wise Coulter, in a convalescent home. She would come home again, once after that to her house that she shared with her longtime boarder and housemate, Aunt Phoebe. Mae was Holiness Methodist, but not fanatical about it. She was a practical woman. Her husband, my second namesake, Joseph “Freeman” Coulter, was an atheist, or as they called them back then a “free thinker”. No one called him by his name. they called him Free or Freeman. He was an auto mechanic. He loved his work. He liked his drink. He worked hard. He made decent money all during the Depression. He managed the business and brought the profit home for Mae to manage. Mae gardened and had a little Upjohn business on the side as well. During the Depression, Mae was always sending one or another of the four children out the door with meals and sacks of produce, sometimes with envelopes of cash included to various neighbors who had fallen on hard times. At any given time, they were supporting two or three other families. They were wearing threadbare clothes and going with very little to do it. Free was happy working. As long as dinner was on the table; his work uniform was laundered; his lunches were packed and he had a bit for the pub on Friday night, he was happy as a clam. Times were tough on everyone. From the stories my dad, his sisters and brother told, I think the Great Depression were the happiest times there were in America! And they seemed to be much happier for those who were sharing than for those who were not.

So, why write? After 30 years of working as a Christian minister, I have abandoned that faith and now view the world more similarly to my father, who described himself as a “Buddhist atheist.” Unlike my father, I am a communist, not a Republican. I have come to regret raising our four daughters in the naive faith in Christian mutual care. It just plain does not exist. As soon as charity has the name of a faith attached to it, it ceases to be charity, and it has become bait for a con. All during my years of ministry, I refused to approach it this way. For that stance, I was abused and bullied by Christian clergy of every stripe. One Mennonite pastor even threatened to kill me. So I write my story as a cautionary tale.

The stories families tell shape the lives of the people raised in those families. Some of the stories are true.

Godfather, 4438 Shoreline Drive

I am the youngest of four siblings, yet my memories have always gone back further than my sisters and brother. This is a painting of the house where I lived for my first six years (June 1955- June 1961). It still stands. The outside finishes and windows have been updated, but it is still the same tiny Dutch Colonial. It is almost totally obscured by trees on Google Earth. When we lived there, those Google Earth shots would have been impossible! The place was literally crawling with children! (also skipping, jumping, climbing, hiding & seeking, chalk drawing, running,etc.) 1955 was the crest of the Baby Boom after all. Crystal Lake was across the street. That is where the Ericsons, Hostermans and DeLays lived.

Our house was at 4438 Shoreline Drive, Robbinsdale, 22, Minnesota. First class postage stamps were 4 cents each. US flags had 48 stars. Everybody liked Ike. Our phone number started with KEllogg 7. I knew all this when I was three. My earliest and most powerful memory was being held in the arms of my godfather, Gordon, when I was just two years old, in the dining room of that house. He was looking out the door to the screened-in porch. I remember the feel of his laugh, and that it was one of the few times I felt truly happy and safe in that house.

Not long after that party, Gordy committed suicide. It wasn’t clear, at first, that he intended to. There was no note. Gordy had the form of acrophobia that would cause him to have a strong urge to jump from open heights. I have it, too. It is actually an idea, seemingly hardwired in the brain, that the scariness of being on the precipice would be relieved, if one would only throw oneself on the wind and fly. Gordy flew. His wings burned up like Icarus’ in the Sun. I simply never saw Uncle Gordy again; never smelled that smell; never saw that smile; never felt that embrace; never felt that laugh again.

That’s me in the painting, in the red jumper, asleep in Gordy’s arms. My therapist asked me, yesterday, when I showed her this painting, “So safety must be a big concern for you. What do you do to make sure you are safe?”

I asked her if that was a trick question.

We had much tears. The fact of the matter is, I have had little consciousness of safety since we moved away from that house. First Gordy disappeared, then we moved away from the Ericsons.

