EPISODES AND ANECDOTES LEFT OUT OF THE BOOK, IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE

SOME OF THE WRITING THAT WAS EXCISED FROM THE ORIGINAL PUBLISHED WORK OF

In the Shadow of the Courthouse
Memoir of the 1940s Written as a Novel

James R. Fisher, Jr.

© 2001

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR:

More than 3,000 readers have purchased and read this memoir written as a novel. Many have asked, having heard the book is abridged from the original manuscript, what was left out? These are examples of episodes and anecdotes cut from that original manuscript. There are twenty-one chapters in the book and what appears here was cut from the first twelve chapters.

IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE was published by AuthorHouse in 2003. The book was first copyrighted by the author in 2001.

CHAPTER TWO:

Mention is made that Clinton, Iowa is a conservative industrial community and mainly Republican and Protestant with nearly three times as many public as Catholic private schools.

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Today this differentiation is even more pronounced. True, there was Mt. St. Clare Academy and College, which continues to thrive today (2003). In 1891, Father James Arthur Murray, pastor of St. Patrick’s parish asked for five sisters of the order of St. Frances to open a school.

It was at a time when Clinton’s main industry, the lumber business, was in precipitous decline and more than 6,000 residents had left Clinton. Yet, the nuns bravely incurred a debt of $20,000 to purchase the Chase property. From the magnificent vista of Bluff Boulevard, on some five acres of pristine property, stood a well-preserved three story brick building. It provided ample room for these entrepreneurial nuns to open a boarding school and academy, and then a junior college.

In 1979, Mt. St. Clare College was accredited as a co-educational four-year liberal arts college offering a degree in business administration. The plight of several other long established Clinton Catholic schools has not been so fortunate.

Our Lady of Angels Academy for girls on North Fifth Street in Lyons was established in 1872. A phantasmal structure which might best be described as angelic stood high on a scenic hill overlooking the Mississippi River, but was dissolved in 1966 due to a teacher shortage. Vocations to the sisterhood were already in decline and are nearly extinct today.

So the elementary schools of St. Ireneaus established in 1840, St. Boniface in 1861, and St. Patrick’s in 1889 are no longer in existence as this is written. The Catholic school system in Clinton continues to shrink in the early twenty-first century with St. Mary’s elementary and high school now surviving as Mater Dei with an uncertain alliance with Mt. St. Clare Academy and College.

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Reference is made here to Clinton’s many frontier saloons at mid-century to be replaced today by the fast-food nation. What follows is also a segue from evening chats around coffee, cake and cigarettes of my uncles, aunts, my da’s railroad buddies, and his saloon keeper friends, who found therapy in storytelling and humor.

The piece also shows how men such as Disney and Kroc seeded our societal decline into a fast-food nation.

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These garish neon-lighted watering holes with their weather-beaten doors, once alive with excitement, are no more, replaced by 30 or so fast-food restaurant franchises, equally garish, but without the allure or style of the riverfront saloons.

Clinton is now part of the fast-food nation in all its offending colors – MacDonald’s, Burger King, Pizza Hut, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Dairy Queen, and even local fast-food imitators. Indeed, imitation of the garish is the local as well as national mantra.

The few taverns that still exist have lost their gusto, symbolized in crumbling paint, rotting wood, stuttering neon signs with missing letters, the stench of stale beer, along with worn out patrons who have lost a kick in their step. I sense that Clintonians are not drinking less, or eating more, simply drinking at home, and eating out.

This cultural shift from a casual parochialism to a concerted homogenizing started with a pair of teenagers in 1917, who lied about their ages to join an ambulance unit destined for the Western Front in WWI.

They found themselves in the same training camp in South Beach, Connecticut. One of them was Walt Disney. The other one, only 15-years-of-age at the time, was Ray Kroc, the man who later made McDonald’s an empire.

When Kroc and his comrades went off to the nearest town on furlough to look for girls, Disney stayed in camp, drawing. Disney served in France and Germany, but WWI ended before Kroc was sent to Europe. Had he gone, it might have changed the history of fast food.

The mode of operation in the trenches fascinated both Kroc and Disney – the assembly line. Everything, the ammunition workers, the machine-gunners, the infantrymen, played their small, repetitive roles with as much speed and efficiency as they could muster. The Front was an industrial operation for the manufacture of corpses.

Moreover, Disney and Kroc were great admirers of Henry Ford (as incidentally was Lenin) and saw assembly lines as the embodiment of efficiency, order and consistency. The main drawback was people. They were the most inefficient, disordered, and inconsistent moving parts of the assembly line. They got sick. They had to be paid. They had to be taught what to do. The solution was to strip workers of skills and confine them to narrow and repetitive tasks.

In the 1930s, Disney set up a rigid assembly line system in his studio, where stupefied artists performed repetitive sketching and inking tasks against the clock. Disney never understood how this was dehumanizing, or why his people struck for better working conditions. He blamed it on Communism. Likewise, Kroc insisted, “The organization cannot trust the individual. The individual must trust the organization.”

The fast-food corporations have been fanatical in their determination to make their employees conform to their technology rather than the other way around. It has become the melodic march of the fast-food nation, but was already reflected in the mindless occupations of most of our working class fathers. It is not surprising, then, that they found relief from this dumbing down in each other’s company.

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CHAPTER SIX:

My neighbor and friend, George Jensen, crippled since a boy with poliomyelitis, was a big reader. He also ran the elevator at Van Allen’s Department Store in downtown Clinton. We would often talk about books and their central message, books that I had no idea existed.

George's favorite author was Shakespeare. One day in a euphoric mood he said that Shakespeare was the greatest writer who ever lived. When I shared this with my mother, she informed me that it was not Shakespeare, but James Joyce who was the greatest writer in the English language. Joyce was another writer I was unfamiliar with, but one my mother assured me I would come to know.

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The episode that follows occurred while a sophomore in college taking a required course, Modern Literature, Greeks, and the Bible. It proved my mother prophetic.

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It so happened that I became ill and was in the infirmary when James Joyce’s "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” was the subject of a discussion. My professor, apparently not wanting to grade another essay, asked me to make an oral presentation of the book. The conversation that follows developed once I completed that oral presentation.

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Professor Armens seems transfixed. Shaking his head as he puts out his cigarette, and exclaims, “Fisher, you’ve given me an experience that I doubt I will soon forget. ‘I am Joyce.’ That’s precious.” He paces the room, laughs to himself, and whispers under his breath again, 'I am Joyce,' smiling like a winking shudder.

This exhilarates and confuses me. All I can think, does this mean I’m getting an “A” or not?

How could I not see myself as Joyce? His pain in the classroom, his anguish with priests, his ambivalence towards girls, lusting for them but being afraid of them, his strangeness with his da, his nonspecific anger with everything and everybody, his sense of exile in the company of his peers, his sensitivity and obsession with class, his awareness of the power of money and his contempt for it, his running lies and illusions of race. Of course, he was Joyce. Joyce’s life was his life. He, too, desired to fly the coop, to soar into the sun and greatness.

“Here is what I propose,” the professor says evenly, and then shows me a brochure. It is titled "The University of Iowa’s Honors Program in the Humanities."

“This is a relatively new program at Iowa," he continues, "It is being offered to select students to pursue a degree in Arts and Letters. What makes it unique is that it is essentially a tutorial program, involving extensive independent study. This includes reading the classics in philosophy, psychology, theology, literature, history and related disciplines in order to create a conceptual framework and artistic foundation. Incidentally, there is no compulsory attendance of classes.

"Oxford College at Cambridge England has a similar program." He can see I'm underwhelmed with the idea. “Before you say, ‘this is not for me, I’m a science major,’ go home and discuss this with your parents and come back next week and tell me of your decision.”

