My Early Life

(Not exactly a roving commission)

 

When I was five we lived at 22 Wellesley Drive in Pleasant Ridge, Michigan. A girl my age named Nina Partridge lived across the street and Nina and I used to wander up and down the street together and play in the playground at the end of the street. Nina was a friend for a lot of years — not a girlfriend — just a friend, though the mailman once encouraged me to kiss her, and I thought that kiss (on her cheek) was nice. We moved from Pleasant Ridge to Ferndale, the city on Pleasant Ridge's southern border a couple years later, but Pleasant Ridge and Ferndale were in the same school district so Nina was in my classes in high school. Here's a picture of the two of us at a sea scout function of some sort. We probably were in our second year of high school when this picture was made.

I got to know the Wellesley Drive milkman pretty well, and I'd ride up the street with him in his cart, pulled by a horse who knew exactly where to make the stops. Milk came in glass bottles with cardboard caps, and the milkman would leave the bottles on your front step. The milk wasn't homogenized, so the cream rose to the top. On cold days, if you didn't get your milk inside pretty early you'd find a column of frozen cream with the cap on top of it, rising an inch or so above the tops of the bottles.

In those days you could hop onto a streetcar (one came by about every ten minutes) and rattle and jerk on down to the heart of Detroit — a twenty to thirty minute ride from Ferndale or Pleasant Ridge. You could even wander the streets of Detroit at night without being mugged, stabbed, or shot. Every month or so I'd go downtown with my mother to shop at Hudson's department store. According to HistoricDetroit.org, Hudson's had 2,124,316 square feet of space, which made it the second largest department store in the U.S., just a tad smaller than Macy's in New York. Mom would buy something and pay the clerk. The clerk would put the money and the sales slip into a cylinder, pop it into a pneumatic tube, and a minute later the cylinder would pop back out of the tube with a receipt and mother's change. Instead of ear-splitting announcements over loudspeaker systems, the store had a signaling system of soft, bell-like notes, which actually were pleasant to listen to. On one of Hudson's 32 floors was a quiet lunchroom with silver-plated utensils and white cloth tablecloths and napkins where we'd have lunch. After lunch we'd hop back onto a streetcar and rattle on home. Next day a Hudson's truck would stop in front of the house and deliver all the stuff.

We moved to 518 W. Woodland, in Ferndale when I was eight, and I started going to Roosevelt school. The next several years are mostly blanks in my memory though I remember recess periods in summer where the playground would be rimmed with marbles games. You could wander the perimeter of the playground and pick your game. I was good at it, won a lot of marbles, and I still have a good feeling about that school. But Roosevelt didn't have an eighth grade, so for eighth grade I went to Coolidge school in Pleasant Ridge. According to my reading of history Cal was an effective president, but the school in Pleasant Ridge named after him left a lot to be desired. I remember an English class where standard classroom decorum was pandemonium. The elderly lady who supposedly was teaching the class had lost control, and the administration was clueless. In the end the incompetent principal decided my class was too rowdy to be permitted a graduation ceremony, which probably was true, so we just slipped away quietly into the night.

When I was twelve I bought a Detroit News route and started delivering the paper every day after school and on Saturday and Sunday. Autumn's house was on my route, but her family was down south with the army. Every once in a while over the next three years I'd get called out in the middle of the night to deliver an "extra." Talk about breaking news! I'd go downtown, get my papers, ride back to my route and ride down the streets shouting: "Extra! Extra! Read all about it! Marines land on Okinawa!" Porch lights would pop on and people in pajamas and bathrobes would pop out. It was an education, and by the time the war ended I was pretty much current on current affairs.

I got my learner's permit as soon as I was thirteen and my dad taught me to drive. He was a good teacher, and on my fourteenth birthday I got my driver's license. The next summer I sold my paper route and got a job at the Detroit Zoo. I worked in a refreshment stand most of that summer, but toward the end of the summer I was called into the office and given a new job driving a truck and delivering stuff to the stands. I was in heaven. The pickups we were using were in pretty bad shape, but they had one advantage: To get to the stands you'd have to drive through crowds of people who often weren't paying attention to what was going on behind them. You could part a crowd by coming up behind and slamming on the brakes. The truck would make a loud shrieking and banging sound and the crowd would separate without delay. Next year we got new, quiet trucks that slowed deliveries a bit.