In 1995, when an ex-offender, strung out on heroin came to my place of work and pulled a gun on me, I was too numb to be afraid. My safety was not on my radar. My concern for my safety was beat out of me at an early age. I just calmly sized up the man, determined what his real motives were, and helped him achieve them in a way that was best for everyone concerned. It involved me driving with a loaded gun poked in my ribs for 17 miles. He got into rehab, not prison, and, as a side benefit, I got to live. I knew he was serious and I knew he could pull the trigger. He had done so before, after all, in an armed robbery. But it would not serve his best interest of surviving the car ride, avoiding prison, and getting free of heroin to do so. I had met him in my role as a volunteer, prison chaplain. I did not share this story until more than ten years after it happened. No one at my job had been aware that I had been held at gunpoint from my desk in Hatfield. My wife did not know about it. She was shocked when she learned of it in when she was proofreading a fundraising newsletter I wrote ten years after the fact. She asked me why I never told her. I said, because I knew it would upset her and she would worry about me. She said I would be right; so how come is it OK to bring it up now? I told her, because the man who did it has been dead for a few years now. She felt better then.

We have gotten ahead of our story. This is a memoir. There are no rules for these things to be absolutely chronological, as long as there are good stories, right? I’ll try to tell good stories, and some of them, I dare say, most of them, will be true.

I grew up in Minnesota, in an upper middle class household in the suburbs. I cannot tell my story without the undercurrent of death and especially suicide. 18 of my close friends, including my sister have killed themselves. An additional 24 friends and associates have also taken their own lives, for a total, so far, of 42. Even so, my life has not been only darkness. I have been inspired by many personal heroes, some of whom I have known. Unfortunately, several of them have had violent deaths, a couple by their own hands, as well. My hope is that my writing and painting may not just interest you and pass the time, but may edify and even challenge you, in some way.

(If you want to purchase this painting, or others by me, visit www.shoutforjoy.net)

I the mighty robin, am quite a feeble bird.

My playmates for the first six years of my life were my sister Sue Ann and our neighbor across the street, David Ericson. They were two years older than I was. I was the youngest of four in my family. David was the youngest of four in his family. There were other children in the neighborhood, but these were my closest friends and constant companions. Our family built a bigger house and moved two miles away in Golden Valley, MN, the summer between kindergarten and first grade, but we stayed in touch. We spent 4th of Julys together and got together around Christmas and did some other outings, as well. We ended up going to the same high school: Robbinsdale Senior High.

When we were little and playing cowboys and Indians, David always managed to get killed right outside his back door. He would lay there for a moment then he would get up and run into the kitchen and pour some ketchup on his face and lie back down; you know, to add bloody realism. The next time we would come by, he would still be lying there, but he would be scraping the ketchup off with potato chips and eating them. You just can’t waste food like that! There were children starving in Africa.

I have written about the Ericsons before. David’s parents, Les and Lois prayed for our family daily and brought us kids to church whenever my folks didn’t go, and to vacation Bible school, to their little Bible church in North Minneapolis. Lois particularly prayed for me daily from the time she heard my mom was pregnant with me until the day she died just a couple of years ago. I played with David’s toys while he was in school and my mom was working for the 1960 Census. The Ericsons’ house was the safest place I knew as a child. Playing with David’s Lincoln Logs in the middle of the living room floor with Mrs. Ericson in the kitchen was as good as life could get.

David grew up to be a serious, well-mannered, Christian, young man. He graduated RHS, Class of 1971. He decided to take a year off to do a short term missionary assignment with Wickliffe Bible Translators, helping his sister and brother-in-law, Jim and Carol Daggett, in Peru, instead of starting college. While there, he was accompanying a young girl on a flight to Quito, to get to a hospital for an emergency surgery. It was Christmas Eve. The flight went down and we did not know for weeks of what had happened. Finally, we learned that only one German girl survived. The plane had broken up in mid air in a bad storm. Pieces of the fuselage had fallen from the sky. Her mother died in the seat next to her. She was carrying her wedding cake on her lap. That may have helped save her. A tribe of natives who were known to be cannibals took her in and treated her wounds. She was finally found and rescued. So we lost David. He died on a mission of mercy. He was Les and Lois Ericson’s only son. Later that year, each of his three married sisters gave birth to sons.

