Vagabond Boy: Memoir of a Youth's Journey Through a Heartland of Chaos

Vagabond Boy

Memoir of a Youth’s Journey Through

a Heartland of Chaos

Joel Everett Harding

Copyright © 2012 by Joel Everett Harding, All rights reserved.

Cover design by Joel Everett Harding, Copyright 2012

Published by Green Peach Publishing, Smashwords Edition

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Names of certain people and places have been changed in this book. This work is a memoir and events portrayed are true, though statements about persons and places expressed in this book are the author’s opinions.

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To the pony-tailed girl who once held my hand

and still holds my heart.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to

front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn

what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover

that I had not lived.

—Henry David Thoreau, 1857

Table of Contents

1 Kindling the Flame

2 Auspicious Arrivals

3 Dick and Bea

4 First Encounters of the Home Kind

5 Mysterious Landscapes

6 See Dick Run

7 Spaghetti Reckoning

8 Ali Baba

9 Dragon Slayers

10 Early Lessons from the Road

11 Oregon Cowboy

12 Life on the Frontier

13 Desert Peaches and Pandemonium

14 Not in Kansas Anymore

15 Pathmakers

16 From Golden Shores to Windy City

17 Mumblety-Peg

18 High Hopes on Four Wheels

19 Ghost House

20 Rescue and Shelter

21 Oaks

22 Ricochet

23 Guardians of the Flame

24 Passage Through the Chaos

25 Blackbeard's Booty

Afterword

Photographs - Section 1

Photographs - Section 2

Photographs - Section 3

Photo Key

About the Author

Additional Resources

Back to Beginning

1 KINDLING THE FLAME

If you live on the road long enough eventually you are likely to see a boy erupt in flames. It’s easy to set a kid on fire. A little gasoline and some matches will do nicely. And if there is even a slight breeze then there is not much more you need to maintain efficient combustion than watch as the lad runs around in circles further fanning the flames on his own. I’ve seen it happen, but I don’t recommend this particular method for there are more viable ways to ignite a boy, or even a girl, for that matter.

Sometimes a single small spark at the right time without an aggressive accelerant is sufficient, though usually a number of such sparkings over the early vulnerable period of the preparation process achieves the best results. If you have the patience and truly want to prepare an inspired dish involving an average cut of youth, persistent attentiveness without excessive fussiness in the kitchen is the way to go.

The gradual steady warming approach from the heart rather than a conflagration derived from indifference is preferred, because consistent cooking early-on can render a young body more tender with less wasted potential, but only if done properly. Excessive heat over an extended period can surely ruin the inherent potential in a child.

When it comes to sources of ignition to get those sparks going a reliable fuel is necessary, and the type I recommend most of the time is nurturance right out of the box. Negative reinforcement may on occasion be unavoidable, though it is best used sparingly and gently in order to prevent destructive flare-ups and persistent smoky outcomes. These can undermine a good cook’s best intentions over the long-term.

Ingredients can vary but the history of rendering children provides proven techniques for achieving successful courses. There are many cookbooks available on the subject that the reader can consult, and cuisine fads covering all manner of styles and fusions crop up regularly. Even so fundamental approaches seem to work best in most cases, and I recommend sticking to the basics. Half-baked experiments, however, rarely produce the intended results.

Many young parents tend to start out with poorly-equipped kitchens containing only the barest essentials, often having inherited the equipment from their own parents. This can be a disadvantage for the livestock under their care but the natural motivational juices and resilience of boys and girls can sometimes compensate for these shortcomings, unless it becomes obvious that their caretakers have absolutely no business in the kitchen. In such cases the dish they produce may be unfit for even the simplest meal, let alone the grand banquet of life. Then salvaging the best that a child has to offer at the banquet to come depends upon other chefs and the inner resources of the child.

Yet despite the best of intentions, even picnics and grilling out on the landscape must sometimes contend with stormy conditions that can dash the most well-intentioned spark. Picnics require some planning and traveling, and while taking trips can add spices and interesting flavors to a child recipe, the wandering life can be as full of twists and turns and hazards as the roads traveled or the most complicated recipe.