There were two of us doing deliveries and at the end of each day one of us would be detailed to do last-minute rounds and make sure all eight refreshment stands were locked. One morning one of the stands turned up unlocked. My partner had been the checker the night before. He was hauled into the office and fired. It was a message I couldn't miss, and after that I was extra careful to make sure all the stands were locked.

There were no credit cards in those days, so if you worked in a stand you were handling cash all the time. At the end of the day the stand manager would take the cash and the register tape out of the register, put everything into a locked bag, and deliver it to accounting. The accounting clerk would count the money and check the total against the register tape. If the cash was short the stand manager had to make it up out of pocket. If the cash was over, the Zoo just copped the difference. During the day, if nobody was watching, a worker might make a few sales without ringing them up. At the end of the day he could sneak the cash from his unrecorded sales out of the register and pocket it. To prevent that the Zoo had some "spotters" who'd sit on a bench and watch a stand for a while to make sure everything was being rung up. If a spotter spotted what he thought was a problem, he'd call it in and the zoo would do a "black bag" surprise inspection on the stand. Accounting would hand one of the delivery guys a (black) lock bag. The delivery guy would have to go to the stand, shut the place down temporarily, pull the cash and the tape from the register, lock the cash and the tape into the bag, give the manager a new bag with change and a clean tape, and take the black bag back to accounting. If there was noticeably more cash in the bag than the total on the tape the stand manager would be in trouble. For some reason the delivery guy who always got that job was ME. I soon was known as "Black Bag Louie."

The driving job had another feature I didn't like. As the summer wore on and the crowds fell off the zoo would begin gradual layoffs in the stands. For some reason I always was the guy who got sent out to bring in the person being laid off. When I'd show up at a stand and call for somebody to come back to the office with me everybody knew what was going on. We'd always ride back in a black silence.

During most of this period I was going with a girl named Jean Peck ("Metamorphosis"). She lived on a pleasant street not far from the Zoo. One day I was in one of the refreshment stands and needed to call the office. When I put the phone to my ear I could hear a discussion going on between two girls. After a minute of listening I realized I knew both girls and that one of them was Jean. Evidently the phone company was doing maintenance and the maintenance guy had crossed some wires. I never told Jean about that, but on the other hand I didn't hear anything incriminating, so my conscience is clear.

During my third year the zoo came up with a new product to sell: guidebooks! And on certain days I was assigned to sell them. I'd start at the mini-train station near the zoo entrance, walk down the cars while they were loading, yelling, "Guidebooks. Guidebooks. Get your guidebooks here." Once the train was ready to roll I'd hop on the conductor's stool at the back and ride to the end of the line. When the train started loading for the return trip I'd do the performance all over again. On some days I'd leave the train and go to the Joe Mendi Theater, where Joe Mendi, the chimpanzee, was performing. I'd wait until all the patrons were in their seats, get out in front of them and yell, "Get your guidebooks here. You can't tell the monkeys from the people without a guidebook." There were a few other guys selling guidebooks but I set guidebook sales records almost every week.

High school was a gas. I did well in algebra and English; not so well in Latin. One day in English class Jean was sitting behind me next to a couple of her girlfriends. I turned around and told her a joke and she started cracking up. In a loud, sharp voice Miss Gillies shouted, "Russell Lewis, are you inciting Miss Peck to hilarity?" The crowd roared, and there was no way to duck so I had to confess.

I had two semesters of Latin. Didn't do too well in the first semester, but in the second we had a final assignment that required writing something about Rome. I ginned up a short story about a Roman soldier that Miss Duddles swooned over, so even though I didn't know much Latin I got a good grade.

