Lessons for a Lifetime

© 2012 by [Pen Name]. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or

transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 5/24/2012

ISBN: 978-1-4685-9527-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4685-9526-0 (e)

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Columbia Philharmonic Gives Thrilling Concert courtesy of The State newspaper.

Contents

Acknowledgements

Preface

A Wild Beginning

From Country To City

A New Dad For The Future

A Thorough Introduction To The Arts

It’s Tough To Grow Up

Back On The Ranch

The Beautiful Metamorphosis

Living It Up And Down

Getting To Know My Real Dad

A Happy Senior Year At John Marshall-Almost!

Off To College

Studies

Off To The Navy Air Corp.

Flight School

Japan

Back To Abnormal

Making It Happen

A Honeymoon And A Half

A Pause In The Plan

Moving In-Barely

A New Life

The Real Beginning

Adventure With A Family

1950-The Amazing Year

Moving On In The Lord

A Different World

New Plans For Our Future

Indiana University-Hooray

Education Phase Two

Figure This One Out

Florida State University-Impressive From A To Z

The Family Grows

Back To Reality

On With The Show

The Final Lap

Family Life As I Had Dreamed

What Does It Take?

More Fun And Surprises

National Music Camp, Here We Come

Tuffy’s Turn Around

Covenant College Here We Come

Intermission

A Big Offer And A Bigger Trip

A Hard Job On A Soft Beach

Fun Living On The Beach

Goodbye To The Beach, And Children

Love And Faith Show Their Power!

Shell Haven In The Jungle

The Latter Days, Personally-Not Spiritually

Interlude

How About A Little Back Packin’

The Top Of The Ladder Or What?

An Unusual Break On Another Continent

A Spiritual Preparation And A New Mission

John’s Back, Or Maybe It’s His Front

A Mountain Top Experience In Malawi

A Few After Thoughts

The Trip Of A Lifetime

Serengeti Here We Come

Abc And What We Learned

A Major Work In A Nutshell

The Calm Before The Storm

The Balances In Life And A Final Decision

The Last Chapter

A Closing Thought And Dedication

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to my grandson, Dan Canfield, who typed my handwritten text, helped with the edits, photos and organized the books’ publication. And to my son, David Canfield, whose excellent editing was much appreciated.

Preface

Why would anyone want to write their own biography? The thought never entered my mind, until recently. My life had always been very active and although my profession as a music educator was rather calm, I also happened to be the owner of an active adventure system that lived in my body and which never took a break during my entire life.

Not long ago my four adult children asked me to write a book about all the hidden adventures of my life. They had heard very little about them as children since they were not children stories. Instead, I told them Patsy and Browny tales which I made up as I went along. Years later, as adults, they somehow became interested in hearing the whole story about the means, methods and drama concerning the many various ways in which I nearly lost my life! I suppose it was quite amusing to them also, to realize that at least fifteen different times all four of them had come very close to being non-existent. Frankly, I was not exactly proud of the number. In fact, I was frightened by it! I had tried very hard in earlier years to rid the traumatic incidents from my mind, which I did accomplish later in life. With my fears behind me, I felt quite differently about the requested project and realized the episodes could be meaningful to my family. I decided to honor their request. After writing the book, I realized it might be interesting to anyone who loves adventure!

*Occasionally, you will see the letters TCBI, which is an abbreviation for This Could a Been It! These were the times during which I came close to losing my life. They each carry a number for reference.

It’s Hard to Grow Up, Isn’t It Momma?

A Wild Beginning

I was born like most children-at a very early age! Dad, Mom, Brother Bill and I lived on a small farm in Sidney, Ohio. My dad ran a baby chick hatchery in a large brick building on our farm property. It contained the chick incubators that were invented by my step-grandfather Samuel B. Smith, who also invented the variable pitch airplane propeller.

I attended first grade in a school offering first through third grade. There were two teachers handling three grades in two school rooms. It was calm, yet an exciting, experience for a young child. The Bible was read daily and the teachers loved every one of us, even though we did not always deserve their love. Besides the class materials, we were also taught many of the basic elements of a good life, such as responsibility, effort, accomplishment and morality.