Preparing remarkable meals and children for the banquet of life both require considerable caretaking, especially when on the road. Without attentive navigation unintended consequences might plague a cook’s reputation forever, and produce a childhood meal that is unpalatable and beyond salvaging. Thus, whether meals are mostly prepared in a home setting or are often on the go, parenting chefs need to proceed diligently for best results.

My family traveled a great deal when I was a boy. During the course of my first decade we lived a fairly itinerant lifestyle residing in one place or another for several weeks or months at a time before continuing onward. Sometimes we circled back to Chicago where my paternal grandmother and grandfather lived. Occasionally we ended up living with them for a time before heading back out west to a new destination of promise.

We rolled through 1950s America swapping landscapes as frequently as some folks changed their underwear. Like other eager new families that poured onto those landscapes after World War II, my parents were restless in their search for fresh opportunities. They tracked clues to the American Dream that lay strewn across the fruited plain, rambling along dusty roads before interstate highways were built.

Many of our experiences on the road during those years have stayed in my memory. I have always wondered why some of them, even seemingly insignificant ones, had a way of persisting with me. When these scenes would play in my head as a young adult they usually did so as isolated unconnected vignettes. I never paid a great deal of attention then to the memories representing events that occurred before age ten. They were born in my distant past and waves of new experiences had washed over me for decades since then. Even so, now and then the old ones rose up through the murky depths and floated on the surface of awareness where they bobbed around, seemingly innocuous and curious, beckoning scrutiny before once again submerging.

As I grew older they floated less often to the surface and most of them eventually settled as suspended sediments do in quiet waters, and became buried by layers of fresh memory fragments, unremembered and unexamined. After decades of living, the feelings those memories once generated had largely vanished like a fleet of lost treasure galleons. For much of my life I viewed most such memories from my childhood as just ordinary features of my life, no more noteworthy than the topography of my face.

I long suspected though, that some of those persistent memories might have had some influence on my attitudes, motivations, and the choices I made along the way. Yet it was not until middle age that the sense nagged at me about how those half-buried, persistent memories might hold an emotional ocean of meaning about my life and who I became. It was then that I decided it was time to dredge some of them up and see what it was that caused them to persist and if there was anything of value to salvage.