When I was little I would tag along with Sue Ann everywhere. Of course, she was trying to tag along with our older sister, Alison, much of the time, so there were times they were trying to lose me. By the time Sue was in junior high, we were tight. I was a couple of inches taller than she was. She would take me to the 7th grade dances. Some people would assume that I was her date. Others would assume I was her twin brother. I would dance with all her friends. The 7th grade boys just sat there. I was in 5th grade and I was dancing with 4 or 5 girls at a time. I would help her with her math homework. By the time I was in junior high, she and I helped replace the useless student council with a Student Service Organization. We both served on the executive council. We were involved in the musical together. I was the third Ozian general. Sue Ann did make up.

Sue Ann & I became the ones that people would call if they were depressed and considering suicide. We appeared to be so stable. We were not always successful. There were attempts. Sometimes I would drink half a can of root beer, fill it up with six ounces of Scotch and drink that, just to go to sleep at night, in 8th grade. We played hard, too. We snow skied and water skied together. Sue Ann would waterbike while I would swim three miles around the lake in the summer. We read all the works of Hermann Hesse together, sometimes by firelight in the basement, while listening to psychedelic music on the Magnavox. I helped her on her English papers. She was a perfectionist, and I used to read dictionaries and the thesaurus. I tend to remember everything I read. She joined the yearbook staff in her junior year. I secretly helped her with that, even some of the all-nighters. I was still in junior high. The next year they had a poetry contest for the yearbook. I submitted a bunch of poems. They wanted to include several. Sue Ann already had me secretly working on staff. They made an exception and made me the only sophomore on staff and limited my published poems to one short one. We had the most intense year working together. The book won national awards, including one of my spreads, for which I had done the writing and she had done the most ruthless editing. I must admit, it is her voice in my head, editing, when I write. It is a painful process, but I tend to be succinct. I am told that people appreciate my style, even if they don’t always agree with my content.

We were so busy with things in high school that I didn’t see David much apart from family gatherings. We were all very involved with different things, but enjoyed our times together when we did see each other. It hit us hard when we got the news of his plane crash and we were in touch with his family daily, when it happened.

In the Spring of my sophomore year in high school I joined a fundamentalist, Baptist church, getting re-baptized with the whole born again thing. I was as serious with that as I am with anything in my life. We had our arguments over that, but she stuck by me. I still pulled all-nighters with her and helped her write some of her English papers for college. I even helped one of her girlfriends write a theology paper. It was kind of funny at one point. She had a prof. at Augsburg who was the husband of my British Lit. II teacher at RHS. They compared notes. I said there was good reason why our styles were so similar. Sue Ann had taught me how to write. And I edited her papers. They had a good laugh over a glass of Chardonnay that night.

By the time I was 21, three of the 100 kids in my 6th grade class had committed suicide. One had killed his sister and his parents with him. Another six friends from junior high and high school were gone by the time I was 24.

Sue got married in 1974. Bethann and I got married in 1975. Our friendship continued. She introduced Bethann to Creative Circle and I learned all sorts of needle crafts to help build the sales presentations. We stayed in constant communication, even though we were in PA and she and Bucky were in MN. Then communication fell off and I got a call from my older sister, Ali, that Sue Ann had checked herself into a rehab for alcoholism and was wanting everyone in the family to seek treatment as well. She had started the process by trying to do an intervention on our dad. While she was in treatment, she accused him of doing unspeakable things to us as children. My sister, Ali, would call me, at night, and ask me if these things were possible. She started the first phone call by asking me what the color of the living room was in our house on Shoreline Drive. That was the house where I was born. Then she asked me what my earliest memory was. I told her it was being carried through the crowded dining room in that house by Uncle Gordy. Uncle Gordy died when I was about two. I have the longest, most reliable memory in the family. She wanted to know whether what Sue Ann was accusing our dad of were at all possible. I told her, absolutely not! Apparently Sue Ann had been subjected to that regression “therapy” and given suggestions of false memories.

