Under the Bed: Tales from an Innocent Childhood

Introduction

PART ONE: Growing Up

1. Changing Channels

2. Home Alone

3. Skunked!

4. Well Done

5. The Dark Ages

6. A Black and White Life in Living Color

7. A Need for Speed

8. Road Trip

9. Under the Bed

PART TWO: Family

10. Grandma’s House

11. The Shiny Red Fire Truck

12. Animal House

13. Queer and Then Some

14. The Black Bag

15. Family Planning

16. Mom and Dad, This Song’s for You

17. It’s All Relative

PART THREE: School

18. Sugar and Spice and Everything Nice

19. It’s Saturday

20. Truth and Consequences

21. School Days

22. 1963

PART FOUR: Fun

23. Toy Story

24. Photographs and Memories

25. Baseball

26. Flexibly Flying

27. The Red Ryder Experience

28. Dangerous Childhood

29. Mental Nexflix

30. Dracula’s Disciple

31. The Ill-Fated Voyage of Captain Sammie

About the Author

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Introduction

As young children, many of us were certain a monster lived under our beds. Of course we never saw it, but we knew something was there. We knew if we dared look under the bed we’d see fierce red eyes glowing in the darkness. We feared if we accidentally dangled a foot during the night it would chew on our toes. A closet door left open posed a corollary danger during that more innocent time in our lives.

This book is about that time, but it’s not about the monster. Rather, under the bed, refers to something I found during the day, when the monster wasn’t home. And it relates to the bittersweet, but inevitable loss of innocence that occurs as we grow up.

Collectively, this book of essays is a celebration of childhood innocence; a mixture of nostalgia and humor. It’s about visits to Grandma’s house and chasing chickens. It’s about collisions with immovable objects, ill-advised pyrotechnics, and the longest day. It’s about the exquisite agony of discovering the opposite sex.

These essays also cover eccentric relatives, family vacations, and words best left unspoken. They’re about a time when surfing referred to riding ocean waves, not changing channels or navigating the internet. They’re about the excitement of paging through the Sears wish book just before Christmas, falling asleep with a transistor radio under your pillow, and discovering good books.

Under the Bed is about growing up during a time when parents had to call you inside at the end of those long summer evenings, instead of trying to make you close the online games and go outside to play with your friends. It’s about growing up during a time when you left the phone at home and devoted all our attention to what you were doing and who you were with. It’s about paradise by the dashboard light. And it’s about 1963.

In fact, the 21 essays by me and 10 contributed by friends are so thorough in their portrayal of childhood during a more innocent time that I experienced something I’m a bit embarrassed to admit. As a writer, I know better. Still, in the middle of the night when I realized I should write one more essay about an aspect of that simpler time I’d forgotten about, I did not turn on the light. Perhaps subconsciously I feared the light would expose monsters frolicking about my bedroom.

Lying there half-asleep, I was stunned the topic hadn’t occurred to me before. The subject was so obvious! I was sure I’d remember it in the morning. But I didn’t. I haven’t. And for days I pored over the essays, trying to discover what I left out. If you notice an omission, please tell me so I finally can sleep peacefully again.

I hope you enjoy this trip back in time. If you grew up during a simpler era, I believe these essays will help you recall, relive, and enjoy the humor and innocence of childhood. If you didn’t, I hope they will help you better understand what life was like for your parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents, and teachers.

As was the case with my two previous books from NorLights Press, Why We Fish: Reel Wisdom From Real Fishermen and Fish, Frogs, and Fireflies: Growing Up With Nature, I am grateful to those who contributed to Under the Bed. They include Paula Hale Baker, Steve Chaconas, Randy Joe Heavin, Sammie Justensen, Tim Mead, Blake Muhlenbruck, Jack Poston, Ron Presley, and Skyler Wiseman. Their names and biographies will accompany their contributions.

Paula shares what Saturdays were like for a small-town girl during the 1960s, while Jack recalls a year in elementary school. Steve reveals what it was like to grow up around the world as a military brat. Randy explains why his parents inspired him to write a song about them, while Sammie shares a cautionary tale of ordering pets from magazines. Blake tells about his fascination with the little black bag during a time when doctors made house calls, while Tim and Ron explore two American topics from a more innocent time: baseball and Red Ryder BB guns.

Skyler told me that writing her essay, The Shiny Red Fire Truck, was fun because it helped her relive long-ago days with her parents and siblings. I experienced much the same thing. Once again I flew down a steep snow-covered hill on a starry night, lay awake talking for hours to my favorite uncle, sat mesmerized by the test pattern on our first television, and enjoyed a Quikee for lunch.

One more time, I whittled arrows, delighted in Mama Lily’s cooked apples, chased lizards, and tormented my sister during a family road trip. I learned to ride a bike, drive a car, and not ask too many questions. I sat quietly in a darkened living room, gazing in awe at the beauty of our Christmas tree while snow drifted gently down on the other side of the picture window. I joined my buddies in being nearly scared to death during a horror movie fest on Halloween at the Liberty Theater. When left home alone for the first time, I experimented with cooking. After getting my ears lowered at the barber shop, I walked across the street to Talbert’s News Agency to buy the latest Superman comic books with my babysitting money. With the help of the Beatles, I survived a traumatic move during my high school years. And I learned what was under the bed.

In fact, this book is the culmination of the most enjoyable writing project of my life to date. My fondest desire is that reading it will be just as pleasurable for you.