When I began hauling them out of the water, so to speak, and into the mental laboratory of critical self-reflection for closer examination, I realized their impact was much greater than I had ever expected. I discovered that indeed there were treasure galleons that had long rested undisturbed within the dark depths of my memories. But there were also other things. Things that made me shiver when I was a young boy after I opened an adventure book with a picture of an old pirate map, and off in a far corner was the warning, here there be monsters.

~~~~```~~~~

2 AUSPICIOUS ARRIVALS

Undoubtedly the weirdest event reported in 1947 was of a mysterious object that crashed near Roswell, New Mexico. The Air Force still insists that it was simply a weather balloon. Eyewitness accounts fuel speculation even today, however, that it may have been an alien spacecraft. I had nothing to do with it, I swear. And I can prove it because that thing, whatever it was, arrived that year on July 2 and I didn’t even land on the planet until November 5.

If it became necessary I could substantiate my claim with official government documentation—namely my birth certificate. It stated emphatically that I arrived at 5:30 p.m. on that November day at the Renton Hospital in King County, Washington. That meant I was more than 1,629 miles from the Roswell incident and could not possibly have been involved.

Since the timing and evidence concerning Roswell remain disputed to this day by legions of conspiracy theorists, I would leave it to others to decide if the government’s official report of that incident was as accurate as my official government-issued birth certificate. Curiously, that document contained information about my parents that differed from my brothers’ and sister’s official birth documents.

In any case, the date and time of my arrival was probably quite accurate and therefore, if aliens did arrive in New Mexico that year, they certainly were no kin of mine.

I liked to imagine my parents, Richard and Beatrice, or Dick and Bea as you might expect, were both thrilled with me at our first meeting. Still, other debuts in 1947 were certainly more exciting to the world at large, for it was an interesting year in terms of many auspicious arrivals. I did not make world headlines but Thor Heyerdahl and his crew of six did. They managed to smash their soggy balsa raft, Kon-Tiki, on a reef of the Tuamotu Islands in Polynesia. It seems their awkward landing was achieved after sailing 4,300 miles in 101 days across the Pacific Ocean with an average speed of 1.6 miles per hour. For many this expedition supported the thesis that people from South America using such flimsy craft technically could have discovered and settled Polynesia in pre-Columbian times. Of course, to do this one might expect they needed to carry along handy equipment similar to that on the Kon-Tiki—a radio, watches, charts, and a sextant.

Of course, none of these were available then, but they were by the time I arrived here. My own first voyage that year was devoid of the world-wide acclaim that either Thor or the Roswell aliens received. This is quite understandable considering that my expedition involved a distance of no more than eight inches from the womb and an average speed of 0.00000025 miles per hour. Unlike Thor’s trip, however, it required less than 18 hours to finish and I did it under complete cover of darkness with very little oxygen. And rest assured that I achieved this feat without the use of any radio, watch, chart, or—heaven forbid—a sextant.

I admit that my mother Bea assisted me with the propulsion system and there was some navigation provided by the attending obstetrician. Even so I made the voyage solo on that fifth of November in the delivery room of the Renton hospital.

Besides my mother’s birthing debut, the Roswell incident, and the Kon-Tiki’s appearance in Polynesia, there were a number of other notable firsts during 1947. Aviator Charles E. Chuck Yeager arrived at the sound barrier in the X-1 and promptly broke it. Howard Hughes’s enormous wooden aircraft, Spruce Goose, immediately became a white elephant three days before my birthday when it completed its first and only flight of 70 seconds.

Although not an aircraft or an aviator, Jet Pilot bolted from the starting gate and arrived first at the finish line in the Kentucky Derby. Meet the Press was launched on NBC as the first televised news show and would eventually become television's longest-running program. The Howdy Doody Show also made its initial arrival and was the first children’s television show broadcast to a national audience, though I never noticed it at the time.

Newspapers announcing the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls by Bedouin nomads at the caves of Qumran in Jordan were tossed onto front lawns and porches all over America. The Yankees beat the Brooklyn Dodgers in seven games in the first televised World Series. Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl first appeared for sale on bookshelves and for millions it personalized the madness of the holocaust.

Both the transistor and the microwave oven were invented that year, and the carbon-14 method of radiocarbon dating was developed. The Polaroid Land camera was first unveiled in New York City and was capable of producing a black-and-white photograph a mere 60 seconds after releasing the shutter.

Even so, none of those momentous events that year were more important to me and my parents than my own arrival when I took my first breath on that November day—one more human being with promise, taken out of the oven and served up to the world piping hot.

Back then I was fully preoccupied with transforming my feeble state into a sustainable venture—breathing and functioning on my own. My umbilical cord was my lifeline for months and I’d never gone anywhere without it. Nevertheless, I had to leave it behind when I moved out of the womb. Fortunately my chances of succeeding in a state of detachment were quite good by that time because I arrived in a well-equipped and professionally-staffed hospital.

This certainly had advantages for my parents and me compared with the birthing process that I imagine was common in less modern eras. The trauma of birthing for mothers and babies seems to be well documented all the way back to the first contraction announced by our original ancient mother ancestor. As difficult as it seemed to be for mothers and children in those earliest years, it was probably far from just a walk in the jungle for fathers, too.

Perhaps their side of it remains a bit sketchy and my father’s experience during my birth was apparently a clichéd one of fear and helplessness regarding childbirth. Such fear might have ancient origins, probably stemming from a single event in our species’ early history when two men, dragging a sabre-toothed tiger home for dinner, happened to walk past a cave where a woman was in the throes of childbirth.

It sounds like someone is about to be a mommy, one of the fearless, grizzled hunters nervously offered, and the other responded, Yikes, it sounds like someone set a mommy on fire!

Surely they hastily moved along until they were back in the deep, dark wilderness where they felt safer.

When I started making my move to freedom my father was away at work and so was oblivious to my mother’s parturient yelping. Had he known she was bedridden in painful labor, undoubtedly he would have rushed with deep concern to the hospital and demanded to know exactly where the crucial room was located—meaning the expectant father’s waiting room. Like other fathers of the time he would have headed there immediately, worried if there were enough obsolete Popular Mechanics magazines and empty ashtrays available to sufficiently distract him for the next fourteen hours.

I was fortunate to arrive in a time when hospitals existed. The era of effective pain management had emerged a decade or so earlier and once women in labor realized that anesthesia was readily available, they abandoned home birthing and started flocking to hospitals by the wagonload.

Doctors and registered nurses handled everything during my birth. Though in ancient times fathers had to guard the entrance to the birthing cave, they were no longer needed when I came along because there hadn’t been a sabre-toothed tiger or wooly mammoth sighting near a hospital for decades.

I did not realize it then, but birth for me was the first rejection I encountered. I never took personally, however, those spasmodic shoves out of the womb from my mother. I can actually appreciate now why she might have felt an urge to kick me out of my first home where I had lived with her for so long. After all, I was constantly filching food from her, causing her to throw up every morning and being an all-around pain in the breasts.

Once I slipped into the hands of the doctor he became my first caretaker on the outside. As such, he likely gave me an immediate rude slap on my bottom. If so, then I involuntarily came into the world and the first thing I received was a spanking. That should have been a warning to me that life on the outside was going to be much tougher than I was used to on the inside. I did not have a lick of sense back then, however, and soon forgot all about that initial insult.

After a quick inspection I was swept away and latched inside a mechanical incubator. Because I had arrived weeks earlier than expected I weighed only five pounds and was in need of special nurturing that apparently only a machine could provide.

I was cloistered in the incubator most of the time, though they did release me for meals, which at least were family affairs that my mother hosted. In fact, she catered every one and though the menu never changed, the food was organic and completely of her own creation.

Eventually I was pronounced sufficiently fit and was placed into the custody of my mother and father. The hospital doors closed behind me and the opportunity to begin exploring a lifetime of new landscapes arrived. I was a small enough package to fit right in with the rest of the family luggage and it seemed that I was born to travel. And that is what I did through the next nine years.

