Waiting for Megan

The summer has passed and now we are getting into the relief of Kentucky autumn. In Louisville, it is still not yet too cool that people have to wear heavy jackets or sweaters. Halloween is coming and the usual fall events of Butchertown Oktoberfest and St. James Art Fair are under way. In the last week of October 1974 we are all waiting for Megan.

October 1973 was a sad time for mom and dad. Dad had graduated from UL in August and was working for the Louisville Board of Education. October 1973 had all started well. Mom and dad were expecting their first baby and everything had gone very well. All the families were in rapt anticipation of a new little life coming to the world. That baby would be the first for this generation. Mom and dad had painted and cleaned the baby's room. There were new curtains and furniture. All the "new baby supplies had been laid in and everyone was waiting.

In the last week of October 1973 something tragic happened. There are things that happen to little ones in the womb for which there is no explanation. Mom had had the best of care from the doctor . She had taken the right vitamins and had eaten the right right stuff. She did everything just right. Yet, in one of those mysterious events that come about, something went amiss.

Dad was in his office at Coleridge Taylor Elementary just on the edge of downtown Louisville when he got a call to come to the office. Mom was on the phone and she was very sad. She was at the doctor's office and she had to listen to the tragic news that the baby that she was carrying was no longer living. The doctor had made arrangements for Mom to go to the hospital and do what had to be done to save her life. It was very sad. It is sad to this day.

Well. Mom and Dad went to Methodist Hospital and over the next 12 or so hours the baby that had been so anticipated was brought into the world having never to experience any of it. In those days, women stayed in the hospital at least 48 to 72 hours. It was a challenge for both Mom and Dad because Mom was on the maternity floor and there was no baby to be the center of attention. This lead, of course, to all kind of gaffs on the part of hospital staff in the course of their duties. It was a relief to end that hospital experience and get home. Mom stayed home for a while to recover and then went back to her work in the county office building in downtown Louisville. Things were not back to normal, but they were routine. The question arose of what to do next. Well, when the time was right, Mom and Dad got busy. Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Years came and went. In February of 1974 Mom took a solo trip to Florida to warm her bones from the Kentucky winter. February turns to March and then to April. Uh-ho! Something is up. Mom had to go to Dr. Oberst again. Great news! A baby is on the way.

Mom is an old hand at this baby business now. There wasn't much to do in preparation. Everything was pretty much in place. Mom was very confident. Dad never noted a drop of anxiety in her attitude. With April came the historic tornado (April 3, 1974) that raked Louisville along with much of the midwest. Mom's office was at the old County Building on West Market St. Mom and Dad saw the Louisville tornado on the way home from work that day. Dad remarked that this site should be noted because it was a very rare thing to behold.

Spring turns to summer and summer brought the usual muggy heat of summer. Again all the families were in anticipation of the coming event. There was no crepe hanging of any hint of dire consequences for the event that was going to take place in the last week of October or first week of November. Everybody was waiting for Megan.

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A Personal History

I was born before the first atomic bomb was detonated. Roosevelt was still alive and Hitler had four months to live.

Until I was eight months old we had lived in the Big City. World War II was still on in Europe and the Pacific. After the war, my parents returned to live in a small, rural central Kentucky town . We lived in duplexes or apartments. In the summer after I had turned four, we moved to a small farmstead on fifteen acres just outside of town. There was no running water, no electric, and there was an out door toilet. It was primitive. By this time my youngest sister was just turning one year old and my second sister was eleven months older. My mother had two in diapers and me. Fortunately for my mom, my dads friend had a wash, fold, and dry laundry in town. He did the heavy stuff for a couple of years. My mom paid him in kind.

I was near unmanageable in my new country world. My dad fenced the yard to slow me down. It worked after a fashion. I was a climber and adventurer though, and I was a handful to keep up with.