We ate lunch in the classrooms, at our own desks, bringing our lunch from home in lunch pails. We always ate whatever our mothers jammed into them. I remember the day a mouse ran out of my lunch pail when I opened it. Immediately, the creature jumped off my desk, onto the floor, shot between a girl’s legs, over a stack of books, and was neatly grabbed in one hand by Bessie Boe (our softball team’s shortstop)-who quietly walked to the window and gently dropped the mouse to the ground outside. Most of the class did not even know what had happened and would not have reacted much if they had seen it all. That was only one of the many incidents that showed me the difference between country kids and the city kids I came to know later. Mom was shocked, however, when I told her what happened at school. She responded by asking me how much of the sandwich the mouse had eaten. I was also momentarily nauseous. I had never thought to look at the sandwich before I ate it! I told her I did dump all of the little rat balls left in my lunch pail into the school trash basket. Yuck!

In 1930, Sidney, Ohio was a very small, quaint and quiet town. Our home was about a half mile north of town. My mother, Elizabeth, was a horse woman and she owned several beautiful animals she had trained. At four and six, Bill and I didn’t do much horseback riding but Mom used Midge, her favorite horse, to pull a cute four-seat wagon to town for shopping. She took Bill and I with her when she could. We loved it! Especially the ice-cream cones we got at Bossies when we had been good boys.

In the winter, we loved Mom’s other pride and joy, the one horse open sleigh with Midge’s jingle bells ringing happily as we slid over the shiny snow, especially at night when the moon was full. Mom was great with horses. Years later she professionally raced Surreys at the Pompano Beach Horse Race Track in Florida.

My Dad had a 1920 Model T Ford, which he had to crank to start. Sometimes, it would not start after several cranks and Dad would swear. Bill and I would cover our ears.

Bill and I also loved to play with the baby chicks from the hatchery. As they grew, a couple became our pets. One Saturday at noon when they were full-grown, Dad called us to the hen house, and said, Watch closely. Before our very eyes, he cut off one of their heads-we screamed, No! No! No! He then hung the chicken’s feet on a wire and let it bleed to death upside-down as it pitifully flapped its wings without a head (Dad didn’t know it was one of our pets). We screamed some more when he threw it into a pot of boiling water. We were still screaming when he said, Now we can pull out the feathers and cook it for supper.

Eat it? After this, Bill and I would not eat chicken for years.

TCBI No. 1

The next day, in order to save our other pet chicken, we secretly threw it into the water cistern so Dad would not find and kill it, like the other one. What we did not know was that a chicken is not like a duck and it soon drowned. We cried again. We were both spanked for this act of love and were sent to our bedroom by Dad without lunch as punishment.

From our bedroom we heard Mom and Dad having an awful argument. You can probably guess about what. We cried a third time. Then we heard Mom leave the house. Not long after, we heard thumping footsteps coming toward our room. The door banged open, and Dad quickly grabbed one of us under each arm and ran quickly to the basement. We thought, Now what did we do?

He planted us under the basement stairs and said, Sit down and hold tight to me. There’s a tornado headed right toward our house.

Almost immediately, we heard the terrible roar and Bill cried. We were all shaking physically and mentally. I screamed to Dad, What’s a tornado?

Dad said, It’s a bad strong wind that goes in a circle.

(Mom had gone to town by then.)

Bill and I cried because the whole house began shaking. Even our basement was vibrating. We heard dishes crash, walls creak, and we could not hear each other’s voices above the roar of the wind. Even Dad looked afraid! After a few horrifying minutes, which seemed like forever, all became quiet. We stared silently at each other for a short while. Bill was still crying and Dad was still staring glassy eyed at me. Then Dad made the first move. He stood and led us slowly upstairs to the kitchen.

The house was still on its foundation, but sustained much damage. Windows and doors had blown out. Wall hangings had crashed down. Broken dishes and more had fallen from the cupboards and were all over the kitchen floor. It was a real mess. Otherwise it looked sort of like our house.

