John's Green Blog

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Category: biography

  • Remembering my sister

    I am documenting the heck out of important aspects of my life while I am still able. I have already recorded memories of:

    Someone’s missing, and that someone is my sister Milly!

    Milly Margaret Freeman was born on April 19, 1940 in Cleveland Ohio.

    She had an older brother: Hal Jr, aka Butchie.
    He lived for to 10 years old, from 1937 to 1946.

    My young years were carefree and optimistic, as we want them to be for all kidsI

    But Milly was not so lucky in her young years. She grew up with the dark cloud of having her older brother dying in the next room.

    This was during and after WW2.
    My dad was a doctor in a Long Beach military hospital.

    I’m picturing a small apartment or house with Butchie living at home in one bedroom, wasting away from a disease that was deadly then, but would have a miracle drug cure with the decade.

    In the other bedroom was young Milly trying to live a normal little girl life.

    I hadn’t quite made it to my first birthday when he passed.

    • I was born a couple of years later, but there was still a lot of sadness..
    • Although the therapist I talked to in the 90’s suggested that my tendency to be a bit of a “pleaser” might’ve come from that time.

    Butchie dies, parents divorce, we all go back to the midwest

    My parents got divorced in 1949.
    I think that Butchie’s death had a lot to do with it.

    The next year we all moved to Springfield, Missouri, where my dad’s family was from.

    Whatever the reasons, it adds up to a less than great childhood for my sister. Her older brother dying and her parents getting divorced in roughly the same year, when she was in third or fourth grade.

    Just doing the math, she must have started grade school in Long Beach and done junior high in Springfield and high school in Louisville.

    Louisville

    We moved to Louisville in the summer of 1954. My mom bought a little house in the middle-class suburbs where we both lived.

    I was excited about starting first grade in our new . She was excited about starting ninth grade!

    She went to Atherton, the best public stownchool in Louisville, as any graduate will be happy to tell you :).

    She did very well there. She was an academic star her whole life.

    She was 8 years older, so even though we were in the same house, we were in entirely different worlds.

    I was a dorky little grade-schooler and she was a new-in-town, attractive but difficult-to-know high schooler.

    She had a boyfriend in high school named Gordon that was pretty into her as I remember it. He came over to our house all the time! But she was not so enthused. That romance didn’t survive past the high school graduation summer.

    She did SO WELL at Atherton that she was admitted to Smith College.

    In late summer of 1958 we packed up the Chevy and delivered Milly to Northampton MA. It’s humid in Louisville in the summer of course, but there was something stiflingly uncomfortable about the humidity in central Massachusetts that June that I still remember!

    She was always adamant that Harvard decided to take a chance on me because she was such a stellar student at Smith.
    She was probably right!     :))
    It probably would not have occurred to me to apply to Harvard if she had not trailblazed the way!!

    Timelime and a note on the last decades

    • The timeline below is to help me keep track of events.
    • You will notice some important dates missing in the last few decades …
      • When did she marry Sigmund ?
      • When did they move to Florida?
    • I decided to publish this without those dates.
      They will be easy enough fill in later if they turn up.
    • So here we go:
    1940born in Cleveland, April 19, 1940
    1941Army moves the family (no me yet!) to Long Beach
    1949The war is over, Army moves the family back to Missouri
    1954My mother, sister and me move to Louisville.
    She starts 9th grade at Atherton High.
    1958Graduate Atherton in June.
    Start Smith College in September.
    1961A.B., Smith College in June
    Start graduate studies at Yale in September.
    1964PhD in Art History from Yale.
    (I’m still a high school sophomore.)
    1964?Marry Ralph Morrill
    1965After they both got Yale degrees, he got a job teaching Architecture at Auburn U. Milly taught in the art department.
    They thought they were too cool for Auburn. 🙁
    I don’t think I visiting them there.
    1970’sLive the bohemian life of architect and artist husband and wife in upper New York State. I’m in Cambridge then DC.
    1980’sCal Poly in San Luis Obispo CA for a coupla years. I’m in SO Cal.
    late 80’sRalph worked for the government of Kuwait
    Milly leaves Ralph in Kuwait, comes home, gets divorced
    Ends up in Buffalo NY, working at the Albright-Knox gallery
    Milly meets Sigmund. They get married in Buffalo.
    We’ve moved to Nor Cal
    They move to Florida, have some good years
    May 99Sigmund dies
    2002Milly and Johnanna at the Sawmill in Florida
    2010I visit Milly at the Sawmill – fun!
    2017Milly and Julie at Mease Manor
    Oct2018Milly dies
    26 Sep 2018 (aged 78)

    She’s at college, I’m still home

    I don’t know know much about her life at Smith.

    I was still in high school in Louisville, while she was learning the ins and outs of being a sophisticated East Coast intellectual. 🙂

    • I guess she came home for the summer, but I don’t remember it.
      • We really were in different worlds:
        • grade school vs a summer stopover from the Ivy League :).
    • One change for me was that most summers we headed East for our big summer trip rather than West.
      • One trip sticks in my mind, where we took a nursing buddy of my mom’s back to New York to visit her family. I
        • don’t remember she and Milly in the car together, so I’m guessing that is was a spring trip going to get her.
        • We drove from Louisville to New York with the annoying friend, dropped her off,
        • then drove on to Northhampton MA to pick up Milly.
    • June 1968 was a memorable trip because we drove up for her graduation from Smith (with Honors!).
      • Louisville was hot and humid in June, we all expect that.
      • But central Massachusetts in June was so stiflingly humid and miserable (in our dress up clothes to look good for the easterners 🙂 …
      • It’s funny to me that after spending my childhood in the south, the icon that stayed with me for unbearable heat is a June in Massachusetts. 🙂

    My crude internet search did turn up this little nugget.
    https://nyfoa.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/1966_10.pdf
    How it fits the overall narrative I can’t say:

    Annual Report for the Year … (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)
    , Vol. 89 (1964), pp. 87-90

    October, Mrs. Milly Morrill , A.B., Smith College, 1961, M.A., Yale University, 1964, became the reference assistant…

    Milly moves 100 miles south and east to New Haven CT to work on a PhD in Art History at Yale University. That’s where she met her unfortunate first husband Ralph.