So I read the books about adult children of alcoholics that Sue Ann sent. When we visited MN and stayed with Sue Ann’s family, we went to AA with her. They would all come out and start chain smoking as soon as the meeting was over. It was like they had traded one addiction for another, or maybe for two: AA and smoking. She was more obnoxious about us joining AA than I had ever been about her being born again. But turnabout being fairplay, our friendship tolerated it. Unfortunately, she did have an addictive personality and that was a foreshadowing. We were out to MN for my dad’s wedding in 1994, we stayed at her house. Late at night she and her girls were talking to our girls about some of their Young Life activities. She said I could take part in the conversation. I said that of course I could. She talked about how they went out “witnessing” with a Muslim and a Christian paired together. I asked, “How could that possibly work, since Jesus said, ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life.'” She went ballistic. It was 0 to 70 with nothing in between. She was going to throw us out of the house then and there, on the edge of Minnetonka, at midnight, at about 0°, with no car, before cell phones. Bucky got involved. We came to a truce after he scored a few points. We got to stay the night and catch a ride to the train station the next day. She never spoke to me again. That was just five months after our mom had died. (I guess we exchanged pro forma Christmas cards for the sake of our children, after that.)

She told my dad a completely different story about what happened that night, a total fabrication. He wrote me lambasting me about it, without hearing my side of the story. I was completely blind-sided, since what I was accused of was so outrageous. Bethann had been there. She was equally shocked. My dad and I had had a rocky relationship. This was part of why my sister and I had been so close. It was part of our protection. My dad had physically thrown me out of the house when I was just shy of 16 just for asking him if he wanted to listen to a gospel quartet; actually it was at the lake place in Wisconsin, at night. My mom came after me and said, “If he goes, I go.” My dad said, “B.J., You know that isn’t fair. I will take you, even with him.”

Way to make a fellow feel loved, dad.

So, when I got that letter, I had had enough of the ups and downs, of the manipulations and intrigues. So rather than explain myself, I wrote my dad a letter telling him that he obviously had no interest in the truth. He had already judged and condemned me. I reminded him that he was a lawyer and he had taught me better; that people were to be considered innocent until proven guilty. I told him I had just had enough. I wasn’t going to play his games any more. I would grieve for him now. I didn’t want to hear about it when he died. So I lost my mom, my sister and my dad, in the space of six months. I did wonder why my dad believed her implicitly, after that which she had previously accused him. Later, I did try to reconcile with him, but he would have none of it.

In late 2000, I got the call from my sister, Ali, that Sue Ann had been found dead. I’m glad she got a hold of me before I checked my email with the subject line “Regarding my sister’s death” from my brother, who was too cheap to call. I flew out for her funeral. It took my sister, Ali, and I several months to uncover that she had committed suicide by a drug cocktail. My dad had told my brother and brother-in-law and the kids to keep it a secret. Sue had become addicted to gambling and had embezzled money from her boss. Her boss had just called her to talk about this. She had just separated from her husband. It was her old girlfriends from college that had the super unlock her apartment after she missed their dinner date, who discovered her.

It was just so awfully sad. I wish we had not fallen out so badly. I am not sure why I am writing this now. I just know that I love my sister. She was a wonderful person. She was a wonderful and creative mother. She was beautiful and talented. She had painted herself into a corner and couldn’t see any good way out. She should not have been alone with her illness.

So my earliest playmates have been gone for some time now. This month is Robbinsdale School District’s all year, all high school reunion and my class’s 40 year reunion. I can’t afford to go. The people I most would want to see are all dead. This is not where I thought I would be.