~~~~```~~~~

3 DICK AND BEA

My father Dick had blond hair and good looks and was the oldest child from a large, middle-class Chicago family composed of his parents plus seven sons and four daughters. I am not sure what my grandparents’ motivation was to produce a brood that size, since they were city-dwellers and really didn’t need a work force for farming the land or running a small country.

Dick was the oldest child and enlisted in the Army when World War II was already well underway, and that was as soon as he was old enough to do so. It wasn’t long before he was airborne over Europe and ducking Nazi shrapnel.

My mother was born Beatrice Rheinert and was an attractive, raven-haired girl from southeastern Pennsylvania. The Rheinert family tree stemmed from their immigrant ancestor, John George. He and his relatives dwelled in the Rhenish Palatinate region of Germany, which encompassed both sides of the Rhine River. The people in this region were the ancestors of the Pennsylvania Germans before persecution and tyranny drove them out to seek new homes in the land of opportunity across the sea.

Family lore suggests John George and his family were too poor even to be farmers. Before emigrating, it seems they survived within the lowest ranks of German society as gleaners—those who walked harvested fields owned by others to gather leftover grains. Gleaning was a sort of primitive welfare system where those who were actually willing to work for food literally did so. It tended to be hard work, bending down all day to collect scraps of wheat kernels, but those were depressed economic times when jobs were scarce.

John George apparently was willing to take a risk for a more productive life where opportunities abounded, so according to genealogical records assembled by a later ancestor, he emigrated sometime before 1740. When he entered America he settled in the Upper Saucon Township in what is now Lehigh County, Pennsylvania, and eventually acquired nearly 150 isolated acres of land to farm. It was a hard life. According to his ancestor’s report, he built a modest log cabin of two rooms, cleared and tilled his land, and reared his family in a wilderness without neighbors. County records show that even sixteen years after taking possession of his land, his meager possessions included only one horse, but no wagons. But at least he was in a land without persecution for his protestant religious beliefs. Moreover, any gleaning he still did was in fields that he owned.

By the time she met Dick, my mother had barely any family remaining other than two younger sisters, an older brother, and an uncle. Most everyone else, including her parents, died when she was a young girl. It seems her father returned from the First World War and became a life insurance salesman, married, and started a family. He was a debit agent and his job was to sell policies and go door-to-door each month to collect premiums from all his policyholders.