    • I have a vague memory of the first time the my mom and I met him at a restaurant up there somewhere.
      • Me, Mom and Milly showed up together,
      • and Ralph showed up to meet everybody.
      • He had some kind of stress attack!
        • He started sweating profusely, got dizzy and knocked a table over!
        • The story later was that the stress of meeting his future wife’s high school brother and her kindly gray-haired mom was too much for him to handle.
        • That seems pretty seak to me, but I was there!
    • The universe was telling Milly as clearly as it could that Ralph was bad news and she should Run Away!
      • But she didn’t, so he was part of our lives for the next 15-20 years.
    • He was a licensed architect, and a pretty good one I think.

    They graduate Yale, move to Auburn Alabama

    They both got their advanced degrees from Yale, then headed out into the world!

    The went to Auburn University, where Ralph was an Associate Professor of Architecture and Milly taught in the Art Department.

    The internet tells me that Ralph was part of a design team that won an award in 1965.

    A pattern of Ralph’s career is that he never stayed anywhere very long. He was an abrasive, unpleasant fellow who thought he was smarter than everyone else.

    By the late 60’s he’s worn out his welcome at Auburn.
    He and Milly dropped out of the academic rat race for the moment, and became more or less bohemians in upstate New York:
    Antler Lake, Wevertown, NY 12886

    I’ve nosed around the internet looking for records of my sister and Ralph and found precious little.

    Done with Universities, live the bohemian life

    He was a working architect. She was an artist.

    He built a really cool cabin for their friends Barb and Vlad, a Czech fellow and his cute blond wife who was Milly’s friend from college. I still remember hanging around the campfire with them. Vlad holding his ciggie in a thumb/finger grip Euro-style, ranting about how powerful the Soviets were and eastern European politics in general.

    Cooking thick steaks and drinking large amounts of red wine was their favorite entertainment. (not so bad! 🙂

    For the first few years of their interlude in the Adirondacks Laura and I were still in Cambridge, so we hopped over there MANY weekends!

    I’m pretty sure this is our Ralph, even though they say his wife’s name is Warren!

    Professor Ralph K. Morrill (The Architecture & Design Educator)

    Connection: He served as a prominent faculty member at Auburn University’s Department of Architecture and was heavily involved with design students and the American Institute of Interior Designers (AIID) during the mid-1960s. His wife, Warren, was also an educator in the Art Department at the University of Alabama. [1, 2],

    Role: Professor of Architecture and faculty advisor.

    They were still there when we lived in Maryland and DC.
    DC to Wevertown is a pretty simple 8-hour drive on 2026 highways.

    Milly’s time with Ralph

    For no particular reason, I’m sticking these big picture thoughts into the middle of the narrative:

    • Alter she left for college we never again lived in the same town.
    • We weren’t very much alike.
      • I was a computer major, she was an art major.
    • But we rarely had harsh words between us.
    • She was a gloomy person. I blame that on Butchie dying.
    • I didn’t much connect with either of her husbands.
      • The second, Sigmund, was a good guy.
        We just didn’t have much on common.
      • Ralph, as discussed above, was not a very nice person, asshole in almost every way.

    Other than that Milly and I were great friends, got along great when we were together and loved each other! 🙂

    Cal Poly

    I don’t remember eactly why or when, but at some point they gave up life in Wevertown to return to academia.
    I’ll bet a steady paycheck factored into the decision.

    Ralph got a professor gig at Cal Poly University in San Luis Obispo.

    We did visit them there. By that time Laura and I were in Southern California (Encinitas) so visiting them in Central California was a beautifulm scenic road trip, and great deal all around.!

    I remember Morro Rock and going to the Madonna Inn. 🙂

    Kuwait

    As mentioned above, Ralph never stayed anywhere for very long. Whether he got tired of them, or (more likely) they got tired of him I don’t know, but after only one (or two?) years in lovely San Lius Obispo they moved on.

    Ralph to take a gig as an architect in Kuwait!
    … Which paid a lot better I’ll bet:)

    I wish I knew more this interlude!
    Was he employed by the government? What did he work on?

    What I do know is that it was very bad for Milly. It was the end of their marriage, and a blow to her mental health for a few years.

    They both drank, and he was emotionally abusive. By that point in his mostly unaccomplished life he might have been physically abusive also. A non-Muslim woman from a far away place with an abusive husband didn’t have much of a support network available to her in Kuwait!

    Buffalo and Sigmund

    Again, I wish knew more details, but Milly somehow left Raplh in Kuwait and got herself back to America and got a divorce!

    For some reason she landed in Buffalo New York, working at the Albright–Knox Art Gallery
    [as it was then called – now it’s the Buffalo AKG Art Museum]

    In her telling she came back from Kuwait an emotional wreck. She met Sigmund Golonka In a recovery place in Buffalo.

    Her memorable phrase:
    he was that rarest of creatures, a nurturing male! 🙂

    I know us nurturing males do exist out there 🙂 but I guess she didn’t have the knack for finding them. She was at a low point, beat up and fragile, and Sigmund found her help her get better! That’s pretty cool!

    They got married and lived in Buffalo for a few years.
    He had five adult daughters from his first marriage.

    Sigmund’s details:

    Sigmund George Golonka
    b 5 Mar 1924 Buffalo, Erie County, New York, USA
    Death 14 May 1999 (aged 75)

    As a veteran, he requested to beburied at Arlington.
    https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/200667066/milly-margaret-golonka

    Buffalo and Sigmund

    • We visited them in Buffalo at least once.
    • We flew all the way cross country to support Milly after very rough time with Ralph.
    • We were kind of surprised that she had already found a new guy!
      • That didn’t take long! 🙂
    • My very specific memory is that Sigmund took me to the shoe store to get me a decent pair of shoes!
      • I was aging hippy that wore Converse high-tops and other forms of tennis shoe all the time.
      • He got me a pair of black shoes, thick soles for comfortable walking, and waterproof for making it through sloshy Buffalo sidewalks.
      • They weren’t very stylish, but I still have them and I still wear them for any kind of dress occasion when it is wet outside!