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PART ONE: Growing Up

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1. Changing Channels

I don’t remember the day that changed life for me, but I certainly do recall the night.

After going to bed at 9 p.m. I tossed and turned, feeling as restless as I often felt on Christmas Eve. Finally my parents turned off the lights and went to bed. I lay there in the dark for awhile, looking up at the ceiling and thinking about the miraculous object that now sat silently in the room at the opposite end of our house in rural Missouri.

How long I waited I’m not sure. But finally I could stand it no longer. Wearing Lone Ranger knit pajamas, I crept down the hall, through the living room, and into what would be deemed a recreation room today, but was then called our sun room.

I knelt in front of the dark, square box sitting on the small table with a swivel top and, holding my breath, I gently turned the knob. Bright light blinded me briefly and then, as my eyes adjusted, I stared in awe at what I later would learn was an Indian-head test pattern on the screen of our first television.

With the hindsight of an adult, I suspect I might have resembled the little girl in the movie Poltergeist who was mesmerized by a sinister presence in her television. But I felt nothing malevolent as I sat cross-legged in the glow of that light and stared. Nor was I disappointed not to see programming at that late hour. For the moment, the test pattern was enough.

I’m not sure how long I sat there before the overhead light flashed on. Back to bed, young man, my mother said, hands on her hips. As she turned off the television with one hand, she grabbed my arm with the other and escorted me out of the sun room.

Over time, television played an expanding role in our lives, especially mine. Oh, I still hurried off the school bus to listen to the Story Lady on the radio at four o’clock; we still went to the drive-in on weekends; and I still crossed the horse pasture with friends on Saturday afternoons to go to the theater in our little town. Don’t Fence Me In with Roy Rogers and Dale Evans and War of the Worlds with Gene Barry were the movies I best remember. But television was right there, right now, for our entertainment—at least until midnight, when the National Anthem played and a test pattern appeared until the following morning.

And though this was the mid-1950s, we didn’t have to get up, go to the television, and turn a knob to change the channel either. That’s because we received just one station—KFVS, Channel 12, in Cape Girardeau, which carried mostly CBS programming.

In fact, it didn’t occur to me that more than one channel existed until we moved to a larger town. There, I ecstatically discovered we received three: KOMU, KRCG, and WGEM. Yes, I remember those stations, just as I remember phone numbers and street addresses from my childhood. Early on Sunday mornings, WGEM showed two hours of Bugs Bunny cartoons. For a kid who never had seen more than one, or at best, two cartoons at the theater, this felt like paradise.

Later on, the number of stations jumped to an almost inconceivable four when we moved closer to St. Louis. And for our first Christmas there, my parents gave me a portable TV for my bedroom. I still can smell the tubes in that little set heating up for the first time, and I still remember how happy I felt at that moment.

In the sun room, though, I’d sit in my little red rocking chair alongside my parents and watch our one channel, which featured such programs as Father Knows Best and Abbott and Costello.

My favorites were Captain Kangaroo and Crusader Rabbit, as well as adventure series such as Soldiers of Fortune and Tales of the 77th Bengal Lancers. I still remember the That’s what I said. Get Bunny Bread commercial that aired during the adventures of the crusading rabbit and his companion, Rags the tiger. On Saturday mornings I watched Winky Dink and You, billed as the first interactive television program. For 50 cents, I bought crayons and a magic drawing screen that stuck to the TV via static electricity and allowed me to help Winky by drawing things he needed, including a bridge to cross a river or an axe to chop down a tree.

Helping Winky was one thing, but trying to turn a black and white screen into color with plastic film was quite another. Some of my parents’ friends tried that and invited us over to see the result. I don’t recall what the adults said about the filter, which featured translucent bands. But I know what I thought as we watched blue wrestlers grappling on a green mat: This is nuts! That was my first clue that adults might not be omnipotent.

Meanwhile, back on our own little black and white set, one Saturday I watched my first late-night movie, The Fighting Sullivans, a real-life story about five brothers from Iowa who served and died together during World War II. By then my mother realized how drawn I was to this technological miracle and would cut me slack on the weekends.

Still, she was mystified by my attraction, especially when she found me watching a baseball game with Dizzy Dean and Pee Wee Reese as the announcers. You don’t know anything about baseball, she said. How can you watch it?

I gave her one of those it’s a mystery to me gestures with my hands. I just do, I said. I think maybe Dizzy’s folksy manner and accent attracted me. He sounded just like the people who lived around us. Later on, I’d learn the former pitcher for the St. Louis Cardinals came from Arkansas, a state just a few miles to the south of where we lived in the Missouri Bootheel.

But Mom was right—to a point. Mostly my initial fascination was all about the technology. Marshall McLuhan was right also: The medium was the message. That’s what kept me watching.

And in the beginning I did know little about baseball. Yet I quickly learned what it was all about from Dizzy and Pee Wee, and as I grew older the only activity I enjoyed more than playing baseball was going fishing. And why I like the latter could fill a book. In fact, it already has: Why We Fish: Reel Wisdom From Real Fishermen.

As time passed, I continued to love television because it opened up the world to a young boy exiled to the rural Midwest. I soaked up knowledge as eagerly in our sun room as I did in school. From that movie about the Sullivans I learned about World War II. From Lloyd Bridges on Sea Hunt I learned about