We looked outside and we were surprised to see our sandbox exactly as we had left it; toys, sand and even the sandcastle we had made that morning were all exactly as we had left them before we put the chicken in the cistern. Amazing! There was only one problem. The sandbox was now sitting in the middle of the driveway on the opposite side of the house from its original location! Our house was only one story and apparently the tornado had skipped over our house, sparing our lives, while lifting the sandbox and setting it down gently on the other side of the house. Even Dad could not explain that one. Mom came home from town later and was also amazed. We were all happy and thankful we were alive and unhurt.

The town was not hit by the tornado, but there was much damage in other homes nearby. No one would believe what we told them about the sandbox even when they saw it, and we did not care because the one thing we knew for sure was the grassless soil in the backyard was where the sandbox had been sitting for the last two years.

From Country to City

I was still six years old and Bill was four, when our country living ended abruptly. Mom, Bill and I moved to the Westside of Cleveland, Ohio without Dad. He had become enamored with Blanche, his secretary at the chick hatchery, and left my Mom, Bill, and me-and married her. Mom chose Cleveland because her dad, mom, sister, and family lived there.

Without Dad, however, it was tough going in every way for the three of us. Mom had been an elementary school teacher prior to her marriage. She could not find a teaching position in Cleveland, but she was able to find a job at the Brown Fence and Wire Company on the eastside of Cleveland even though the Great Depression was still in full swing. Mom drove a worn out Buick donated by her Dad, a twelve mile round trip, five days a week. Until Bill began school, Mom left him with her sister, Elsie Ann Kaiser, during the day and restricted me to the house after school until she returned from work. Boring? Yep! I attended Hayes Elementary School, which we soon found to be of high quality.

Bill and I were very close brothers in our youthful days. We shared everything, including bedroom, food, toys, money (which we seldom had) and time (of which we had plenty). When not helping Mom, we spent time collecting bottle caps from every kind of glass bottle that we could find lying around the streets or in trash piles behind houses. We had to be careful though, because some people were mean and would yell at us and sometimes throw things at us. We also liked to collect stamps we found on mail in trash cans. It was fun for us to scrounge in garbage cans and dumpsters, occasionally finding some neat toy, stuffed animal, or just plain interesting junk. We had to have Mom’s permission, however, to keep anything we found in a trash can or dumpster. During this period of our life, our friends were few.

Hayes Elementary School was tough but very good. They did not read the Bible there, and if you messed up, it was a paddle in the Principal’s office. Brother and I behaved well. We knew what a paddle felt like!

My first and second grade teachers were Miss Faught and Miss Cash, two lovely ladies who taught first and second grade together. They were absolutely terrific in the motivation and all around development of their students. All of us loved school at that level. With only these two teachers as directors, the first and second grades put together a giant circus parade where we all dressed like animals, clowns, and circus personal, including musicians playing toy instruments. We marched proudly around the whole school ground several times during class time. The entire school was let out for one hour, by the principal, to watch and listen to us sing, march, and perform our circus acts. The students loved it and applauded continuously as we performed.

Many times, I have thought back to that special event. Personally I feel the event, as well as other well engineered projects at this grade level, were major influences on me during my entire school education. You see, for perhaps the first time in our lives, we had performed, and had felt successful in the venture, both personally and corporately. It showed each one of us we could be recognized positively for successfully producing a product after much dedicated effort, which many people enjoyed! It did wonders for our self-confidence. Unfortunately, such teaching and learning structures and techniques are not that common in most schools today.

Miss Faught and Miss Cash certainly influenced my teaching methods for fifty years. As a future teacher, my direction in life was determined in first through third grade.

The third grade writing and music teacher, Miss Sibly (who was of the same batch of educational dough) took our entire class in a school bus to Severance Hall to hear a concert by the Cleveland Orchestra. I sat transfixed in my seat. I knew then that I wanted to be a musician, and shortly after that concert experience, I entered the elementary school orchestra training program, on violin. Miss Sibly was the director. My life was changing.

During the Depression, we ate lots of potatoes, beans, and cabbage, of which we became very tired, yet we were happy to have something to eat. Then Mom found a farmer who traded home-raised produce for baby chicks that Mom got inexpensively through Brown Fence and Wire Co. We ate much better after that.