    Sorry for the digression, but sharing my memories is kinda the whole point here! 🙂

    Anyway after a couple of years Sigmund and Milly Golonka moved to Florida.

    An unsolved mystery is that I remember a lot of daughters in Buffalo, but then when they moved to Florida, I remember a lot of daughters there also. Did some daughters move south when he did, or were there daughters in both places? I should have paid more attention 🙂

    In Florida: Sigmund dies, Milly moved to the gay campground!

    the Sawmill!
    Outside Dade City, middle of the state N of Tampa, W of Orlando

    I visited Milly there in November 2010! It was great fun!

    • Big Gay Thanksgiving 2010
    • I rode my little bike around! Everybody was very nice!

    The fact of Milly finishing out her years as a lesbian was utterly un-explored between me and her !

    That’s all on me. If I had asked, she would have told me I’m sure, I just didn’t have the emotional clarity to ask when I could have..

    There were no issues, no judgement from my side. I got along with her bossy female partners at least as well as I did with her bossy husbands. 🙂

    I’m totally supportive of the change and I’ll bet she was a lot happier living with the ladies that the men she had chosen.

    But I DO have questions:

    • Did she know it all along and just didn’t act on it till late in life?
    • Did something happen after Sigmund died to change her outlook?

    I’m guessing the former. I’m picturing her dabbling in hte local gay bars (not hard to find in Fllorida) after Sigmund died and she was on her own, eventually hitting it off with Johnanna (yes, that really was how she spelled it!) and moving in with her at the Sawmill.

    I quite enjoyed my three nights at the Sawmill visiting her in 2010.

    it’s outside Dade City, middle of the state north of Tampa, west of Orlando

    From Sawmill to Mease Manor

    The two links below are to my WHUFU road trip blog:

    • 2010 – at the Sawmill, living with Johnanna
      • The report is sadly light on details.
      • WHUFU posts re about documenting road trip sights.
        Details of a family visit just don’t fit.
    • 2018 – at Mease Manor, living with Julie.
      • The first half of this post is me looking forward to visiting my sister for the first time in 8 years!
      • A few days before I got there the news that she had died!!
      • So instead of visiting my sister I signed papers at the Cremation Society.

    These two places are probably a million miles apart in lifestyle, but are only 60 miles apart on the central Florida map! 🙂

    I am sure it is significant somehow that Mease Manor is less that 10 miles from where our mother lived out her last years in a different old folks home the Clearwater/Pinellas Park area.

    I reminisced with her friend Julie.

    I visited the Cremation Society and was handed a box of Milly’s effects to take back to California!

  • Remembering my very young life

    This post is what I remember of my pre-school days, ages 1 to 5, living in Long Beach and Springfield.

    Why am I doing this you ask?
    Who writes about their pre-school days! :))

    It was fun for me to remember what I could, so I enjoyed it!
    Living in the old folks home, I am sensitive to the possibility that I won’t remember as much in 5 years!

    My school years in Louisville will have their own post!

    The back story

    My mom came into her adult life during the Depression.
    .. which makes me the child of a child of the Depression
    … a second hand Depression baby I guess! 🙂

    She was born poor and raised poor on a farm in southern Indiana. Her people were Dutch. The name Real kinda gives that away!
    Her story has it’s own post:

    My dad’s family was small-time country gentry from a little town near Springfield Missouri. His people were English who settled in Missouri from North Carolina.

    A direct descendant of William Freeman who fought with the North Carolina militia in the Revolutionary War!

    They were the local doctors and lawyers in their part of Missouri.
    Here is his story.

    My parents met while going to their respective schools in Louisville Kentucky.

    • Dad wasat the University of Louisville Medical School, studying to be a doctor
    • Mom was at Louisville General Hospital Nursing School to become a Registered Nurse.

    Handsome medical student meets good-looking nursing student!
    Pretty textbook stuff 🙂

    They got married the summer after he graduated in June 1934 … just as Laura and I got married the summer after I graduated college in 1970! 🙂

    In normal times they would have had some expectation of starting to make some money, but by 1934 the Depression was underway.

    The records show that they went to Cleveland where my Dad did his residency. Both my older siblings were born in Cleveland (Hal Jr in 1937, and Milly in 1940).

    Sad to say, I know almost nothing about their time in Cleveland. Job prospects in the Depression must have sucked, so a residency in Cleveland for my dad might have been just the thing!

    I know first hand how dispiriting it can be to get the job market for the first time in a year when the job market is crappy! That was me in the Carter Recession of th mid-70’s, and that was how I ended up taking a job at a government agancy in DC (the Census Bureau) in 1976 rather than heading off to California for fame and fortune!

    World War II happens

    In Cleveland in the late 1930’s I like to imagine that my mom was happy raising cute little Hal Jr, and looking forward to a second baby (in April 1940), my sister Milly.

    I imagine my dad was happy in civilian life, being a big shot doctor. The couple was looking forward to a comfortable doctor/nurse married live in Springfield MO (his home) or Louisville/Southern Indiana (her home). He would have had a nice little practice, she would have been his nurse or stayed home as a full-time mom. They would have a picture-perfect doctor/nurse life
    (I like to imagine) …

    But those were not normal times. Pearl Harbor happened and the country mobilized for war. My dad was no longer a civilian, he enlisted as an Army doctor and was stationed in Long Beach CA.

    I’m guessing that the Army paid to move for the whole crew – Dad, pregnant mom, and 3 year-old boy – from Cleveland to Long Beach. I don’t know where in that process they got the terrible news that Butchie had rheumatic fever and might die.

    Pre-school in Springfield MO between the Army and grade school

    A World War was a huge enterprise that moved a lot of people to a lot of places. My dad applied to be a airplane pilot, but was rejected because of heart issues. They wouldn’t take him as a pilot, but they sure would take him as an Army doctor, and stationed him in Long Beach!

    My guess is that the Army moved the whole crew, Dad, pregnant Mom, and children to Long Beach, then moved the whole crew, Dad, Mom, and children (including me!) back to the midwest when he was mustered out.