My head is spinning. I don’t know what to say. Reading uncertainty in my face, he adds, “In case you are wondering why I didn’t read your paper in class on the influence of religion in your life, I have a confession to make. I had to find out if you were for real. That is why I wanted this oral examination. Your paper on religion was intensely personal, intuitively constructed, and yet blatantly innocent. It was as if you were having a conversation with your God, and it didn’t matter if anyone got it or not.

"Joyce wrote like that. Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake are not written for an audience. They are written for Joyce and his God. We now call these works literature.

“My concern if I had read your work in class is that it would have generated cynicism if not caustic comments doing you irreparable harm. You have a keen eye for what you see and a counterintuitive way of expressing it.

"You’re not an imitator. You’re the genuine article. That’s rare. But you’re also raw, unschooled and rough. You need honing. I am confident this program could go along way in that direction.” With that he excuses himself, and leaves me sitting enveloped in the empty darkness of the room and my mind.

Once home, I explained first to my mother Dr. Armen’s suggestion. “Are you sure this is what you want to do?”

“No, but I am flattered. It’s kind of amazing, mother, I’m not nearly as sharp as some of the other people in the class, yet he singled me out.”

“Don’t play humble with me. You know better. We’ll discuss it with your father after dinner, but not before, understand?” I nod.

Once my da has had his dinner, his coffee, and has read The Clinton Herald, my mother pats him on the shoulder. “Ray, Jimmy, has something he wants to discuss with you.”

“Yes? What?" He looks at me. "They kick you out of school?” I shake my head, but don't speak. Still anxious, he continues, “Did they cancel your scholarship? If they did, fella, there’s no goddamned reason for discussion." Then, turning to my mother, he adds, "He’ll have to go to work on the railroad, or get a job somewhere else. I’m not supporting him you better goddamned believe that, Dorothy!”

Ignoring his bluster as if an ill fated breeze, she says through a cloud of cigarette smoke, “No, he didn’t lose his scholarship.”

“Then for Christ’s sake, Dorothy, what is it? That goddamned kid of yours doesn’t come home less than something’s wrong, you know that, Dorothy! So, Jimmy, what is it?”

Nervously, I explain briefly the humanities program. When I am through, he looks at me with a prying glint in his eyes. “Jimmy, can I ask you a question?” I am expressionless. “Don’t try to lie. I love you and always will, and you’ll always be welcome here no matter what. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

I had no idea what he was saying. “Nooo!”

“Jimmy, you’re not a goddamned fag are you?”

“A what?” Then it registers. “No! What gave you that idea?”

“I see those fairies on my trains, goddamned beatniks, loud, rude, long dirty hair, smell like goats, reading filthy books, dirty tennis shoes, shabby clothes, hugging each other, yes, Dorothy, goddamned guys hugging each other like it’s the most natural thing in the world. It’s disgusting that's what it is. You want your son to hang out with fairies?”

He throws his arms up in theatrical fashion. “Jesus Christ, when I ask them where they’re going, they tell me,” he gestures with effeminate exaggeration with his hands and mocks an effeminate whine, ‘we’re students at Iowa.’ Can you believe your son has come to this? I ask you again, Jimmy, are you a goddamned fag?”

“Nooo!” I literally scream. It is too much for me. I put my coat on and rush out the door. When I return some time later, the house is quiet, everyone is in bed. We didn’t discuss the matter again. It was obvious that I would stay in chemistry. There was absolutely no chance to live with him and become a scholar.

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Not knowing at the time, that St. Patrick’s church, rectory and school were going to be leveled to dust as if this historic landmark had never been, I left the following episode out of the book to my regret.

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Father Finefield’s successor at St. Patrick's parish was a St. Ambrose professor, Father John B. McIniry, who longed to be a parish priest after several years as an educator and administrator at this Davenport, Iowa institution.

Parish life at St. Patrick's for Father McIniry was to be the challenge of a strange and sometimes irritating culture. He seemed especially comfortable, however, around bleeding heart parishioners as if that was a parish priest's primary role. That said he was more successful carrying out some of Father Finefield’s sketchy plans than he had been, which you might not expect from a novice parish priest.

In 1961, Father McIniry purchased the land adjacent to the school and enlarged the playground and parking lot. He also created a parish committee to head up a fund raising drive to construct a Parish Center. Between 1961 and 1981, the parish budget grew from $30,000 to $130,000 per year, largely through his fiscal acumen and ability to profile parishioners with the deepest pockets. St. Patrick’s parish also grew to more than 1,500 members.

The oldest part of the school, which dated from 1924, was not a school at all, but the parish hall. With the caption in the cornerstone, it read “St. James Hall, 1924, James Davis, Bishop, J. A. Murray, Pastor.”

Now, in the early twenty-first century when this is being written, the school is empty, the building a tomb, the rectory unoccupied, and the parish a memory. Priests in Clinton, Iowa are as rare as the American bald eagle. The century vision of Father James Arthur Murray is manifestly sustained only by Mount St. Clare College and Convent, but the good priest left his heart at St. Patrick’s.

Meanwhile, St. Mary’s parish, once again dominates a shrinking universe, and disappearing Clinton Catholic community. The churches of St. Patrick, St. Boniface, St. Irenaeus, and Sacred Heart are in various states of terminal decline, having all but lost the struggle to stay viable with a corps of shuttling priests from church to church, while Mount St. Clare College, all but devoid of vocational nuns, continues to use the temper of the times to diminishing advantage.

The good sisters of St. Francis embrace non-practicing Catholics along with people of all religious persuasions with open arms. They are, indeed, a tribute to the order founded by St. Clare, who was a devoted colleague of St. Francis of Assisi.

Consider this against a Clinton County, which has shrunk from its apogee of nearly 40,000 citizens during WWII to little more than 29,000 today. St. Patrick’s church and school once stood buoyed by the spirit of its creator, who took on all factions and odds, even the opposition of the St. Mary "hill toppers" to the south.

St. Mary parishioners and priests saw little need for a church and school in central Clinton, but he did and he won. Now, that spirit is being buried under a planned Senior Citizen Housing façade. Alas, where are the Father James Murray’s of the world today. Are there no more leaders anywhere?

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CHAPTER SEVEN:

My family often had trouble paying its bills. It wasn’t a case of being extravagant. It was a case of being poor. This chapter ends when my da is humiliated in the presence of his nine-year-old-son when he tries to charge school clothes for him at the Martin Morris Department Store from an old grade school chum.

My da, a physically courageous man, would never back down from a fight with anyone no matter how big or powerful. The same could not be said about his emotional courage.

When the salesman said that he checked and found my da’s credit bad, my da’s shoulders slumped, his head dropped and he stood there virtually motionless. I was embarrassed for him, and angry with the salesman, taking control of the situation by saying, we didn’t want these purchases anyway, and marching my da out of the store.

Life is a series of emotional tests, tests that determine the construction of our
character. This, looking back now sixty years, was perhaps the most compelling test of my life up to that point. In my rush to make this book of “readable size,” I left this out.

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I’ve often thought about that day. My da didn’t belong in Clinton. He was an outsider. He didn’t fit in with either the counterfeit gentry or the rough and tumble crowd of Clinton’s youth of his generation. He was a displaced Irishman from urban south Chicago with the temperament of a street fighter where that no longer applied. He was a character out of James T. Farrell’s “Studs Lonigan,” and not a nice Catholic boy from a small town.