My most worthwhile class at Lincoln High was English Composition, taught by Elsie Harper. I wish I could see Mrs. Harper again and give her a hug and a kiss, but at the time her class was pure agony. My mother knew Elsie and had a sit-down with her one day where Elsie told mother that though I had lots of potential I was an "intellectual bum." Looking back I'd have to agree that was a pretty accurate assessment. Elsie was like Otto Brown (see below), and she wouldn't take any crap. I remember turning in a composition that included a stupid error. She marked it up. I told her I'd fix the problem and bring it back next day. She gave me a choice: I could go to the typing room and fix the problem or I could turn it in the next day and be graded down. I went to the typing room and suffered through an hour of humiliation from the girls who were learning typing. But Elsie taught me to write. May God bless her.

Lincoln High had a rifle team, and I joined it during my sophomore semester. (Can you imagine such a thing? A high school rifle team? The horror! The horror!) I was good at it and I lettered in it. We'd occasionally make trips to competitions around the state, and after one of those competitions I was Michigan's Junior Smallbore Rifle Champion. I may still have a newspaper clipping about that somewhere that my folks cut out of the Detroit News. Didn't last long though. About two months later somebody beat me in another competition and I became a has-been.

Lincoln High had two choirs: Choir A and choir B. To make it into Choir A you had to try out in front of its choir master, Otto Brown. It wasn't easy to get in, but I made it. Otto didn't take any crap from anybody and if somebody in the choir didn't pay attention he'd instantly kick that person out. Sometimes a parent would come and plead with Otto to let the kid back in, but usually the parent could forget about it. More than once I saw Otto break a baton, whacking it on his music stand. But it was a very good a capella choir, and we used to go various places in the state to perform. The high point of the year was the Christmas concert. We always did the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel's Messiah, and the Choir A alumni in the audience were invited to come up and join the choir. I still remember the baritone from that music, though my voice can't handle it any longer.

First thing in the morning we'd doze through some boring announcements over the high school P.A. system. Somehow in my senior year, though I don't remember how, I wrangled the job of putting on the morning announcements. I was given a lot of freedom in what I was allowed to put on as long as I included the required announcements. I started cooking up skits, got a few of my friends to play parts, and had a ball. We'd do the skit, or read something weird, then do the announcements. It was a success. People were no longer falling asleep. One skit I did was a takeoff on a popular radio program: "Little Theater Off Times Square." The radio program would start out with traffic sounds as you were being whisked through New York's streets to the theater. Jean's dad had a system that would let him record sound — on a vinyl disk of course. Byron, my best friend (and later best man at my wedding) and I went over to Jean's house and talked her dad into recording us starting Byron's car, my (folks') car, and then driving off. I used that recording later in the week to start the skit. Most of the time Byron and I would do what later could be considered a Bob and Ray routine (Google it). But toward the end of that year Jean and I broke up and I poured out some bitter sarcasm in a couple skits that only she and I and a couple other people, like Byron, knew was directed toward her. I hurt her; she called me out on it; and I still regret having done it. But it made me realize that "power corrupts" doesn't apply just to politicians. It applies to you and me too!

During that last winter (we graduated in January, 1948) Byron and I and a couple other guys were beating around in Byron's car one evening when we stopped at a little pizza place in Highland Park. The joint was empty and the owner, Mario, made us a couple pizzas that were very good. A week or so later we came back on a snowy, cold night and saw Mario's car sitting out front with a flat tire. We were expert tire changers since Byron's car got somewhere around 100 miles per flat. We hopped out, opened Mario's trunk and changed his tire. From then on we were Mario's boys. We'd chat with him in the kitchen while he sipped Dago Red wine and make us the best pizzas I've had in my life. In all our visits we never saw another soul in the place. I've always suspected Mario was into something that didn't involve pizza and the pizza was a sideline, maybe a front.

My final image from high school is from a Choir A rehearsal for our graduation ceremony. Among the numbers we were going to do was a segment for the girls alone and a segment for the boys alone. I remember standing on the stage singing with the boys while the girls sat below us in the front row of the auditorium. In those days girls wore dresses, and they were sitting there flipping their legs back and forth. They'd cross their right legs over their left, then in a couple seconds reverse the flip. Otto couldn't see it happening because he was facing us, but it was really hard to keep singing. I know it sounds innocuous, but it was probably the sexiest thing I remember from high school. Don't really know why.