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Letter: 13

March 4,1995

      DEAR JEFF, Todd, Chris and Tawnya, (In case you aren't too bored with this stuff).

      This is just a little more gab about my reminiscences.

      When was a kid almost old enough to start school, the older kids in the family would be saying, "I gotta hurry. I gotta get to school" and they would grab their homework and books and go to school and disappear for several hours.

      I wondered what dire consequences would occur if they didn't get there, and I thought school was probably a little like prison. I got to thinking about it and one day and I asked Mom, "Mama, what will happen if I don't go to school?"She replied "They will put your dad and me in jail."Then the obvious question was asked by an adult who saw that I was about to become school age, "Are you going to go to school next fall?' My answer was "No, Pa and Ma are going to jail."

      When fall came they explained that I would have to go and it was necessary for me to learn, and I went without much fuss. However when the second grade year was going to start I said I wasn't going to go. Mom knew that not much happened the first day and she told Miss Alexander, who stayed with us (it was private, not for my ears to hear) to bring my books home and that I would go the next day. I didn't need to get acquainted with the kids because I had played with most of the boys all summer. The next day I went without much fuss.

      When you are the youngest of eight, the older kids bring home lots of diseases, colds, pink eye, sore throat, etc. As a consequence I had chicken pox, mumps, whooping cough and finally measles all before I was four years old. They thought the measles were going to do me in. I had apparently recovered and they said after I got sick again that I had had "setback”. The Mercers, who lived in Grandpa Howard's house across the alley to the east of us would come over to visit us. Een Mercer (real name Enos) called me Arnie Gene and said to me, "Arnie Gene, I thought you were just about well. What happened?"I said, "Genie had a backset."All this trouble didn't seem to hurt my health any. I was just as healthy as any of the kids later on and I was immune to all those things later.

      I have had two or three vaccinations for smallpox but none of them ever took and I didn't get the scar like all the kids had on their shoulders. When Mom was pregnant with me, she had smallpox — apparently a mild case because she didn't have any pox scars that I knew of. This caused me to get vaccinated in the army twice because they saw no scar. Some of the guys in the army felt pretty bad for a few days. They couldn't understand why it didn't bother me. They were welcome to vaccinate me a hundred times if they wanted to. Mom's immunity was passed to me by umbilical cord.

      I did quite a lot of reading. Mom encouraged us to read, so if I wanted a book shown in the Sears, Roebuck catalog, she would order it for me. They were quite cheap. I read Treasure Island, Kidnapped, all the Tarzan books and several Zane Grey's books. I liked P. G. Wodehouse nonsense about Bertie Wooster. Have you seen Jeeves and Wooster on Masterpiece Theater? I get a big kick out of seeing them. I read Wodehouse's books about 60 years ago.

      I liked The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas. I liked Booth Tarkington's about Penrod and Sam, who were kids. We all liked Mark Twain's stuff — The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Life on the Mississippi was a nonfiction humorous book. I think this reading helped me a lot in later life.

      I'm really enjoying this northwest upstairs bedroom as my home "office."I could have put Tawnya's small bed downstairs and made that room my "office" but we would have had to move too many things and I wouldn't have any privacy. Grandma can come up here any time she wants to, but there are long stretches when I am left alone, which letter writers need.

      This letter is getting too boring, so I will close and try to do better next time.

      Love,

      Grandpa

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