The animal in him ruled his humanity. He never got to the higher centers. Yet, where he had once been a drinker and a brawler of some distinction, he now needed the mental toughness of a father and provider that was not to be had. Unafraid as he was of any man, no matter his size or physical strength, counting on his courage to even the score, he was a man afraid. His fear was of life. He tended to exaggerate the mental toughness and superiority of nearly everyone. He failed to see the games people play, the charades of arrogance and posturing, the pretending to be in charge when clearly they weren’t.

Being unschooled in the world of books, he found most people more intelligent than himself simply because they read. Consequently, he gave people the benefit of the doubt, something he never gave himself. He believed himself a fraud and failure and once got angry when I said I never met anyone that wasn’t. My genes missed his natural bravado, his jaunty exuberance, but they also missed his condescending belief that everyone was better.

My mother knew this of him, and used it with cruel precision. My da’s cocky zest was all but gone by the time I was nine. His essence was buried deep in a personality of failure. He already felt defeated by life, defeated by the burdens of responsibility, defeated by having to comply, submit, surrender and confound in order to get by. Indeed, he was defeated by whom he was and what he had become. He was a man ashamed with nothing to hold unto, nothing to protect him from his fears except the invincible spirit of my mother. She was his savior and his nemesis.

St. Thomas Aquinas preferred a proud to a fainthearted man. Somehow my da missed this in his education. Aquinas noted that the former would do something while the latter most likely nothing at all.

That described my da, beaten down but not yet dead. His soul was all but dead to its possibilities, while his body stubbornly lived on in embarrassment. He was an Irishman to the core, who liked to look back, to dwell on the past, to what he never was to what he was now. He talked incessantly about Chicago as if it were Mecca. The talk kept his spirits, dim as they were, barely alive. The country killed what was left of that spirit. Clinton, Iowa killed my da. His Irish soul abandoned him long before his body consented to die.

Like all paradoxes, however, an inherent equilibrium prevails in the universe. I was in the navy on the U.S.S. Salem (CA-139), the flagship of the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean when I learned he had multiple myeloma, a form of leukemia.

With this disease, the bone marrow refuses to produce healthy red blood cells, and the body wastes away, bit-by-bit, day-by-day. He learned of this disease in a routine fashion. He had gone to his dentist, Dr. McLaughlin, for his annual check-up. The dentist didn’t like the looks of his gums. He sent him to Dr. O’Donnell. Our family doctor then sent him to a specialist for a biopsy. When the results came back, Dr. O’Donnell said, “Ray, it’s a bad actor.”

Without hesitation, my da asked, “How long do I have, Joe?”

“A year, fourteen months at most. We don’t know much about this disease, and there are no drugs to treat it, only blood transfusions to keep your strength up.” My da had just turned forty-eight.

Most men given a death sentence retreat into themelves, look for pity, or wail about their lot being too young to die. Not him. When he got the news, it proved his greatest moment. He was accepting, and oddly enough even cheerful and more loving. He even regained his childlike affection for Irish Catholicism again, no doubt influenced by devout Dr. O’Donnell.

He, a changed man, met me at the train nation with my mother when I came back from Europe on emergency leave. He rediscovered his gift for storytelling and became a daily communicant at mass. Before, he hadn’t been inside a church for years. He no longer swore, no longer raised his voice, and no longer smoked. He found a peculiar happiness instead of dread in knowing his destiny.

One of the stories he now told was about being a first grader. The nun at school had taught the children a new prayer. He went to his grandmother and cried, “Granny, granny, I learned a new prayer today.” She asked, “What prayer might that be, Raymond?” He replied with pride, “Across the Street.” The prayer was actually the Apostle’s Creed.

His body shrunk, and the pain became more intense caused by his bones breaking from lack of nourishing blood. The soul that once took residence in Chicago now returned. Dr. O’Donnell allowed me to give him morphine shots for the pain on demand, as I was a hospital corpsman. The pain was reflected in his eyes, but he never complained.

The last several weeks of his life I was his constant companion, me who had always been distant from his center. We watched television together on a little nine inch black and white monitor. His favorites were Wagon Train, Gun Smoke, and The Bounty Hunter. Confined to bed, and seldom out of pain, he made every attempt to make everyone at ease around him. He loved my sister Patsy especially, and her husband, Bill Waddell, who was also home from the navy. He would light up when they would visit.

It was as if his personality emerged from a deep cold and dark cave into the sunlight of the day. He would hold my sister Janice’s hand and tell her she was beautiful like an angel. And he would kid my brother Jackie about how much he was a chip off the old block. With me, it was another matter. I remained an enigma to the end. “Your mother thinks you’re smart like she is," he said out of the blue one day, shaking his head, "I wonder. I know you think you'r as smart as anyone alive. Maybe that’s enough. I don’t know.”

He died on January 3, 1958, three days after his fiftieth birthday. He weighed forty pounds. Every bone in his body was broken.

“There will be no stopping for him in Purgatory,” Dr. O’Donnell told my mother, “your husband has taught us all about dying with dignity. He’s heading straight for heaven.” With that, he handed her a bill with the scribble across it, “Paid in full.” My mother hadn’t paid him a cent in my da’s yearlong illness.

It seemed poetic justice that his physical courage, which was legendary, became his defining attribute, as he met his Maker.

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CHAPTER TEN:

The chapter originally opened with my being still troubled by the letter Sister Helen had sent to my mother. She claimed I had a lot of quiet rage. So, the chapter opened this way:

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School is out, but my mind is not quiet. What Sister Helen said about the Diaspora, the scattering of the Jewish people throughout the world after the Babylonian Captivity still rings in my head. She says Palestine is the Promised Land for Jews, but why? I am Irish and far from Ireland, but I don’t think of Dublin as the Promised Land, nor of my Irish separate from my American.

My da told me our people left Ireland in the middle of the nineteenth century because of the potato famine. He never spoke of anyone wanting to go back. The idea of a promised land mystifies me. It’s like a castle in the sky, while the courthouse is real, concrete, yet sacred to me, even these many years later.

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The next piece is about the courthouse and its affect on me: is this my Israel?

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My mind still races back without effort to those halcyon days when a sense of belonging smiled down on me from the courthouse’s watchful eyes. Even as I struggle to describe its hold on me now it seems unperturbed with my sluggish mind. Instead, it basks in quiet pleasure for my attention.

The courthouse is a motion picture in my head, a collection of magical moments that occurred a half century ago, that surfaces and come to light especially when captive to enforced quiet times, like a flight to some God forsaken place to give a speech. These moments are as real as if they are just occurring. I am a boy of ten again exhilarated but unconscious of my blessings.

The courthouse is in my bones, and vibrates with my soul. Is this my Israel? Is this what Palestine feels to Jews? The courthouse is here, where I am now, writing a book about long ago, and also wherever that might be in the future. It captured the rhythm of my heart the first moment I smelled the aroma of the courthouse lawn freshly cut by Mr. Roy Dunmore, the groundskeeper. He is father of Jack, one of our coaches, and Dick, one of my teammates.

Memory of St. Patrick’s always melts into the courthouse, which lies in its shadow. The courthouse was always a happy place, St. Patrick’s not always so. The courthouse puts me in tune with my nature. St. Patrick’s sometimes pulls me from it. The dour side of St. Patrick’s comes to me in sleep like a painting of a veiled shroud that blankets the courthouse, and records my dread of a misspent life.

I guess religion is all about guilt. Fortunately, before I wake from this nightmare, and this always happens, the sun comes out, the mist is burned away, and I see only the courthouse clearly. It is in this spirit that I jump out of bed with great relief when I'm a boy not yet nine.

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The nightmare of St. Michael.

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I like Marines, but my hero has always been St. Michael the Archangel. I named my youngest son after him.