When the Great Depression came along, many people were too poor to pay with money so he sometimes accepted goods instead—perhaps a sack of potatoes, a basket of onions, a chicken or two, and whatever else was offered just to keep the policies in place until things improved. He paid his customer's premiums for awhile, however it eventually became an unsustainable situation. Policies lapsed, his income dropped accordingly, and his debts increased beyond tolerance. As I heard the story, one day when my mother was six years old, he stuck his head in the kitchen oven with the gas on and committed suicide. She happened to walk into the kitchen just as two men, perhaps her uncles, pulled him out.

His self-imposed demise in 1929 left a mother with four children. The five of them moved into their grandmother’s house in Spring City, Pennsylvania. It was a large, two-story brick house on what was then the rural edge of the old town. In addition to my mother, three sisters and a brother, there was her mother and grandmother, an aunt, two uncles, a great aunt, and a mother-in-law. Of those twelve people only one uncle and the aunt were gainfully employed and supported the whole extended family during a historic economic depression.

When Bea turned sixteen her mother became ill with breast cancer. Consequently my mother and her younger sister, Margaret, were sent to a girl’s boarding school named Ellis College near West Chester, Pennsylvania. It was not a college of higher education but a place where fatherless girls lived and attended classes until they graduated with a high school diploma. Her brother, William, lived at a boy’s secondary school in Philadelphia, Girard College, until he graduated. Her youngest sister, Janet, stayed with her mother for awhile then was sent to Ellis College, as well.

Within a few months of Bea’s arrival at the boarding school, her mother died from the cancer in the spring of 1940. One day, when I was nine years old, I was particularly angry at my mother for something and said to her, I wish you were dead! She calmly responded that she had said the same thing to her mother once and ran out of the house. When she returned later that day she learned her mother had indeed died in her absence. It was surely a terrible way to end Bea’s brief visit home from the boarding school.

My mother returned to the boarding school and lived there for nearly two years and hated the institutional life there. That did not stop her from graduating with her diploma. After leaving Ellis College she attended Chester County Hospital School of Nursing in nearby West Chester. The nursing school participated in the US Student Nurse Cadet Corps during World War II. Forty-six of the sixty-eight nursing students in the school joined the program in which the government provided uniforms, books, and a monthly stipend while they attended the nursing program in return for their promise to work for the government for the duration of the war and until six months afterward. My mother was one of those who participated and graduated with a Registered Nurse degree then entered the army as a lieutenant with the U S Army Nurse Corps.

She completed basic training in Fort Dix, New Jersey, in 1944, received additional training at Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland, then was sent overseas on the troop ship George Washington.

She was initially stationed at Camp Phillip Morris in La Havre, France. That military base and about nine others were called cigarette camps and served as staging areas for new troops arriving in Europe. Incoming units first passed through the staging camps on their way to the assembly areas and then to the front.

Soon Bea was sent to Frankfurt, Germany, where she nursed wounded American soldiers back to health at the Army’s 97th General Hospital. During her time there she became romantically involved with an officer named Marty. He wanted to marry her and proposed to Bea in late 1946. Before she gave him an answer, Marty was sent back to the states and was apparently discharged. My mother, however, remained in Germany at the hospital in Frankfurt after the war ended to fulfill her army obligation.

She remained there until sometime after the Christmas of 1946. Based on a letter she sent to Margaret on December 19 of that year, she expected to come back to the states before long. Marty was already back in Philadelphia waiting for an answer on his marriage proposal. In her fluid script my mother related to Margaret her need to delay her answer to him until she arrived home because her life at the hospital was too chaotic for her to think through the implications of such a momentous decision. Margaret responded with her own letter, mentioning that she had visited with Marty in Philadelphia recently and felt he was a good match for Bea.

Nowhere in Bea’s five-page December 1946 letter to Margaret was there any mention of Dick. She talked about getting ready for the upcoming holidays, Marty’s proposal, how she felt stifled by army bureaucracy, and other things. There wasn’t even any hint of Dick or any sense of emotional detachment about Marty. But there was also no gushing about her love for Marty; her letter had the emotional tone of someone who wanted to postpone a decision about buying a refrigerator.