TCBI No. 2

During this era, my Dad’s mom, Nie, gave me my first bike. I learned to ride it in two days. The second day, I was coming out of our driveway and was distracted by a monkey grinder (a man with a music box and live monkey who did tricks for pennies). I cycled into the street and ran into the side of a car going thirty miles per hour. I totaled the new bike, dented the car and badly dented me. If I had hit the car one second earlier, the car’s left front wheel would have run completely over my body. Mom and Grandmother weren’t very nice to each other for some time.

Mom had it tough when Bill, me, or both had mumps, chicken pox, whooping cough, etc. but Mom managed. She did have a few friends who helped her when she needed them, but Mom had the competence to handle about any situation that came up. The medical doctors in those days came to the house and charged $5.00 a visit for unlimited time. Even as a child, I remember how friendly and caring they were. At that time in history, doctors were respected highly for their service to humanity (and were dedicated to their profession). Money was secondary. Today it seems the priorities have reversed. Today house calls are almost unheard of. It is sad!

A New Dad for the Future

Mom had a boyfriend who lived next door when we first moved to Cleveland. He was only twenty years old in 1930 and Mom was twenty-nine. His name was Roy McGregor. He was a nice young man who at the time had few minutes to spare outside his job at Western Auto Store in Lakewood. Those minutes he spent with Mom. It was several years before he and my mother married.

When they did marry, we found it difficult to connect to a young man named Roy as dad or even as a dad figure. It was also hard because Mom had been our guide for so many years and because Roy looked and acted his age. After we became older, we grew to love him as a father and appreciated all that he and Mom sacrificed for us as children. He was a man of high character.

Although Mom and Dad both had high moral values, they did not become Christians until many years later in the late 1950’s. They also gave us a beautiful sister named Marcia when I was fifteen and Bill was thirteen.

A Thorough Introduction to the Arts

Enter Grandmother (Edith Canfield Smith, my biological paternal grandmother)-our mediator to culture and the arts. When I was two years old, I called her Nie because I could not pronounce any of the above. It caught on in the family and from then on Nie was her name! Only strangers called her Edith.

For Bill and me, Nie opened the world of culture and arts by showing us amazing things in the various art arenas. Having seen and heard the wonderful Cleveland orchestra perform recently, I was ready for more. Nie, not the staff, did the explaining of various exhibits to Bill and me at the Cleveland Museum of Arts. Nie also opened doors for us in music, art, drama, sports and public events like the Barnum and Bailey Circus, the Cleveland Air Races, the 1933 World Fair in Cleveland, and the 1936 World Fair in Chicago. She not only took us to hear the Cleveland Orchestra and opera, but to recitals of music by Heifetz, Horowitz, Rachmaninoff, Kreisler, the Budapest String Quartet, etc.

However, Bill and I were living a double life: at home we led a dull and isolated life with few friends and little stimulus of culture. Then, once a month or so, we entered the magical world of the cultural arts. It was a contrast in the extreme between the two environments and as boys of nine and seven, we were completely confused as to who on earth we really were. It seemed that what we learned in each of the arts was diametrically opposed to our mundane existence.

Bill and I had both developed a lack of self-confidence from our restricted lifestyle at home. Mom recognized this and thus was happy to have Nie show us the world since she could not afford to do so. She suggested to Nie that since I was doing well on the violin, in the school music program, private violin lessons might be beneficial. Nie agreed and I began lessons with Laurence Kurkdjie, a fine violinist from Czechoslovakia. He had a fine Prescenda violin that he played beautifully. Shortly thereafter, Bill began the piano with an excellent teacher, Graham Marsh, and played it well for most of his life. I studied with Mr. Kurkdjie for about seven years.

Although I did not like to practice, I learned much from him. He was very strict. I wanted to please him at my lessons because when I did well he would listen to the pieces that I had composed for violin and would make good suggestions for their improvement. I sincerely believe playing the violin helped my self-confidence improve. I was distraught when Mr. Kurkdjie moved to California and played in The Jack Benny and other Hollywood shows.