In this painting in my mind, the vision of St. Michael is not pretty. He holds a heavy sword in his right hand, and in his left dangles a scale in which he is weighing the souls of the righteous, and the unrighteous.

To St. Michael’s left stands the Devil with his scaly tail and lascivious grinning face, the personification of evil, as he is prepared to claim his prize. I see a multitude of virtuous faces lifting pale hands in prayer, while the damned are reduced to a squirming mass of black potbellied openmouthed hermaphrodites.

Beside them, I see a group of less devils, the kind we run into every day, with pitchforks and chains. They are busily shoving victims into the jaws of an immense fish with teeth like a row of swords.

To the left, I see Heaven shaped into a castellated hotel with angels as doorkeepers welcoming naked souls. St. Peter is in a red bejeweled cape, and a triple tiara receiving the more important of the blessed. All are naked but those of rank wear headpieces, a Cardinal his scarlet hat, a bishop his red miter, a king or queen a golden crown, and the rest bareheaded and gradually reduced to a blur.

Many times I have returned to St. Patrick’s to see if this painting exists. Might it be a stained glass window? No. The St. Michael I see here is much more benign with none of the trappings of my nightmare.

I tell myself it must be at St. Boniface’s. No. Then at St. Iraneaus. No again. Then where? Perhaps in Rome, perhaps in the Vatican, the Sistine Chapel, or some remote abbey or church that I have visited, say in Bucharest. But it isn’t there either.

Ah, then it must be in a Father Sunbrueller sermon? He often scared me to death at St. Boniface’s with his fire and brimstone. I’m not sure. It is like a mind map etched on my soul in rooted grooves tracing and retracing the same painting, and yet remaining hidden to me, surfacing only flash-like in nightmares at unexpected moments.

Perhaps that is why when the morning mist burns off and the dew on the grass dries up, and the courthouse looms brilliant in the morning sunlight in all its majesty, spreading the shadow of its magnificent arms over my young limbs, there is no nightmare. There is only joy.

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Hitting a baseball loomed a large challenge for me from the beginning as a boy of nine and ten. Gussie Witt worked hard on this to make it less so.

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"Read this," Gussie tells me, handing me a handwritten piece of paper, "think about hitting as if you’re in school." The pun is meant to make reference to my love of books, but the baseball hitting instructions are like a foreign language to me.

The paper reads:

Here are some flaws to hitting a baseball. Directness, not length, generates speed. From a strong athletic position, the hips and hands move directly to the ball and initiate the correct swing. The back foot rotates the knee in and aids the hips. The hands go to the inside part of the baseball with the bat barrel staying above the hands. The bat and hands level out at the point of contact. The hands should be in a palm up (top of the palm down). Ideally, your hips and hands move first and drive the front shoulder out of the way. When the opposite happens, your front shoulder goes first and pulls the backside through. This causes your head to come off the ball. Your first movement should be moving the hands toward the inside half of the baseball. The front arm starts soft or slightly bent, and remains soft during the swing. If you push away, your front arm straightens out. What this means is that on the approach to the ball, the back of your bottom hand turns so it faces up. When the back hand is up, the barrel of the bat is down too soon. The proper movement would be to keep the back of the hand facing the inside half of the ball during the bat approach. An improper pivot causes the back knee to collapse, forcing the front shoulder to be higher than the back shoulder. When this happens, an uppercut swing will result. In a proper pivot, rotate on the ball of the back foot so the back knee turns in aligning the knees and forming an “L” and not a “C.” To stop from upper cutting, turn your knee, and then hit the ball off your back knee. Your back knee then drives your hands. Every mistake in hitting is because the batter doesn’t get ready to swing. Nothing goes back. So the head slides first. What you want to do is run your hands across your face, take your swing, and then have a big follow through. You have to keep your head behind the swing. If your face goes up and out, then you have no swing because your hands can’t catch up to your face.

After reading this, I look at Gussie in amazement. “I’m going into fifth grade. Am I supposed to understand this?” I’m ready to cry, masking my distress by rubbing my eyes hard with the back of my hand, but I can’t control my heaving chest.

He puts his hand on my shoulder, “It’s okay, Rube.” He studies me as if I’m a specimen in a bottle, strokes his chin, and says, “Let’s try something, okay. Let’s try making you a switch hitter."

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True to my nature whenever faced with a phenomenon that pointed to a deficiency, in this case my inability to consistently hit a baseball, I would attempt to understand it intellectually. It appeared that I could hit a baseball more consistently and further batting left handed. This needed analysis long after my spent youth.

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It was as if sociobiology preprogrammed me to prefer using my left to my right hand. Could my genetic code prefigure this preference? Could the DNA of my chromosomes be so marked? I was naturally left handed, only forced to be right-handed by my da. Science suggests that those left handed oriented tend to be more influenced by the right-brain, the intuitive side, and those right handed oriented more by the left-brain, the cognitive side.

Both brains complement each other but one tends to dominate. This makes some sense to me, as my life has been a journey from trusting my thinking exclusively or left brain, to having greater confidence in the power of my feelings or right brain as I have grown into middle age.

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CHAPTER ELEVEN:

In the previous chapter, it is described how I split my fingers when Gussie Witt threw me a curve ball, and how he took me home and doctored my injury and calmed my mother, an injury we hid from my da. What was taken out of the episode was my da coming home after working a hospital troop train of wounded GI’s, and then discovering my wrapped fingers. My mother, once again, is equal to the test of circumstances.

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Circumstantial leisure has always given me a perspective on things. Turns out I’ve had more than my share. Splitting my fingers was the first of many such enforced respites. I couldn’t play baseball, couldn’t work around the house, couldn’t do much of anything, but look, listen and think. My powers of observation were put into play almost immediately when my da came off the road.

Surprisingly, he was in an uncharacteristic expansive mood. The GI’s on his hospital troop train must have been upbeat, as he invariably feeds off their collective mood. His face was alight with feeling as he stepped into the house.

“Dorothy,” he declares excitedly as he brushes passed us kids, embraces my mother, then collapses into a chair, “this one soldier I got to know pretty well was telling me about being on patrol on Guadalcanal.”

He pauses, my mother’s eyes wide with a patient ‘well, get on with it!’ Sensing her discomfort, he adds quickly, “a sniper in a palm tree shot him in the ass.”

My mother’s puzzled expression prompts him to add. “This was after our boys took the island. GI’s thought the island was secure of Japs. Imagine him telling me this, Dorothy, laughing as if it were nothing, him in plaster cast from his waist down. ‘I took off for camp so fast I could have beaten Jesse Owen in the hundred meters even with half my ass gone,’ he tells me. He was full of lead from an automatic weapon or hand grenade, he wasn’t sure. Took doctors more than 12 hours to dig it all out of him.”

My da grew teary. “Dorothy, can you beat that?” He slumps in the chair and puts his head in his hands. “Guy loses most of his ass, part of his leg, and has already been six months in hospital, and he can joke about it.”

I watch as he covers his sobs by taking out his handkerchief and blowing his nose. My mother comes over and puts her arm around his shoulders, cupping her cigarette in her other hand. It amazes me how she keeps from burning herself.

“Those boys put themselves on the line for us every day, Dorothy, yet they don’t show an ounce of self-pity about missing parts.” He wipes his eyes with his sleeve. “They’re amazing, Dorothy, amazing. And that’s not the half of it.” I can tell he’s winding up to a story.

My mother interrupts. She knows my da. “Ray, let’s get some food in you and you can tell us all about it later.” She takes his hat off, strips him of his brakeman jacket, and loosens his tie. He doesn’t protest. He seems numb.