    If my mom had had a choice I think she would have relocated to someplace closer to her home on southern Indiana. But I don’t t think the Army gave her a choice.

    The important thing to them was to get the family back to the midwest on the government’s dime.

    My parents divorce was a done deal before they left Long Beach.
    The papers were filed in California in 1949.

    Cross-country moves were still a pretty big deal in the 50’s. Having the government pay for the big part of the move – Long Beach -> Missouri – was a big deal.

    As I said elsewhere, the death of older brother Butchie pretty much shattered the family.

    I don’t remember anything about living in Long Beach, but I remember little snippets of Springfield. I remember sitting in the car with Milly outside my dad’s apartment while mom went inside to have serious talk with him about divorce stuff. Then she’d come back and bring me in so I could have my visitation with him without having to hear them fight. She was a great mom and my sister was a very patient 10 year old.

    I remember getting in trouble in pre-school for coloring with crayons on the nap-time cots, so I had to stay inside and clean the cots.
    [Crazy that I still remember that!]

    The place my Dad moved in to when we moved to Springfield in 1950 was the place he stayed until he died in 1963. A nice 3-story red brick building a half-block walk from where he worked. He had the right hand half of the top floor.

    His office was in the Professional Building right around the corner. He lived on Elm St, but worked on Cherry St.

    All traces if both buildings and basically everything I remember about the area have been wiped out by a massive expansion of Southwest Missouri State University. 🙂

  • Growing up in Louisville

    Growing up in Louisville

    Moving to Louisville

    1950 to mid 1954 we lived in Springfield. I was very young and remember very little. In ’54, some milestones were coming up:

    • I was gonna have my 6th birthday in November.
      • Six is the magic age where you start public school.
    • My sister is eight years older, so she would be starting high school.
    • If we were going to make a move to be closer to her Indiana roots, now was the time!
      • I would start school in the place I was gonna stay.
      • Likewise, my sister would start high school (9th grade) at her new school.

    So that summer my mom, my older sister Milly, and I moved to very pleasant little house in a new development in the near suburbs of Louisville KY.

    I started first grade at John Jacob Audubon Elementary School.
    It was a brand new baby-boomer school.
    Grand opening was the first year I attended!

    My birthday is in November, so I started first grade at 5 years old.

    The school was at a busy corner

    • a Catholic school/church across the street to the east,
    • a big ole Baptist Church across the other street to the south,
    • the lovely, long-established neighborhood of Audubon Park catty-corner (to the southeast :).
    • Brand new subdivisions to feed children to our brand new school to the north and west.

    My sister Milly was already super-smart and a serious student, so she went straight to Atherton High, which was the best public school in Louisville.

    Our subdivision was a great place to grow up

    My mom bought a little house (probably with my dad’s help) at 1626 Ehrler Drive, at the corner of Ehrler and Illinois Avenue.

    Just like my school, our subdivision was brand new. We were the first folks to live in it. All the houses on Ehrler were pretty new.

    Try this map

    Illinois Avenue on the other hand had been there for quite some time. It was a potholed old narrow lane that ambled down the hill to the north of us, past our side yard to the east, then crossed the little creek and ambled back up the hill to the south of us. The houses on Illinois north of us were quite a bit older and had been there long time.

    Our development was pretty new. They were building new houses across Illinois for most of my grade school years. This made wandering around the neighborhood looking for the kind of adventure grade school want pretty exciting! It was a great time to be there!

    The absolute coolest part though was that there were only houses on the “inside” side of Illinois as it looped from Poplar Level Road to the north to Trevillian Way in the south.

    The outer side was the border of a really quite large tract of scrub forest owned by the Catholic Church (“the woods” we called it :). The Woods made our afternoons and weekends so much more adventure-filled.

    Louisville’s ethnic mix then was that black folks lived in the west end and country white folks like my mom and ethnic white folks lived in the central and eastern suburbs. The further east you went, the more prosperous were the neighborhoods. Rich people lived in “the East End”.

    Along with the white country people there were also quite a few Italian Catholics and German Catholics. Irish Catholics weren’t a thing in Louisville for some reason, at least in my neighborhood!

    In the 60’s there were started to be new black neighborhoods … as my neighbors discovered! (see below)

    In 1954-55, my mom returned to the working world at her old alma mater – Louisville General Hospital – as a regular RN on a regular hospital ward.

    I remember it more like a clinic than a ward. It was on the 3d floor as I recall, but she wasn’t tending patients in their hospital beds, she was assisting the doctor while he treated walk-in patients. But what do I know, I was in 2nd grade! 🙂

    Many days (most days?) I walked from John Jacob Audubon Elementary school to the bus stop catty-corner across the street to catch the city bus to General Hospital downtown. I would go up to my mom’s ward, get fussed over by the doctors and nurses (even then in the 50’s most of the doctors were Pakistani and most of the patients were black), then I would go back down to the lower lever and kill time in the hospital coffee shop until her shift was over.

    I just looked it up, my first year of school (1954) was the first year that Audubon Elementary was open!

    We did not have a school bus serving my neighborhood for my first couple of years, which I imagine is why I took the city bus downtown to where mom worked at General Hospital. I think we got a school bus in my 3d grade!

    When the bus happened I started going home and fending for myself for a couple of hours.

    • The bus was very user-friendly in that the morning pickup was at the Ehrler’s Dairy store at the end of our street. I could stay warm inside the store!
    • When I got home in the afternoon I let myself in with a housekey I kept on a lanyard around my neck all day.
    • I had strict instructions not to have company.
      No other real instructions except to try not to mess anything up till mom got home at 5:30 or 6.

    Somewhere in the late 50’s (late in elementary school), my mom switched jobs. Instead of a staff nurse at General Hospital, she went to work for the government as a visiting nurse!
    It might have paid a little better, but looking back, I think she did it mainly so she could be home when I got home from school.

    Doing that job was such a brave thing! Just her little ole white self – white uniform, white skin, white hair (she was prematurely gray as long as I can remember), and a white Chevy Impala land cruiser – heading off into the sketchiest parts of Louisville to knock on doors and tell black folks news they didn’t look forward to hearing..