My parents never talked much about that period and thus events and timing at that point remained fuzzy. They never brought up the mysterious Marty. I found out about him from old photos and letters given to me as an adult. My mother did tell me on several occasions while I was growing up that Dick was a patient of hers at the hospital in Frankfurt. This had to be around the same time Marty was cooling his heels back in the City of Brotherly Love. As she bustled about the army hospital in Frankfurt caring for injured soldiers, it seems she nursed Dick back to health from wounds he received after parachuting into Normandy as a private and getting shot in the leg.

The fact that my mother does not mention him in her December letter to her sister suggests several possibilities. Perhaps she did not meet the man until after she sent the letter to Margaret, or if she had, he wasn’t emotionally important enough to her then to mention. On the other hand, maybe he was indeed important and she was conflicted about it in regard to her relationship with Marty.

I have always leaned toward the latter option where Dick managed to somehow woo her away. He might have done this either after Marty sailed for home or perhaps before while he was still in the Frankfurt hospital seeing Bea in the evenings—after she changed Dick’s bandages during the day. It was all quite unclear as to who was dressing or undressing whom at the time.

One thing was quite clear though. As a trained Registered Nurse, my mother was an officer when she met Dick. Except in special cases, fraternization between an officer and an enlisted soldier was against regulations. That wasn’t sufficient to discourage their relationship from escalating, though. It obviously went well beyond the strictly proper nurse-patient realm to mutual care-giving in the biblical sense. Marty was an officer like Bea and fraternization between them was acceptable. Nevertheless, despite his low rank Dick’s salute must have been more impressive to Bea.

Apparently Dick was able to charm the pants off her to the point where she became pregnant with me within two months of her December letter to her sister Margaret. And there is no doubt that Dick had a hand in the matter, so to speak. Yet I’ve never been quite sure how he managed to pull it off since the mechanics must have been a challenge. I have always wondered if he was able to impregnate her while his battle-mangled leg was hanging up in the air in traction with a sling held under the delicate tension of cables and counter-weights, or if he accomplished it while limping along with just a cast and crutches after he was discharged from the hospital. Regardless, he was a highly trained, determined American soldier used to undertaking complicated undercover missions in Europe.

In any case, within about a month and a half after her Christmas letter to Margaret, Bea knew for certain that the cramps in her belly weren’t from the Army hospital food. And once Dick and Bea both realized she was pregnant, word must have gotten back to Marty and he dropped off the radar faster than a paratrooper without a chute over Omaha Beach.

The army probably considered the little entanglement that Dick and Bea managed to get themselves into more irregular than a barbed wire perimeter around a Nazi bunker, because they soon left Germany and were shipped back to the states separately. They landed at the Greensboro army base in North Carolina where they reunited, then sprinted down the street to a Justice of the Peace for a quick marriage ceremony as soon as the ink was dry on their discharge papers. At the time they married, Bea was twenty-three and my birth certificate states Dick was twenty-four. US census records and my brother Michael’s birth certificate, however, indicate that Dick was nearly a year younger than Bea. I still don’t think that discrepancy in my birth certificate proves I may be related to the Roswell aliens, even if you count the fact that I dressed like a Martian once for a Halloween party when I was ten.

In the single black-and-white photo of my parents that survived from their marriage day they are smiling broadly—no doubt deliriously happy in anticipation of living the splendid American dream life they expected with the little bundle of wonder that was gestating quietly a few inches away from the camera lens. That was me. You can’t see even a hint of my presence in the photo though, because my mother is holding a nice bunch of flowers in her lap.

My parents spent most of the next six months between their wedding and my arrival date traveling the back roads of America. I don’t know all the places they traveled to up until my birthday, but after their brief marriage ceremony they went from North Carolina to Pennsylvania to visit Bea’s brother and sisters. Afterward they went to Chicago to meet Dick’s family then hit the road west and wound up in Renton two months before my birth. They lived in an apartment there until it was time for my arrival in early November of 1947.

How I acquired my names was revealed in another letter my mother wrote to Margaret, this time from the hospital on the day I was born. There my mother mentions that they were going to make my middle name Richard in honor of his contributions to the family cause. They had a change of heart at the last minute and for some obscure reason selected a different middle name for