There isn’t a troop train of wounded GI’s that doesn’t affect him in some way. When they are so badly wounded that most cannot talk or walk, he is close to speechless when he comes home. It shows first in his eyes. They seem to burn with pain. We kids know when to stay clear of him. It’s not us he wants to see anyway. We know he is a time bomb waiting to explode and needs quiet. Besides, he only wants to be with our mother, and we seem to understand this without really understanding.

When The Guadalcanal Diary came to the Rialto Theatre, Bobby Witt and I couldn’t wait to see it. It was a spectacular movie. I rode on the handlebars of his bike and we couldn’t stop talking about it on the way home. I told him some of my da’s Guadalcanal train stories.

“Boy, are you lucky! Your dad talked to real marines that fought there?”

“Uh huh.”

“Can I come over sometime when he’s talking?”

That didn’t seem like a good idea, given my da’s changing moods, but I didn’t know what to say, so I lied, “Sure, why not?”

It wasn’t just marines that fought so bravely at Guadalcanal, my da made clear, but I didn’t tell Bobby that. The movie was mainly about gung ho marines, but GI’s on my da’s Guadalcanal troop train were from all the branches of service. They were being transferred from west coast hospitals where they had already spent several months to eastern hospitals for rehabilitation, and training for return to civilian life. Seeing these GI’s on the mend made my da’s spirits soar.

Yet, when he told my mother he befriended a GI assigned to Schick Hospital, and invited his girlfriend to stay with us, I was shocked. Such generosity is totally out of character. The girlfriend I understand is from Dayton, Ohio and will be coming next week.

Wonderful! We already have two guys renting Jackie and my room upstairs, and Patsy, Jackie and I are crammed together in the smallest room in the house. Janice, who is only two, stays downstairs in her crib in the room off the living room, which is also small. The only other sleeping room is my parent’s in the front of the house. That’s it!

So, where’s this girlfriend going to stay? With the carpenters? I don’t think so. With us? You couldn’t fit her in our bedroom with a shoehorn. Then where?

I wrack my brain with these problems, forgetting about my split fingers. Then suddenly, I hear a familiar roar. My da comes out of the kitchen after a big breakfast, and sees me as if for the first time.

“God Jesus, Dorothy, what the hell’s wrong with Jimmy’s hand?”

“Nothing, Ray, just a little accident playing baseball at the courthouse.”

“Little accident my ass! Look at his hand?” The white bandage with the splint did look a little gross.

“Believe me, Ray, it’s nothing. A baseball bruised his fingers. That’s all. But it’s coming along. He’ll be as good as new in no time.”

“Where you get the money for the doctor?”

“No doctor, Ray, no big deal.”

“Let me see those fingers!” Obediently, I march over and put my hand out to him for inspection. The palm of my hand had turned a combination of yellow, blue and purple as if by magic in support of my mother’s notice.

“You can see the bruising,” she adds as he turns my hand over from palm up to palm down.

“Why are the fingers taped together?”

“Ray, come on! Think about it! Why do you think? So he won’t injure them again. You know what a klutz he is.”

“You goddamned right I know! Your kid has to be the klutziest kid in the whole goddamned neighborhood!” I look to my mother for inspiration. She looks past me, and lights a cigarette on the end of hers, and hands it to him.

“Here, Ray, let’s get you upstairs so you can get some sleep. I’ll rub your back to get the road out of you.” Like a puppy he follows her upstairs.

She won’t be back for an hour or two. So, I’m stuck here watching my little sister, my Honey Bunny Tinker Fritzes. But I don’t mind. I adore her. Janice Kay has to be the prettiest baby ever with a full head of black hair and an angelic face. She coos and smiles at me as if the world around her is milk and honey. I hope it will be.

I wonder what room they’re in upstairs. Probably mine. I hate that smell of cigarettes and sweat and stuff. But I’m not complaining. No way. My mother’s a genius. She knows all my da’s buttons. It’s something to see how he melts to her will. His eyes turn to butter and he gets that look in them. Aren’t they getting a little old for that cuddly stuff? After all, he’s already 34, and she’s almost 28. I don’t understand old people at all. They’re very strange.

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The episode that follows relates to my guilt and behavior after stealing a box of brand new baseballs before a Clinton Industrial League game. I return them with due speed to the general manager’s doorstep, unused and undetected.

The opportunity to steal came while convalescing with my split fingers, and unable to take the field and shag flies with my Courthouse Tiger teammates. It was a ritual during batting practice of the Industrial League players. Some teams gave us special access because we lived around the ballpark and were always there.

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Guilt and Confession then come into play. The sacrament of Catholic Confession is as monumental a matter to negotiate as the reason for it. Here Confession to Father Minehart at Sacred Heart’s is compared to Father Fieldfield of St. Patrick’s.

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Father Finefield trusts no one. I couldn’t confess my stealing with misdirection as I could with Father Minehart. He’d probe, ask how many baseballs, ask the condition of the baseballs, and demand that as part of my Penance that I return the baseballs and report my theft to the general manager.

It wouldn’t satisfy him at all that I had already returned the baseballs knowing the terrible error of my ways. There is also a good chance Father Finefield would insist that I confess my crime to the authorities, to the police, or to the sheriff, or both.

If Father Finefield was the only available priest in the city, and there was no Father Minehart option, I’m quite certain I would have done what I did, not out of principle, but out of holy terror. Guilt is a big motivator with me.

No matter what I confessed to Father Minehart, he would give me the same Penance of three Hail Mary’s and three Our Father’s, whereas Father Finefield in his most magnanimous mood would give me minimally the Penance of the Rosary, and quite certainly the Sorrowful mysteries, no chance at all for the Joyful mysteries for me.

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I take a look at crime in the city of Clinton, which is nonexistent and how boredom fills the void.

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If crime is not a problem in Clinton in the summer of 1943, then boredom surely is.

Temperatures often flirt with 100 degrees Fahrenheit with the humidity nearly as high.

When it rains, it rains buckets as if the humidity empties the clouds in contemptuous frustration. After the rain, the heat races back to show it is in command.

There is no relief anywhere as an Iowa summer is nearly as hot in the shade as in the sun. With little breeze and few electric fans about, it is equally cloying inside the jail, where we hang out when we are even too bored to play baseball at the courthouse. The deputies, and sometimes the sheriff, too, seek to create diversions from this sickly sweet and monotonous heat.

Jackie Fisher, my brother, and Thiel Collins, Bob Collins’s brother, both only six, are little bigger than postage stamps. Deputies Stamp and Gaffey, who hate custodial duty, have just completed some housekeeping of the outer office. In comes these two little devils, throwing spitballs around, and creating new debris. The deputies look at each other, smile, and say, “Let’s do it! Let’s teach them a lesson.”

Gently, they take the two little rascals by the scuff of the neck, Jackie and Thiel thinking this is too funny, that is, until the deputies march them off placing them in an empty prisoner cell. They lock the door with deputy Stamp placing the key ceremoniously in his pocket, and then walking away whistling.

“Let’s see how well they like it here.” Deputy Gaffey nods, “We’ll come back,” he lets that sink in, “maybe tomorrow and see if they’ve learned a lesson in good manners.”

Once out of the room, the deputies listen with their ears to the wall. No sound. Jackie and Thiel don’t cry. Yet, it is clear the little guys fail to see the humor in this as I peak in and see their eyes as big as saucer cups and their faces as white as milk.

Everyone in the outer office, including me, razzes them about being jailbirds.

Imagine our surprise when a minute later, they are standing there before us chirpy as frogs on a lily pad. This is too precious. We all roar with laughter. The joke is on the deputies.

Deputy Stamp, characteristically pulling on his right ear, says, “Okay, show us how you did it.”