    She was a hero at it too. They loved her!

    I saw my dad every summer

    My dad visited us in Lousville a few summers.
    My mom and I drove to Springfield as part of our summer adventures a few times.

    And I’m pretty sure I there flew on an airplane by myself a couple of times!
    Such grown-upness 🙂

    I guess there was court-mandated visitation, for my dad to see me, so I think we did one of those things every year.

    More on dad here!

    Leaving safe and cozy Audubon Elementary for rough and tumble 7 – 12 Durrett HS

    Jefferson County schools did the thing where grades 1 through 6 went to a grade school, then grades 7 through 12 all crammed into the same place for junior high AND high school.

    Many more enlightened school boards have actual Junior High Schools to ease the transition, but Louisville did not at that time.

    At least in my case, it was a pretty brutal change:

    • From my nice, safe elementary school where as a 6th grader I was on top of the world …
    • to Durrett High School, a cauldron of transplanted redneck hillbillies trying to figure what to do with themselves in the big city
      (answer: apply for a job at the Ford plant):
      • 7th graders were the most insignificant people on earth.
      • I was literally afraid for my safety entering the Men’s Room (where 17 year old went to steal a smoke) for the first couple of years.

    Memories of Durrett

    • As a November baby, I was always one of the youngest in my class. I think that was more problematic around puberty than before or after.
      • Kids with January birthdays had been driving since the last half of their sophmore year.
      • As a November baby I couldn’t drive until two months into my junior year.
    • Girls in general were such a mystery to me.
    • Like most surburban kids of that era, life could be divided into before you got a drivers license and after:
      • before drivers license – grades 7 to 10
      • 16th Birthday in November 1964, start if Junior year. It’s all different after that!
    • Thanks to my mom’s high school friend Estel Parks of Parks Cherolet, I got a sweet little Corvair sedan.
      • 1968 Corvair 500 coupe 2 door, the rounded look
      • See the title image of this post! My Corvair was like this but a light brown-tan color.
      • engine in the back
        • memorable times filling the “trunk” with ice abd beer and going to the drive in – sweaty!
    • By junior year I was obsesssed with future wife Laura.
      • I don’t think she went the prom with me, I don’t remember who did.
    • Getting into Harvard
      • I hadn’t had much luck making an impression on my future wife until the news got around about the Harvard acceptance letter.
      • My stock went WAY up after that! 🙂
        • All the sudden her Mom was GLAD to see me at the door.

  • Basketball courts I have haunted

    For most of my adult life basketball was very important to me! aaaa

    On an average Saturday afternoon or a workday with daylight left after work, I would get antsy at home. I would put on my beat up basketball shoes and head for my local court.

    It was my exercise, my therapy, my relaxation and a good part of my social life!

    Growing up

    It surprises me to think about this, but I hardly played basketball with my buds in high school. We did all the dorky things high school boys do, but hanging out at the hoops court was not a big thing for me!

    College Dorm Days

    The hoops passion came on me during my lonely sophomore year in Lowell House.

    Harvard freshmen live all together in the Freshman dorms, which are those lovely three-story brick buildings in Harvard Yard that you always see in any Harvard movie or video. Lovely, but there’s no place to play ball! There were no athletic facilities in Harvard Yard, and besides I was too busy figuring out life at the big-time university!

    At the end freshmen year, students are sorted into the nine Houses (very reminiscent of the Sorting Hat in Harry Potter :). I chose to go to Lowell House. This was still the era that Harvard Houses were all boys. Radcliffe girls lived in Radcliffe dorms.

    Literally across Holyoke St from Lowell House was an un-lovely college gym with the un-lovely name of Indoor Athletics Building (IAB for short) which became my home away from home! 🙂

    In the dark of a Massachusetts winter afternoon I would put on in my hoops clothes (gym shorts and beat-up t-shirt) and a hoodie, and pick my way through the slush in my un-waterproof Converse high tops and hop Holyoke Street to the IAB and play myself into a puddle of sweat.

    It was my therapy. There is lotta stress dealing with Harvard – thinking about term papers, about tests and grades, about girls you were never gonna meet, and that were too cool to talk to you even if you did, … but when I got on the court none of that mattered!

    College Off Campus Days

    For my last senior year me and my soon-to-be wife moved to a lovely little block of apartments called Terry Terrace (lol :), off campus across the street from Harvard Law School on Everett Street. The Law School gym was very close, and my undergraduate Harvard card got me in, so I was able to continue using hoops as my escape from it all. Refining my game, such as it was 🙂

    Law school dudes were quite a bit more intense than the undergrad dudes at the IAB. It was great fun!

    We stayed in Cambridge and lived at Terry Terrace for an extra year. I got a job writing software for a Psych professor while I figured out out whether I wanted to go to Psychology grad school or Computer Science grad school.

    I spent a lot of that year at the Law School gym deciding! 🙂

    The decision was that Comp Sci at the U of Maryland College Park was the place for me!

    University of Maryland

    For the three years I was studying at the U of Maryland we lived in a 12-th floor apartment in a high-rise in Adelphi MD. It wasn’t much of a neighborhood, so I did all my playing at the U.

    On nice days I played outside with whatever student riff-raff was there.
    I don’t recall having particular basketball friends, I just showed up and played with whomever was there.
    On crappy days and when I wanted a better game, I played indoors at the gym.

    I have a strong memory of seeing Len Elmore there, where he was treated like the celebrity he was.. He graduated from the U of Maryland in 1974, so it all fits. To be clear I never played on the same court as Len 🙂

    I got my Masters in Computer Science in 1974 and sent out my resumes!

    Court behind our apartment on Kentucky St

    My first entry into the real world of full-time work forever was at the United States Census Bureau, located out in the southeast Maryland suburbs in Suitland MD. We cleverly opted for the reverse commute, living on Capitol Hill downtown and commuting outward to the suburbs.

    We first lived at 225 Kentucky Avenue SE for almost a year. We were in a second floor apartment with a tiny landing on the fire escape where we could open the door and get a little through breeze. There was an inner city elementary school behind us with some crappy little basketball courts

    I would open that door, check out the court and hustle down there if nobody is playing. We only lived there less than a year, butI can still remember standing on the back fire escape checking out the action on the court!