From the time I four years old , I was up-to-date on science and technology. I did not believe a thing until it came with accumulated data with words and pictures. I was all about jets, dinosaurs and robots. I was interested in WWII because my uncle, and many other men in my town had participated. Some of the ones that returned had suffered a range of wounds from very minor to grievous. I absorbed all their stories and first hand accounts of the war from the invasion of North Africa to the final stroll into Berlin. I also was acquainted with the World War II - Pacific Theater. There were quite a few men that I knew who had flown off aircraft carriers, had strafed convoys in P-38 Lightnings or had climbed Mt. Suribaci on Iwo Jima. I was a sponge for all the facts and details. In the summer of 1952, my dad and my uncle, who lived next door, bought Motorola table top television sets. They were the hottest new style. Every TV that I had seem before was a console model with a tiny screen. Ours had 19" screens. With that came the daily televised war news from Korea, cartoons and Arthur Godfrey. I was seven.

My uncle was a paratroops vet. He had made five combat jumps from North Africa to a "A Bridge too Far" in Holland. My uncle was a trained electrician, as was my dad. They were not so much home or commercial electricians but rather electrical stuff, like vacuum tube radios, to complicated traffic light systems and switch control boxes..

My dad had been a systems installer in a defense plant production line that turned out B-24 Liberator bombers. Needless to say I was very enthusiastic about aircraft, especially B-24 Liberators. After the war my dad went back to work for an undertaker and did that job until he and my grandmother opened a homestyle meal cafe.

I grew up on the small farm to which we had moved, when I was in my fourth summer. It was 1948. I grew up tending cows, hogs, chickens and a big garden. My dad taught me how to milk a cow, tend hogs, and gather eggs. I had to carry in wood and coal for a kitchen heating stove. I also had to carry in coal oil for the two space heaters placed in two other rooms in the house. I did that chore until I was ten. In my tenth summer, we had a gas line run from the highway to our house. All of the oil and solid fuel burners were replaced with natural gas space heaters. I thereafter became a child of some leisure except for tending the cows, hogs, and chickens. In summer, I had to add pushing a lawn mower to my duties.

My dad built and equipped a restaurant building on the frontage of our fifteen acre farmstead that we shared with my uncle. I was not allowed to participate in that building project. We lived in the existing house set further back from the road and my uncle soon built a house about three hundred feet away. I was allowed to participate in my uncles building project. I learned to read a tape measure in fractions and how to properly hammer a nail. At first we had no power tools on that job. When the cutting jobs became heavier, my uncle bought a worm drive rotary saw from Sears. It weighed all most as much as I did. I was not allowed to operate it. I could measure and mark but some one else did the cutting. I was allowed to use a hand saw on scraps and dunnage that may have gone in as filler somewhere.

My mom, was an Irish Catholic lady who had been in convent boarding school from the time she was eight years old. Just after she turned seventeen she graduated from a business and secretarial course that was considered very advanced and practical. She left rural Kentucky very shortly after that and traveled to New York City. She worked in Manhattan and took classes at night. She returned to rural Kentucky after seven years in the city. It was 1940.

My mother was a strong reader, an accomplished seamstress, a talented cook and an all round small farm wife along with her other accomplishments.

On the farm we had milk cows. My mother processed the fresh milk daily. In the days when we had no natural gas line or electric, that job was done in primitive but sanitary ways on a bottle gas stove. My mother was a nurse. She knew sanitary.

My mother strained the milk through a muslin and cheese cloth filter. She Pasteurized it in a large Army surplus pot on the bottle gas stove top. She had a set of thermometers and testers that were in her kit for hospital cookery and sanitary service supervision. She skimmed the cream when the milk had been allowed to separate. She churn milk for butter , made farmers cheese, and fed the waste whey to the hogs.

My mother also canned, fruits and vegetables and made pickles out of every piece of surplus vegetable or fruit. She also canned certain cuts of meat. She made her own V8 like vegatable juice. Nothing was wasted. Boiled potato water became the medium for scrap vegetables and meats to stew in for broth or stock she then canned or put in the home freezer. The surplus milk and eggs went into pies and cakes that were sold bartered or given as gifts. My mother also baked pies for our family restaurants and for special order customers. My mother also baked bread and biscuits. Every meal was a touch point. We all sat down together and started eating when given permission. It was a different time and a different consciousness. It was the 1950s, the cusp of an age.