Like two little peacocks, the little guys lead us back into the jail section and demonstrate by crawling back through the narrow slot used for the prisoner’s food tray, and then stand up momentarily pumping their chests, then crawling back through triumphantly to freedom again, giggling all the time.

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It wasn’t many days later that we were jolted out of our skin by the cacophonous clanking of an ear splitting jail bell with someone yelling, “Prison break! Prison break!"

Most of us courthouse guys were oiling our baseballs gloves at the time, sitting on the concrete jail steps. Immediately, we scattered like buckshot out of a shotgun, fleeing in all directions.

I ran to the courthouse which was a football field away not stopping until I was safely inside. No one followed me. I told the first person I saw that a prisoner had escaped the jail. He looked at me as if I were mad, and turned and went about his business. I waited for the police sirens. Nothing. All I could hear was typewriters humming in that busy staccato, and people moving in and out of the courthouse just as if it was another routine day.

I wandered about the courthouse for the next hour, finally going to the second floor and looking west to the jail. Nothing.

Sheriff Peterson had conspired with the only prisoner in the jail at the time to let him out to scare the belly bejesus out of us. Actually, it wasn’t much of gambit as the prisoner was a trustee and worked in the jail garage washing vehicles. He only spent his nights in the jail cell. We all knew him, and shouldn’t have been scared, but we were. I never did admit to the guys where I went. Afterwards, I made one of the longest visits of my life to St. Patrick’s church.

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Rastrelli’s and Candyland come into play as popular hangouts in this memoir, but left out were bowling alleys and pool halls.

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Bowling and pool playing always confounded me. Guys that were good at these “sports” were seldom good at baseball. Thiel Collins, who was not much bigger than a bowling ball, was already a student of bowling when he turned seven, and was also a fledgling student of pool as well. His brother, Bob, obviously a powerful influence, was nearly an expert at both. You might even call him a pool shark at twelve.

There weren’t a lot of bowling alleys in Clinton. One was across the street from The Clinton Herald on Sixth Avenue South between Second and Third Street. During the war, McEleney Motors, at the North Bridge on Main Avenue in Lyons, converted its automobile showroom into a bowling alley. No new automobiles were being manufactured during the war. McEleney’s was an Oldsmobile dealership, and so they called it the “Olds Bowl.”

A private club, the Odeon, also in Lyons, had it own bowling alley for members.

Some courthouse guys were setting pins at the Clinton Bowling Alley before they were teenagers, Bob Collins for one, Smiley Carlson for another. My mother claimed bowling alleys were dens of iniquity where kids smoked cigarettes and learned to swear. I took her at her word and avoided them.

But I had to admit to myself that guys that hung out at those places always seemed to be more interesting than I was.

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The Clinton Municipal Swimming Pool comes into play after watching a boring Industrial League game.

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One daring adventure that had a touch of danger to it was sneaking into the Clinton Municipal Swimming Pool at night. The first time was when Clinton Foods was beating Climax 11 to 0 in the third inning, and someone yelled, “Let’s go for a swim!”

Everyone knew what he meant. We left the ballpark, walked south through Riverfront Park, only about a quarter mile, and climbed over the four-foot wrought iron steel fence into the pool grounds.

I was never a strong swimmer, but the water felt wonderful. It was warm but not too warm and amazingly clean. Matt Price, director of the pool, kept the facility in near perfect condition. The dock in the deep part had a low springboard at one end and a 20-foot tower for experienced divers at the other. I stayed away from both the dock and the tower, and just lowered myself into the water like into a bath.

All the guys, except Bobby and me, were great swimmers. They played water tag, dove off all the boards, did canon balls, and made lots of noise. Not surprisingly, people heard us.

It brought out some girls in the area, who asked if they could come in. Even though it was the black of night, I shrunk in embarrassment. I was naked and so were the other guys. The girls said they didn’t mind. They stripped to their bras and panties and frolicked about, teasing the guys to get up on the boards and dive. Some did. I stayed in the shallow water like a hippo, as did Bobby, with only my nose above the water. They never seemed to notice us. Afterwards, walking home with Bobby, I grew serious.

“Do you think we have to tell that in confession, seeing those girls in their underwear?”

“What?”

“The girl thing.”

“What girl thing?”

“You know, those girls in their bras and panties, and that one girl who took everything off and waved them at the guys, that thing?”

“I don’t think so, Rube. You were miles from them. Heck, I couldn’t see you myself.”

It was impossible to see his face, but I wondered if he was laughing at me. Sensing this, he changed his tone. “We were hot. We cooled off in the pool. We couldn’t pay because the pool was closed. If I remember right, you were closer to the kiddy pool than to anyone of those girls."

He had to say that! The kiddy pool was only two feet deep. Well, I was by it but not in it. I was wadding next to it in four feet of water, but so was he. He laughs.

“Rube, what would you do if you didn’t have something to worry about? If you want to give Father Finefield a cheap thrill, confess.”

“But is it a sin, Bobby, that’s what I want to know. I don’t want to confess if it isn’t a sin.”

“Rube, it’s a sin if you think it is.”

“Do you?”

“Do I think it’s a sin? No. I think it is silly to think it is a sin. We didn’t do anything wrong, period.”

With great relief, I left him at his door smelling of chlorine and wondering if my mother would be able to smell it, too.”

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Some Clinton kids of my youth knew a world that I never visited and didn’t know until I did research for this book. It was a surprising thing to learn of another side of my community, a side that was so alive and such a learning place for many.

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Clinton in the 1940s was a booming place for adults. Prohibition had been repealed but Iowa liquor laws tightly controlled liquor distribution. Places such as the Odeon Club in Lyons politely ignored these restrictions. The Odeon Club was a bowling, partying, and drinking spot, which defied the law and sold liquor by the drink, and flouted gambling laws as well with a whole room full of slot machines.

Liquor came from Chicago and was unloaded outside of Fulton, Illinois just across the Mississippi River from Lyons, and transported by car across the Lyons Bridge and state line into Iowa. The liquor suppliers wouldn’t bring it across the state line.

At the time of one inventory by Federal Agents during the war, the Odeon Club was told it had the largest stock of liquor between Chicago and Omaha, and Minneapolis and St. Louis. Clinton was truly a jumping place although we kids didn’t have a clue that it was.

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Imagine a pool emporium as a learning institution. Well the Clinton Billiard Parlor under the management of Sam Knight was something like that.

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Bob and Thiel Collins, along with Kenny Tharp and Sam Annear were great fans of the pool shark, Sam Knight. He was Clinton’s best 3-cushion billiard player. These guys were all underage, but Sam, who ran the Clinton Billiard Parlor on Fourth Avenue South and Second Street, just around the corner from the Revere Candy Shop, treated them like family, that is, as long as they behaved.

Sam Knight played against such great players as Welker Cochran and Willie Hoppe. Heinie Witt, Bobby Witt’s father, was a pool enthusiast and played a respectable game of 3-cushion billiards. But Heinie’s preferred game was snooker.

A snooker table is five by eleven feet, larger than a championship billiard table, which is four and one half feet by nine feet. Anyway, Heinie Witt’s favorite game was the high run.

Negroes in Clinton were practically invisible, and didn’t associate in most white establishments during the war, but the Clinton Billiard Parlor was a notable exception. Julius Kent was black and a regular billiard and pool player at the parlor.

Sam Knight allowed young kids in, and permitted them to play some pool, but if they were caught smoking or swearing, they were tossed out, and not allowed back again for two weeks, and he kept track, so they couldn’t slip back in as if nothing happened.

Sam was also a devout Irish Catholic who sometimes acted more like a priest, a sort of Father Flanagan of Boys Town type. Even Clinton’s roughnecks, and there were more than a few, either respected or feared Sam and seldom stepped across the line.