    Eastern Market court

    We left the Kentucky St apartment so we could move into our fancy-but-run-down four story row house on East Capitol St SE! aaaa

    Inside out

    My version of basketball heaven!!!

    This was my most intense basketball time. I was late-20, early 30’s so I had as much energy as I was ever going to have! Every Saturday I would have my coffee then dribble through the alleys and streets (or ride my old clunker bike) down to the full court at Eastern Market.

    North County San Diego hoops…

    Then life happened, and a company moved me and the family from DC to North County San Diego! We again rented from someone for a while until we found a place to buy, but I was in the full local hoops scene the whole time!

    This is a small thing but meaningful to me at the time: San Diego still had an NBA team when we moved there!! The Clippers left later in the 80’s, but there were a couple of years when I could and did cruise down i-5 to the Sports Arena and watch Clips games!

    The little hardware company that moved us to Encinitas kind of imploded after a couple of years, and I went to work for the fellow that sold them their graphics software. The importance of that here is that for the rest of the time we lived in So Cal I worked at home! (woo!)

    Glen Park in Cardiff

    The court pictured below became my home away from home!

    It was a super simple and scenic drive from our little neighborhood:

    • East on Encinitas Blvd to
    • south on Manchester Ave.
      • Manchester hugs the edge of San Elijo Lagoon under I-5 and around the corner to where
    • it becomes San Elijo Avenue
      • Cardiff Beach and the Cardiff little restaurant row is on your left
    • San Elijo straightens out to parallel the railroad tracks and the Coast Highway on the left
    • and within two blocks you are at Glen Park!

      A short and scenic and never crowded drive to get to this little slice of heaven!

      Glenn Park in Cardiff – looks a lot like it did 40 years ago!

      It truly was 40 years ago when I was here 3,4,5 days a week, 1986 to 2026! I am very happy that the court looks basically as it id back then. Possibly a little better maintained today!

      Just a single, non-regulation sized full court. No extra hoops on the side, no frills. The backboards are the tacky elementary school style with the rounded edges.

      So this is not the place to practice your fall-away rainbow three-point bank shot, because that part of the backboard is missing!

      But you can (or as least I can) feel the love that the locals have for this court by how perfectly it is maintained.

      As I recall they mostly played very intense half court games. The right hand court, closer to the beach, was the “main event” court. With the short length and the cheesy backboards, full court just didn’t seem like the thing.

      I could pop over any time after noon and have a decent change of someone being there. By 4:00, almost certainly enough bodies for a 3 on 3. I think we played 4 on 4 sometimes, but I won’t swear to that! 🙂

      The newspaper guys

      Looking back, what was even more meaningful is that most of the friends I made in So Cal were basketball buddies.

      Encinitas Junior high full court

      North to Marin County (90’s)

      First place we found was a rental on the side of the hill in Corte Madera. The Town Park Playground basketball courts were right down the hill!

      Court-wise this was a slight upgrade from Glen Park. A single full court, but a little closer to regularion dimensions and with a square plexiglass backboards like God intended basketball courts to have!

      It was right down the hill from our house, and I was brand new to my company, so I had no work friends yet, so I spend a lot of time there.

      Also, I played a bit in the funky little full court on Bee Street in Sausalito. Part of what attracted me to Autodesk was that I would show up for work in a cool building in Sausalito. Folks from the city coult take the ferry to work, it was pretty awesome,. Sadly though that lasted about two years before the moved to old boring San Rafael by the Civic Center.

      The point here is that I hooked up with a crew of Adesk guys who would play at the Bee Street court!

      Move to Larkspur

      Then we bought a house in Larkspur a couple of miles away. We basically moved from a little south of the Town Park courts in Corte Madera to a little northeast of them in Larkspur. So that remained my go-to weekend court.

      Playin with my Autodesk homies

      Now that I’m back at a real company I have a real schedule! I have to show up at the workplace in the morning and stay all day! sigh…

      But as time went on I played a lot more with my work buddies from Autodesk.

      More at lunch than the arternoon, people wanted to go home in the aternoon. Any also we had a team in the local San Rafael Parks league. We weren’t very goo, but it sure was fun!

      Choose a condo in Reno facing a park with two full courts

      When I was deciding where to live in Reno, the fact that there was a park with two full courts that I could see through the trees from my 3d floor deck was a Big Deal in my decision-making!

      I played there quite a bit in my first few years there, but as I got older the charm wore off.

      The dudes that played there weren’t very good or very likeable for that matter.

      Reno time I’m getting older

      Played at my court quite a bit at first.

      (did I play at the gym?)

      the gym

      the three years I went to U of Maryland

      Basketball was a BIG part of my life until somewhere around in my late 50’s after the Istanbul surgery when I just couldn’t hang with the kids any more and it wasn’t that fun any more.

      I shoulda gone back to tennis at that point, but i didn’t. 🙂

      Scouting Report on ME

      • Strength – not even a little.
      • Speed – average – I was usually not the slowest guy out there
      • Endurance – pretty good.
        I could hang in 3 on 3 games for as long as it took with anybody.
      • Court Awareness – top notch!
      • Secret Ingredient – long arms!

      So … I am not big or strong … nor quick or fast or coordinated but I process information quickly and my arms are longer than the average for a person of my height.

      The latter is not a big deal in most life situations, but a hand that stretches and inch or so farther than you think it will can be helpful on the basketball court.

      Hong Kong Interlude

      Going through the steno pad that I used to keep track of our Tour of the Orient I found that I actually played local pickup basketball with the kids in the park not too far from our hotel. We were out exploring one day, and I noted a game that at the level where I could plausibly ask to play, so I went back the next day and did it. They were very nice and I held up my end by passing instead of shooting, paying attention to boxing out and all those little thing that make your teammates like you, and it was (I think) enjoyed by all concerned! 🙂

      For most of my adult life, basketball was a pretty important part of my life. On a run-of-the-mill Saturday afternoon, or a run-of-the-mill workday with some daylight left after work, I would very likely hop out of the house and walk or drive to my local court. That was my exercise and a good part of my social life.