I just remember being so much happier and four and saying, “Alison, can you help Sue Ann and me cross the street so we can play with David?”

Rent Party

We organized a “rent party” last week. I have been wanting to do this for some time. It is a practice that comes out of 1920s Harlem in New York City. Fats Waller and James P. Johnson used rent parties to help get by. When someone was going to come up short on their rent, they would throw a party to raise the rent. You clear the furniture out of the main room, invite all your friends and neighbors. Tell them to invite all their friends and neighbors. Charge a cover charge at the door. Provide some food. Have some musician friends play and sing for their supper and free drinks. Have some cheap beer and wine available for more contributions to the cause. This is where line dancing was invented. The most famous of these is the Electric Slide. These parties would be so crowded that, in order to dance, you had to synchronize. It was only later that Nashville expropriated it to turn the Electric Slide into country line dancing. It was a good way to have some fun on a Friday or Saturday night; for less money than at a bar or nightclub, with people you knew, while helping someone out of a tight spot.

Hard times are here again. But unlike during the Great Depression, most of us are unaware of one another’s situations. We are used to being anesthetized by the internet and by cable TV and by constant, on demand entertainment, infotainment, news and propaganda. We have been conditioned to think that anything that is not packaged and branded and sold to us is inferior, and possibly suspect. We get upset about the statistics we see on whatever “news” outlet we prefer, and we will argue about politics that ultimately will benefit the rich regardless of which party is in power, because, let’s face it, they’re all rich and out of touch with any personal sense of neighbors in need. A lot of people on the right are screaming that government is not the answer. A lot of people on the left are crying that the government is too slow to respond. Yet most, on both left and right, just continue to holler at each other while we could actually be doing something to address the suffering and the poverty about which we all say we are concerned.

A rent party is the perfect blend of free enterprise spirit and socialist concern! It’s a cheap date with live entertainment, good, home-cooked food, spirits, laughter, and friendship. Or you can choose to give more with the expectation that when you are short, the others will come to your aid. Another thing I want to say is that there is no shame in coming up short some times. “Events conspire” as they say. Kids get sick. Hours at work get cut back. Utility prices change. Oil and gas prices change. Appliances break or wear out. Expected Christmas bonuses are not given or are miserly. There are dozens of nickel and dimey things that can get a household behind the 8 ball before you can say, “Bob’s your uncle!” Then there are the salesmen and bankers who can paint a rosier picture of the future to get one to finance things one shouldn’t and acquire more debt than one should. Then there is student loan debt. When people are working hard and still not able to make ends meet, there is no shame.

We had a great time. The duo of Kevin Paige, who teaches music at Clemmer Music in Harleysville, PA, and Jeff Bonnet, who usually is part of a classic rock cover band “Out of Touch”, provided most of the entertainment. They were joined on some of the numbers by Dr. Raymond Acker, known to some as Deacon Herman, who also did some solos on guitar and vocal, both originals and some by Bob Dylan. His two sons did a beautiful medley from The Lord of the Rings acapella. April made a leafy salad, rice and beans, veggies and dip, chips and salsa, and coffee. Bethann made chicken breast, potatoes and peppers, orzo and spinach, pigs in a blanket, and wacky cake. Uncle John tended bar with a box of Merlot, a box of Chardonnay, a case of PBR, a case of Icehouse, and a mixed case of Mike’s Hard. We bought way too much alcohol. We have lots leftover. I guess we need to have another party. Thankfully, somebody bought some of the leftovers.

Unfortunately, it was a foggy night, so a number of people did not feel confident to travel. We charged $10 cover and $3 suggested donation for beer or wine or hard lemonade. We had a great time! We raised about $700 to help a young couple with their mortgage. Everyone said we should definitely do this again.

I hope the idea catches on. We could use more live music in our homes. We could use more joy and happiness. We could use more helping one another in hard times.