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This is another episode while my split fingers were healing and I attempted to make myself useful to my Courthouse Tiger teammates.

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Unable to play baseball, watching the Courthouse Tigers in the summer of 1943, the thought occurred to me that they looked a little ragged. They needed something to spruce them up. I said to myself, they are a good baseball team, but they need uniforms! That’s it, that’s what they lack!

Well, uniforms are costly, and we didn’t have money to even buy baseballs, relying on our courthouse shaggers to get them when foul balls came over the roof at Riverview Stadium. So, getting uniforms wasn’t realistic. Then what was? What about an image that identifies them as Courthouse Tigers?

With time on my hands, and wanting to make a contribution, I suggested to the guys that they give me their best white tee shirt, and I would iron an image of a tiger on the back of the tee shirt with “Courthouse Tiger” over the image. I also said that everyone should purchase the same red baseball cap from Rod Fitch’s Sports Wear department at the Martin Morris Department Store, and that everyone should wear a clean pair of jeans with white tennis shoes.

They all agreed enthusiastically to my idea, and in a few days I had eleven sparkling white tee shirts with which to work. They were all new! Gussie Witt, who seems to know everyone, managed to get the tee shirts, baseball caps and sneakers from Rod Fitch’s at wholesale prices. The tee shirts cost each player $1.35, the baseball cap, ninety cents, and the sneakers $1.80.

My uncle Arnie Ekland, who never married, had a hobby of drawing cartoons, animals, and caricatures of people. Every Wednesday night after work at the Chicago & North Western Railway Shops on Camanche Avenue, he would take a bus to Sixth Avenue North, and walk past the courthouse ball field, seeing my guys playing ball.

So, he knew how important they all were to me. I told him of my plan, and asked him if it was possible to draw a tiger. Without hesitation, I watched him with fascination make circles, elliptical configurations, cross lines, and crossword puzzle like patterns, and then turn them all into the most impressive tiger face I had ever seen. He asked me if I needed a bigger or smaller pattern. No, I told him, the size was just right.

Now, came the hard work. I got a box of new crayolas and colored the pattern consistent with that of a tiger, along with large block letters “COURTHOUSE TIGERS” above the tiger image.

Then I put a piece of my mother’s wax paper over it, and then a handkerchief, and ironed the image into the tee shirt.

Voila! It was a perfect tiger head with the orange colors vibrantly brilliantly, reflecting the tiger’s menacing dominance. It was great. I was so proud. The problem was I had to re-crayon each image, and that seemed to take tons of time.

I made tee shirts for Bobby Witt, Phil “Legs” Leahy, Bill “Chang” Benson, Jim “Owl” Holle, Sam Annear, Walt “Fergie” Ferguson, Dick Crider, Dave “Pooper” Cavanaugh, Dick Dunmore, and Ken Tharp. I didn’t make one for myself because I couldn’t play with my split fingers, and besides I was completely pooped out.

The guys looked great playing in their new uniforms. The only problem is that the tee shirts had to be washed eventually, and the image faded, and faded, until the image all but vanished. Oh, well! It was a good idea at the time, and kept me involved with the guys.

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CHAPTER TWELVE:

The opening paragraphs of this chapter were cut out. Here they are.

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If there is anything more beautiful than an Iowa fall, it must be in heaven. The earth tones are dazzling in Indian summer brilliance. The leaves of trees are rich in deep yellows, bright reds, dark oranges, soft browns, hard purples, and moist greens, the color spectrum of infrared to ultraviolet light on display.

It is as if in the dying of things they come to life in Nature’s pent-up beauty, reminding us that nothing is ever lost, only changed in God’s magnificence. Soon the trees will be as naked as a winter’s cloudless sky. But now the Iowa fall is radiant with the many faces of God in picture frame quality, suitable for one’s mantle.

My heart is bursting with joy as I shuffle along Third Street kicking leaves and hearing them crunch under foot. I feel one with them. I don’t know why but I do. I pick up a leave and examine it. Pick up another and compare the two, then a third, and a fourth until my hands are full of leaves.

Some leaves look like triangular webbing, their veins prominent, others are heart shaped, and still others remind me of fans. They dance along the walk, whirl in the air, land and kiss each other, then part again as Nature’s playful children from the same family without a care in the world.

The fall is like a big brother to me. It is my favorite time of year. I hate the rains in the spring, the heat of the summer, and the sickening cold of winter. It is heaven on earth in the fall when no matter what direction you look it is like a priceless painting in God’s favorite colors. The sky is so blue that I feel I can see all the way to heaven. Gentle breezes caress my face like angels’ hands reminding me how lucky I am to be a native Iowan. When I die, I pray that heaven is like an Iowa fall.

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The passage that follows relates to my violent reaction when my classmates lock me out of school after recess. This meant I couldn’t play basketball after school. Only ten, I ripped the locked metal door handle from its wood moorings bending the metal at a tortured angle. The action released surprising strength in me. Scientists call this “akathisia.” The body at rest is like a quiet volcano capable of eruption if the conditions are right. In fact, the muscles of the human body, if they were all to work together at the same time, could lift 6,000 pounds.

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Violence is endemic to the American soul and has been since the Pilgrims came to this virgin continent. Violence is our collective heritage, but it is also our individual torment.

There are two categories of violence, instrumental and emotional violence. Instrumental violence is intended to achieve a particular goal or reward – money, status, territory, or advantage. A terrorist act or armed robbery is an example of instrumental violence. The Boston Tea Party leading to the American Revolution was a terrorist act as were the first shots fired by the Minute Men at Concord, Massachusetts in the Revolutionary War.

Emotional violence, on the other hand, can be triggered by feelings of rage, anger, hatred, fear, frustration, or jealousy. In destroying the locked door, I was displaying emotional violence. I was only ten but what Sister Flavian said was to prove prophetic, I was an angry child heading for trouble.

Characteristic of akathisia is hyperkinesis and hyperdynamism (HK/HD). HK is characterized by hyperactivity and extreme rapidity of motion. The average person is capable of motion much faster than can consciously be generated, say, catching a glass that falls off the table before it hits the floor.

HD is the rush of energy that comes with the extraordinary quickness of action. A specific trigger or psychological catalyst, such as fear or rage or some other emotion, brings on the HK/HD phenomenon.

Life magazine in 1946 wrote of a stunning example of this. William Anderby, a five-seven, 152-pound sailor, serving on a destroyer attached to a merchant ship convoy in the North Atlantic in World War II, during an attack by German dive bombers, lifted an unexploded bomb off the forward deck weighing 610 pounds, picked it up and carried it effortlessly to the railing, and flung it overboard, saving his ship.

Displays of HK/HD seem to fall into two general categories. The most common is the reflexive HK or HD reaction, that is, a momentary single act of supranormal strength, speed, or agility brought on by a reflexive response to mortal peril or extreme emotional shock, such as my ripping a bronze door panel off its hinges as if it were a piece of cardboard.

More rare are sustained displays of HK/HD, which are of a hysterical nature, such as athletes who play with broken bones, or Metal of Honor winners in warfare who exhibit sustained courage under life threatening conditions. According to research, HK/HD appears more common among people of Nordic origin, especially Celts, Scandinavians, and Germans. But I expect it is in everyone.

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More episodic evidence was prepared but not included that indicated that akathisia was not a “one time” phenomenon with me. These following episodes were left out.

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When I was fifteen, I came home after high school football practice, tired and hungry, to find my parents not home. I asked my sister, Patsy, whom I adored, to heat up my dinner. She refused. I grabbed her arm, and told her she was mean, and then heated up my own dinner. The next day my sister’s arm was tattooed with the precise imprint of my five fingers and palm on her arm as an ugly bruise. It is a wonder my da didn’t kill me.