      I intentionally said “adult life”, because I played very little in high school. As I remember it, it was not a “thing” to me at all!

      Those lonely first couple of years at Harvard is where I got the bug. The unlovely building for undergrad indoor athletics had the very functional name Indoor Athletic Building, or IAB for short. It was literally across the street from Lowell House, so even in the winter I could just hop over there.

      I am not athletic in any way.

      I’m not fast, but was of probably average speed. There were some people I could outrun.

      Ditto on quickness. I was at best average in those hand-slapping games one to one, but I like to think I was better than average at seeing which way things were going and getting to that loose ball just a little bit quicker than the other guy.

      Strength – not even a little. Endurance – pretty good. I could hang with 3 on 3’s for four hours or so with anybody.

      U of Md gym

      Len Elmore!

      Court behind us at Kentucky St

      Eastern Market court

      – my heaven!!!

      Cardiff Park – go many hours…

      Encinitas Junior high full court with the news guys

      Other locals

      Reno time I’m getting older

      Played at my court quite a bit at first.

      (did I play at the gym?)

      the gym

      stuff

    • Life through college

      I’ve had a pretty great life really.

      Nothing dramatic or too exciting, and certainly not by explicit design, but I’ve lived in really nice places and enjoyed them well.

      Big Picture overview:

      I was a pretty good software guy back in the day and opportunities to move to different really nice places presented themselves to us for a few decades when I was young and “hot” :), first on the East Coast then we went for the glamor and opportunity of life out West!

      Here is my story in brief, in one of those bullet lists the new WordPress makes me love so much:

      • 1948-49 – Long Beach CA – Dad was in the army – I was born.
      • 1950-54 – Springfield MO – pre-school
      • 1954-66 – Louisville KY – grade school -> high school -> escape to a coast!
      • 1966-71 – Cambridge MA – Harvard College + extra year
      • 1971-75 – Adelphi MD – University of Maryland
      • 1975-81 – Washington DC – U S Census Bureau
      • 1981-91 – Encinitas CA – Superset Corp, then Zenographics
      • 1991-95 – Larkspur CA – Autodesk
      • 1995-05 – Mill Valley CA- Autodesk
      • 2005-23 – Reno NV – contract programming, then retire
      • 2023-24 – Chico CA – get sick
      • 2024-… – Rohnert Park CA – be old

      1949-49 – Long Beach CA

      Dad was in the Army, assigned to a military hospital in Long Beach.

      While we were there, my older brother died at age 9 or 10 of rheumatic fever (1949). This broke up my parent’s marriage.

      So when the Army was ready to move everybody back to where they came from at the end of the war, our family was kind of a mess.

      1950-54 – Springfield MO

      The whole crew – Mom, Dad (now divorced), me and my sister – all moved to Springfield MO in 1950-ish, the area my dad’s people were from around.

      All of us living in the same area was the easiest and cheapest way to maintain visitation rights and all that stuff.

      The Freemans were minor gentry out towards Willard MO.
      My dad’s cousins were doctors and lawyers, not farmers and train conductors like my mom’s people.

      I was pre-school age, 2-6.

      My mom was figuring out her life after suddenly becoming single.
      She spent a lot of time with her best friend Marguerite.
      I barely remember her, but here’s to you Marguerite for supporting my mom then!

      1954-66 – Louisville KY – 1626 Ehrler Drive, 40213

      Springfield was all about his family.

      My mom wanted to be closer to her family. The closest civilization to where she grew up in English IN was Louisville KY, where she went to nursing school.

      We moved there in the summer of ’54 when I was 5 years old, so I would start school at the school I would stay at.

      Suburban Louisville was a great place to grow up. Most of the families in our neighborhood were Italian Catholic or German Catholic. In the big waves of European (white) immigration way back in the day, Louisville and our part of the midwest absorbed a lot of Italians and Germans, hardly any Irish Catholics for some reason.

      [It was a shock to move to the Boston area where Irish Catholics rule the world. :)]

      Also the single mom thing was pretty unusual in our neighborhood. I still remember a conversation that happened more than once when I would go to a new friend’s house where:

      “Oh, where does your daddy work Johnny?”
      “Oh it’s just me and my mom, my parents are divorced.”
      … uncomfortable silence …

      Folks talk forever about whether Louisvilleis a midwestern city (on the Ohio River, Cincinnati closeby), or a southern city (Kentucky Derby, mint juleps :). It felt midwestern to me.
      But it is definitely the heartland in either case.

      For me, it kinda had the best of both worlds – southern accents without the deep-south racism.

      I was lucky to be growing up there when Wes Unseld attended the University of Louisville.

      There was the one magic year when Westley Unseld was a freshman, and a local restaurant called the Ranch House gave out free tickets to the Freshman games

      On the big night of a game me and my buddy Ekim (Mike) would …

      • be dropped off at the restaurant by a parent.
      • We would eat our Ranchburgers and get our tickets.
      • Clutching our tickets,
        • we would walk across the field behind the restaurant to the Fairgrounds entry road clogged with game-goers,
        • walk under the freeway and past the parking toll gates
        • onward to Freedom Hall, the hallowed ground where UL basketball has been played for decades (“a great view from every seat!”)
      • Unseld so dominated the freshmen on the other teams that each game was a curb-stomping.
        • We would enjoy it, then a parent would pick us up outside after the game!
      • That season was 1964 – 1965.
        So I was a junior and Ekim was a sophomore!

      What memories!

      My schools in Louisville:

      • 1954-1960 – John James Audobon Elementary
      • 1960-1966 – Sally Phillips Durrett High School

      Jefferson County was very busy building new schools for us baby boomer kids. They didn’t mess around with separate schools for middle school and high school: it was grades 1 through 6 in the first school, grades 7 through 12 in the second!

      Going from cozy, safe Audubon Elementary to huge, overcrowded, under-staffed, lower class (redneck even!) Durrett High School was a major trauma in my young life!

      I remember genuine fright venturing into the Men’s Room, where there might be seniors in James Dean white tees with rolled-up sleeves sneaking a smoke! I was the lowest form of life, a 7-th grader!

