Growing Up Poor; the Seven Year Itch; Sulfa and the Violin; the Truck Accident That Saved Me
Posted: Friday, July 04, 2008
by Marty RicKard
I was born in 1937, the day after Christmas, in Grinnell, Iowa, when, in a severe blizzard, my mother, a Protestant, entered a Catholic hospital to relieve herself of my laborious burden and begin her life of distress.
We were poor.
Mother sometimes put two of us in one diaper-to make ends meet.
There were so many kids in my family that I didn't sleep alone until I was married.
Army surplus bunk beds and cots in the living room permitted eight of us to live in a ramshackle, two-bedroom rented home.
The heating system was a pot-bellied stove in the dining area, and we carried our water from a well that was just south of Duluth .
The bathroom was breezy and smelly-but was located far enough from the house that it seldom bothered.
The list of things we didn't have was long, but what we did have were parents-parents who practiced tough love long before it became fashionable.
Mom, though uneducated at the time, had a brilliant mind and encouraged our cerebral growth to the point of what I considered intellectual abuse. (She graduated from college after we left the nest.)
Dad, the smartest man I ever knew, had a crisp sense of humor and the fastest belt in the west.
We had no television and no radio. Since we couldn't afford professional entertainment, we fought.
One thing I can honestly say, however, to our credit, is that we never fought about anything significant.
I can visualize it now:
"I saw a butterfly today," my sister cooed.
"You did not," I replied.
"I did too."
"You did not."
"I did too."
"You did not."
"Did too."
"Did not."
"Did."
"Not."
"D."
"N."
Very softly now, since the person who got in the last word won.
"d."
"n."
WHAP!!!
She hit me in the mouth.
WHAP!!!
I responded.
She grabbed a rake. I retreated to the brick pile. Then mother appeared and came down on us like hot gravy on biscuits.
It's no wonder I wasn't afraid when I went into the Army. After fighting my sisters, hand-to-hand combat was a vacation.
Some memorable highlights of my childhood were:
1. The showers.
2. The sulfa.
3. The seven-year itch.
4. The violin.
These are all interrelated; let me explain.
Not having modern bathing facilities, we kids were prone to wash both as infrequently and as tiny a portion of skin as we could.
This hygienic deprivation contributed to us catching the finest case of itch of any family on record in the Midwest .
The doctor fed us egg-sized sulfa pills, and also prescribed a horrible, mustard-colored sulfa salve, which we virtually lived in for weeks. By comparison, rotten eggs smelled like fresh baked bread.
He also prescribed bathing once in a while.
To facilitate the bathing ordeal, my dad drilled a hole in the kitchen floor, soldered a garden hose onto a five-gallon, metal bucket, stuck the hose through the hole in the floor, and screwed a sprinkler can nozzle on it in the basement.
Mom heated water on the wood burning cook stove, dumped it in the pail and it magically sprayed on us kids in the basement.
The first problem was communication, which had to be precise, and was complicated by the fact that mother was upstairs in the kitchen and we were in the basement, and if you weren't beneath the sprinkler before the water ran out, it wasn't pretty. The problem was solved by a series of knocks on the floor.
Here was the second problem: the basement floor was dirt, so the first few showers were a disaster, but after dad poured a small slab of concrete, things improved.
There were other problems.
Words don't exist to adequately describe the hatred I had for those showers.
It wasn't the freezing, clammy basement. I didn't mind walking the plank, which bridged the man-made lake from the stairway to the cement slab.
It wasn't the fact that the temperature of mom's water ranged from the steam at Old Faithful to tundra ice.
Nor was it that the water always ran out before the soap ran off.
What I hated was balancing on that small concrete slab in the nude with my three curious sisters.
To make matters worse, after the shower, my mother, while we were still nude, lined us up on a plank supported by two chairs and smeared the yellow salve on us.
Then we would dress and march off to school.
The showers and sulfa helped, but traces of the itch remained.
At this point mom theorized that the itch might be a psychosomatic disorder, which could be cured simply by immersing the sufferer in activities, which would create an appropriate curative mental climate.
She decided I would learn to play the violin.
Don't misconstrue her decision as an indication that I possessed musical talent. I don't.
Another thing I lack is the manual dexterity to finger a violin. You're looking at a guy who could never connect his thumb and little finger sufficiently to perform the Boy Scout salute.
The truth is, my mother had a moth-eaten violin, which had been handed down in our family since the Last Supper. The wood was petrified.
The showers, the itch, the sulfa-all of these things possessed qualities I enjoyed more than violin lessons.
Picture a boy at the sensitive age of eleven walking to school, in an invisible cloud of sulfur that smells like a Civil War battlefield hospital tent, with a violin clamped under his arm while his hands flailed at hard-to-reach patches of itchy rash.
Picture him walking alone-very alone.
It was then that I discovered something about time.
The seven-year-itch doesn't refer to the time you actually have it. It alludes to the length of time you think you've had it.
Fortunately, my seven years lasted only a couple of months. Soon after that, I had a serious accident with the violin and was forced to give up my weekly lessons.
How horribly sad it was to see that Hiland Potato Chip truck run over that beautiful instrument. I learned a lesson, too-never leave anything you value, directly behind the rear tire of a parked potato chip truck.
But kids bounce back from great tragedy if given enough time, and in a few moments I recovered from the depths of my violin grief.
So there you have it-the highlights of my childhood. Er…make that lowlights.
Marty RicKard Bio
Marty RicKard attended William Penn College , Iowa State University and University of Southern Mississippi , from which he holds a BS degree in journalism and photojournalism. He also has a Masters Degree in photography, in addition to the Craftsman, CPP, and A-ASP degrees. Marty spent two years as a technical writer for White Motor Company, and has worked for the Charles City Press, Mason City Globe-Gazette, and Davenport Times-Democrat. He was co-owner of the weekly New Sharon Star, where he was twice named Iowa Master Columnist for his article, which was syndicated in twenty Iowa newspapers. For more than a decade Marty's regular column appeared in the Professional Photographer magazine. He has been published in many other magazines and newspapers, including Writer's Digest, Writer Advice, Golf Digest, Resource Magazine, Picture, Range Finder, and Darkroom. In addition to his writing credits, Marty has won numerous photography awards, has lectured in 48 states, and has traveled internationally as lecturer, and judge. He was one of thirty from the U.S. to participate in the first cultural exchange with China in 1986. He currently is a regular columnist for Lens Magazine, and a full-time writer of fiction and poetry. He is the author of two poetry books and one volume of short stories. He is an entertaining speaker.
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Top-level comments on this article: (1 total)hi marty, it's amazing how it takes all different people all different ways to get to where they want to be. some take adversity and make it work for them, some wallow in self pity, and some accept, and move on. thank you for sharing. i enjoyed it, best regards, sue thomDear Sue: You are the best. Thanks for taking time to comment. I sure enjoyed my childhood. Best, Marty RicKard
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