When I was seventeen in football scrimmage at Clinton High, I hit Bobby Witt so hard coming around my end that he couldn’t practice the rest of the week.

“Rube, why’d you do that?” he asked in disbelief as we took the bus home from school. “God, know what, that really hurt. It was a cheap shot. It’s only practice.” Then shaking his head, “I hurt all over.”

I couldn’t explain it, except that fear might have triggered it, certainly not courage. We had another football warm up drill that illustrates this conundrum. We would stand apart about thirty yards, and a player carrying the ball would run at us with a blocker in front and we would try to get past the blocker and tackle the ball carrier, then reverse roles, go to the back of the line, and do it all over again.

It was just a drill, but for me it was an emotional release, as I hated scrimmage. Nobody wanted to face me because when I was the designated tackler I took it too seriously.

Such emotional release was something that I turned on and off like a light switch. The peculiar nature of this trigger deployment was illustrated when we upset Rock Island (Illinois) in the last football game of my football playing career.

I had had a vicious time with the guy across from me, often knocking him ass over applecart, and then yelling for him to get out of my face. We played both sides of the ball in those days, so I got to humiliate him on offense and defense, too. Once the game was over, however, the madness left me. Not him. I went to shake his hand, and he hit me and knocked me off my feet.

It didn’t hurt but stunned me. I sat there on the ground with no desire to retaliate. Red Butler came up and did it for me, pummeling him into submission with the Rock Island player finally saying, “Oh right! Oh right!”

This episode confused me. I wondered if I was actually a coward, and why the anger that had served me so well in the game, abandoned me afterwards so quickly.

The emotional violence of the Rock Island players didn’t end there. They trashed the visitors’ locker room of our high school. That was collective instrumental violence versus individual emotional violence.

With me, I never knew what might trigger my emotions. I considered when I was young and strong that I might be capable of killing someone while in a rage. It scared me.

The final summer of my working at Clinton Corn Processing Company while going to Iowa provided some evidence for my concern.

This was my fifth and final summer working there, a job that had enabled me to earn a college education. I owed the company and its good people more than I could ever repay. Even so, this inner restlessness or akathisia was to surface once again.

Perhaps because I’ve always been a loner, and never into any games, except sports explains why I’ve also never been into grab-assing games or pranks of any kind.

I was working the eleven to seven shift in the feed house at Clinton Corn. Here we took 140 pound feed bags off the conveyor belt and stacked them in box cars thirteen high for shipping. Only athletic type college guys were assigned to this detail with the crew’s regulars.

Nate Walton, an outstanding athlete at St. Mary’s High School, and now a student at St. Ambrose College in Davenport (Iowa), was a colleague of mine on the night crew. Ben Dorsey was the night superintendent, and very supportive of college kids.

On this particular night, during the waning hours of the morning, when we would soon all be returning to college, the superintendent was away doing paper work, and Clyde Powell was in charge.

Clyde was huge, as tall as I am, but seventy-five pounds heavier if an ounce. A nice guy, but a practical joker, he decided that he and his buddies would initiate us stenciling on our private parts with black ink as honorary members of the crew. They went for Nate first. Nate didn’t resist, and then it was my turn.

Casually, the six-man crew formed a half circle around me, sensing my resistance, with shit assed grins on their faces. I’ve never felt such terror or helplessness before. First, I was wracked with disbelief -- this isn’t happening to me! –- then unbridled fear.

My tongue was dry, and I was so frightened that I was shaking like a leaf. I couldn’t speak. I tried to and my lips quivered, but nothing came out. Nate said later that it appeared that I was about to cry, a twenty-one year old cry baby.

When the first man broke from the half circle and approached me, I gave a sigh of relief that it wasn’t Clyde, and hit him on the chin with such an explosive force that it sent him flying over a stack of feed sacks as if he was jettisoned out of a canon.

He landed out cold in a mist of feed dust, spread-eagled like a fallen bird. Everyone laughed, but me. “Holy shit!” was the cry, “did you see that?”

After a brief spell, the man shook his head, picked himself up, massaged his jaw, tried to stand, and then collapsed again, uttering some earthy expletive.

Seeing this, the other guys went back to work as if nothing had happened. It was over. I still think about it these many years later.

Akathisia was to visit me again while a member of the crew of the USS Salem in the Mediterranean during the late 1950s. A bodybuilding boatswain’s mate was always flexing his muscles as he rumbled through the passageway, hitting guys on the arm and laughing, “Oh, I’m sorry, did that hurt?” No one ever complained.

One day I told him as he gave me an especially stunning punch, “Don’t ever do that again!” It was a bruising punch on top a bruise given earlier in the day.

He stopped, looked at me in astonishment. Deck guys consider hospital corpsmen weenies, “short arm inspectors” and “pussies,” and not real sailors.

“Well, well, pretty boy doc is a tough guy.” Now he has a crowd as he is blocking the passageway. He hits me again in the arm and knocks me against the bulkhead and then turns his back on me, as if I don’t exist and moves off.

I was taller and quicker than him, coming up behind him and wrapping my arms around his thick chest from the back, and pulling him towards me with all my might. It sounded like piano keys being tuned as I crushed his chest and he collapsed in my arms with several broken ribs. One rib punctured his lung and he was struggling to breathe.

Others rushed him into sickbay, just ten feet away, while I stood there coldly with contemptuous hate in my eyes. I was living on my rage.

Word spread that he fell down the gangplank on the hanger deck where the weight room was located. He never challenged this description of his injuries. I could have received a General Court Marshall and Dishonorable Discharge, and possibly even jail time, but it never came up. The weight lifter made a recovery, but never bothered me again.

There was another time when akathisia worked indirectly but possibly saved my life. It was 1975, and I was consulting the Fairfax County Police Department, which is located outside Washington, D.C.

I had gone to a play with the Secretary of the State of Iowa, whom I had met when he attended one of my seminars in Kansas City, Missouri. We went to dinner afterwards and left each other in the early a.m. A police officer from Fairfax County was due to pick me up, but got delayed, and wouldn’t be around until 2 a.m.

I decided to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue in this cold early morning, when suddenly I noticed across the street walking parallel to me were three African American youths.

Alarm should have arisen, but it didn’t. At six-four and nearly 200 pounds, dressed in a three-piece Hickey Freeman suit and cashmere top coat, I felt insulated from danger by my apparent status, that is, until the three youths rushed ahead and crossed the street, and were standing under the street light jiving with each other some fifty yards from me.

When the distance was reduced to ten yards, I remembered that the senator from Mississippi had been robbed and stabbed and nearly fatally wounded in this same area during the wee hours of the morning.

Emotional panic rose in me fed by consuming fear, but not instrumentally as in the past, but in a cautionary form. Out of the blue, I recalled that whenever I interviewed plain clothed detectives at Fairfax, and asked them sensitive questions, they invariably adjusted their shoulder holsters.

Remembering this, when I was less than five yards from the boys, I made an exaggerated move to adjust my phantom holster, which they didn’t miss, followed with obvious false bravado, “Good evening, boys, little past your bedtime, isn’t it?”

Without missing a beat, I walked boldly by them, now with my back to them, rolling my shoulders again as if to withdraw my revolver in imitation of the cop that I wasn’t, I heard them whistling, “There goes the fuzz!”

When I told my ride this, he said, “Well, doc, I guess you could say that saved your white ass, but I wouldn’t recommend a repeat performance." xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx


Note: This material is copyrighted © by Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., and is made available only for your private use, and is not to be published without the expressed permission of the author.