Class Story 118 Belle Isle Trip

We took a school trip in October in the 4^th grade to visit the science museum over on Belle Isle.  I was amazed at the aquarium.  I can only picture it as looking like Steinhart Aquarium used to look in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park.  This experience prompted me to become a pet fish enthusiast thirty years later when I was recuperating from a bout with cancer at Gail Howard's house.  I had twenty plus aquariums bubbling and gurgling to Gail's continued irritation.  The sad ending to my collector's fancy is documented in "The Man Who Loved Tropical Fish." 

I’m sure there were many more science exhibits there but the aquarium is what stands out as a lasting memory, except … …  When we got on the bus to go back to school, the teacher saw that I was chewing gum.  She said, “Peter, spit that gum out and if you want to save it, stick it behind your ear.”  Of course, that is exactly what I did, even though I had longish hair at the time.  I then proceeded to completely forget about it, rough horsing around all the way home with my friends in the bus. 

When I walked in the door at home that night, my mother said, “What’s that on the side of your head?” 

“Oh’” I said “I saved some gum behind my ear.”

“Well,” she says “It’s all over the side of your head now and I’m going to have to cut it all out!”

What a mess; and I screamed bloody murder.  I walked around for weeks with a shaved patch on the back of my head.

Mother took my sister and I to Waterloo, Nebraska in 1944 to visit her parents.  They owned and operated the newspaper there. We went on the train, an over-night trip on a Pullman Sleeper car.  I can remember bits and pieces of this trip.  Some older family member, I remember it as my father's dad, my mother thinks it might have been her dad, told me how to deal with the Porters, about the shoe-shinning if you left them outside you sleeper door.  I was six or seven years old, so I should remember more of this trip.  When I recited to my mother my memories of Waterloo, she says it wasn't so, there was no soda fountain catty-corner from the newspaper.  Then again, her memory of Waterloo was dated by twenty years away from home at this post-war juncture.

We took our first true family excursion when Dickie had justification to go and visit Greenfield Tap & Die in Greenfield, Massachusetts.  We started by driving down to visit Dickies parents in Akron, Ohio.  We visited Akron on several occasions before we left for California.  I remember the tennis courts, a left-over from before the War.  The next leg was driving all the way to Greenfield.  We stayed in a motel and while Dickie did his business, Patty and I played croquet all day at the motel.  We had never played before and really had fun with the game.

Then we drove up to Buffalo, New York, where we boarded a big ship, a steamer.  We were able to drive the car onto the deck for storage.  Thus we took the boat across Lake Erie bound for Detroit.  It was an overnight cruise and I tried to stay up as late as possible because of the beautiful lights on the water; other ships signaling each other with horns and lights from towns along the banks.

The gum-chewing incident reminds me of what a holy terror I was as a kid.  I was a regular pyromaniac for a few years and my parents didn't know what to do about it.  It was early sociopathic behavior, I guess.  I started by setting fires in the neighbor's yards and one time under a car in a neighbor's garage.  They seemed to be always caught in the nick of time and I got into trouble with each occurrence. 

One time on Lewiston, I built a fire in one of the back bathrooms, in the shower stall.  It caught the curtains on fire and this produced a huge amount of smoke.  After this, my father called me onto the back patio porch and brought out a whole carton of matches, maybe 50 packs.  "You're going to light each one and let it burn for a while," he said.

We went through them all, but it didn't cure me.  I only vaguely remember the final cure, which my mother related to me.  They had called over a fire-man, an authority figure.  He took me outside and gave me a talking to for about half an hour.  After that talking to, I never did it again.