For some time after that, I studied with several different violin teachers, none of whom, for various reasons, taught me for more than a year. Then, I was most fortunate to have the opportunity to study with Charles Rycklich, a well known violin master who had at that time six of his former students performing in the Cleveland Orchestra. The discipline was tough; the preparation before each lesson included a half hour of copy work at a desk, in his studio, writing his fingerings and bowings onto my music for following practice and lessons. I knew from the first lesson, he was a master of his trade, unlike anyone else I had seen or heard. Fortunately, Mr. Rycklich was patient and kind. Unfortunately, I only had two years of study with him before I graduated from high school. In that time, however, I learned a great deal about violin technique.

It’s Tough to Grow Up

With a complex beginning in life and a restricted lifestyle, several basic doors had to be opened in our lives; girls, death, money, education and adventure. Bill and I had tasted religion and condemned it as phony. We were told in Sunday school that the only hell there was existed on earth and heaven is for all good little boys and girls!

So I tried girls first. One day, I asked Betty, the cute girl whose desk was in front of mine, if I could walk her home from school. She said Okay, and on the way we decided to climb this tree in a vacant lot. I, having been taught manners from age two, invited her to climb first, which she did. I was shocked however to find out that girls were different than boys when they don’t wear underpants!

From then on, I paid more attention to what Mom had said about girls. She answered all my new questions about sex and how to treat girls, of all kinds and ages. Roy was very shy about giving us advice on most subjects, but as we matured through adolescence and our stepfather matured as a father (he matured more rapidly than we did), he became more helpful in guiding our personal and social activities and we began to trust his wisdom. At one time we considered adopting the name McGregor instead of Canfield but our grandmother Nie (Edith Smith) convinced us we should carry the Canfield name down through history.

Death struck heavily in our family in 1933. Both of our mother’s parents, George and Elsie Kimberly, and our grandfather Dr. Samuel Smith (Nie’s second husband) died in that year. Bill and I were fond of all three and saw them weaken one at a time.

I remember near the end of his life, Grandpa Smith took me for a short walk from his home at 48 Colver Road in Rocky River, Ohio (a suburb of West Cleveland). We walked to the cliff near his house overlooking Lake Erie. After a long silence, Grandpa looked at me and said, Jack, very soon I’m going to take a long trip.

I responded, Can I come with you?

No, Jack. Where I am going, you cannot come. He said.

I said I was sorry I could not go along. Several weeks later he died from spinal cancer.

Back on the Ranch

Our stepdad, Roy, had worked hard and with his good memory and effort soon became the manager of the Western Auto Store, where he had worked since he was a young man. In fact, for a while, I worked there part time in my early teens. The staff would call me Jack McGregor, and after awhile, it seemed quite normal. Learning about cars and their parts was important, but learning the work ethic was more so. Having some money to spend was also great.

In fact, at ten and twelve, Bill and I began to come out of our shells. We moved to our fourth rental house near the Westside ice rink and for our two year stay, we both learned to ice-skate, a sport we both enjoyed greatly during our youth. Bill won several ice-skate races in his age group.

Many things happened in our new house. We had a radio that finally worked, and a single phone line. At our other homes we had one to three other families on the same phone line. Some talked forever. My school was Lakewood Jr. High School, a big come down from Hayes Elementary School.

Our home also had an icebox and our ice was supplied by a man with a wagon full of ice blocks, which were covered by a canvas. The wagon was drawn by a horse. As he came by each morning before school, he would call out, Ice man! In fact, he half sang it. If we needed ice, I was the one assigned the job of running out with the amount needed, which the iceman would then carry to the house on his padded shoulder. He then carefully stored the ice in the lower compartment. We kept the food in the top part. Mom generally got ice two or three times a week. It cost fifteen to twenty-five cents a load from fifteen to twenty-five pounds. He could supply larger blocks but our ice box was small.

While we lived at house number four we saw a neighborhood home burn to the ground-sparks from a nearby trash fire were responsible. We did not have city fire equipment either as we have today. It was also where our neighbor Emilie, a cute eight year old girl, was killed by a car in front of our house. Mom said I did not talk to anyone for four days after the accident. I do not remember that, but from then on it was always look both ways to cross a street! By then my mind had a pretty good understanding of the reality of death.

In the same month, Roy’s dad, left