      1966-67 – Cambridge MA – 55 Matthews Hall – Harvard College

      Harvard College, bless them, gave me an opportunity to escape the heartland and head for a coastal city.
      I never even came close to returning to the heartland for the rest of my life. I was bi-coastal until Reno in my last few years. Culturally, Reno-Tahoe (as they like to call it) is an extension of the Bay Area in my book.

      Freshman year, Harvard assigned me to Matthews Hall, first building on your left as you enter Harvard Yard from the Square. Could not have asked for anything more Harvard-y than that!

      Matthews is in the southeast corner of what they call “Old Harvard Yard”, the iconic quadrangle of red brick, ivy-covered buildings criss-crossed by diagonal walkways. I didn’t really appreciate it at the time so much, but it was actually really cool

      1967-69 – Cambridge MA – Lowell House – Harvard College

      So all of the freshmen men are thrown together for the first year, then they are scattered into the House system for the rest of their undergraduate years. In that era it was literally all men. The female persons were up the street at their own college – Radcliffe.

      The house you were assigned to fell out of a complex weighing of competing needs including

      • where you wanted to live,
      • who you wanted to live with,
      • whether a House wanted you,
      • and whether the want the whole crew you wanted to live with, and …
      • who’s left over!

      I lucked out, I was assigned to an extremely cool room with my fellow Louisvillian Orest and two other compatible fellows on the second floor of Lowell House. The other two fellows had spent their high school years in prep school, so they were well adapted to dorm life.

      It was four bedrooms in a row with the bathroom in the middle and a door at each end. I do remember it was centered over the side entrance on Plympton Street, so you would come out of Entryway N or Entryway O depending on from which direction you exit our suite!

      Junior year, I hooked with four other fellows to share a really interesting room on the third floor. That is the top floor, so had a garret-ish feel.. It was one long living room on the west side, and five bedrooms on a row on the east. The windows were cut into the dormers to give it that “living in the attic” feel. 🙂

      The room had a lot of potential, but we weren’t too compatible as roommates.

      It’s pretty ironic that I liked the roommates that Harverd chose for me better that the ones I chose for myself!

      1969-1971 – Cambridge – Terry Terrace – 21 Everett St

      My future wife Laura graduated Durrett High in Louisville two years after me and moved to the Boston area that summer. I have a vague memory of a flat on Beacon Hill for one first summer, but sadly don’t remember more.

      My senior year I moved off campus and we lived in a nifty apartment building right across the street from Harvard Law School, with the very cool name of Terry Terrace. :))

      Summer 1970 I applied to one Psychology program and one Computer Science PhD program. I think I was rejected by Stanford Computer Science and didn’t like the Psych program I got into that much, so we stuck around a Terry Terrace an extra year. Laura could continue her schooling at Boston U and I would try my luck again in 1971!

      That in-between year turned out to be a lot of fun!

      I showed up for work every day at the William James Psychology Building to work for Professor Olivier.

      Laura went to Boston University Nursing School and we hung out with the good friends we had made. Some through Harvard connections but mostly Louisville connections (long story…).

      Oh and I played a LOT of basketball at the Law School Gym!
      Law Schoolers are more intense than undergraduates (surprise!)

      This ends my life in New England.

      Life in the DC Metroplex starts in the next post.

    • Remembering my dad

      I actually don’t know that much about my dad. All the more reason to memorialize it here.

      ancestors.com says this:

      Hal Elson Freeman MD

      • born on 22 August 1907, in Willard, Missouri.
      • married my mom on 14 June 1934.
      • died on 13 July 1963, in Springfield, Missouri.

      Here is info from his Death Certificte:

      • Hal E. Freeman
      • death: July 13, 1963 no autopsy
        • died in Professional Building Parking Log, 633 E Elm St
        • On a hot summer day in the parking lot outside the Professional Building where his doctor’s office was.
        • died of arteriosclerotic heart disease (had for 11 years)
        • buried 7/17/63 at Robberson Prairie Cemetery (north of Springfield)
      • born: 8/22/07
      • age: 55
      • occupation: physician
      • in Army in W W 2 (from Flavius B Freeman)
      • Greene County Missouri.
      • Lived in Springfield for 15 years

      Mother: Marguerite Day Shelledy
      Father: John Guy Freeman

      Children:
      Hal Elson Freeman (aka Butchie) – 1937 – 1946 – born Cleveland OH
      Milly Margaret Freeman – 1940 – 2017
      John Philip Freeman (ME!) – 1948 – present

      I know shamefully little about his life.
      I was never with him for longer than about two weeks at a time in my whole life!

      His people came from the Ozark hills, north and west of Springfield Missouri.
      The town names are Williard (county seat of Greene County), and Ebenezer, a very small town where my older brother Butchie is buried.

      I think the Freemans were kind of a big deal in their little part of the world — landed gentry on a local scale.

      His horizons were wide enough that he applied to medical school and went all the way to Kentucky for the University of Louisville which not too many folks did in the 1930’s did I’m guessing!

      His cousin Flavius became a big deal Springfield lawyer.
      The internet tells me he was Democratic Party Chairman of Greene Co 1958-1960, and that he interviewed Harry Truman in 1960!

      His page on: Ancestry.com

      I’ve tried to piece together my parents’ lives in the 1930’s and 40’s.

      other children:
      Butchie (Hal Elson Jr) in Cleveland in 1937.
      Milly was born in Cleveland in 1940

      So between 1940, and by somewhere in 1941-42 the family left Cleveland and settled in Long Beach CA, at the behest of the US Army.

      Dad was a doctor at the military hospital in Long Beach. My mom sat on her nursing credentials while she raised two young children, one of whom was already having serious symptoms.

      Butchie (Hal Jr) died 1949(*) of complications of rheumatic fever. That sad event essentially blew up the family.

      (*)Ancestors.com says he died in 1946, but I remember my mom telling me I was a little baby when he was dying, so I’m sticking with my memories of hearing 1949.

      I was a normal, cute little healthy, happy baby.
      My mom and my sister put a lot of energy into making sure I was that way!

      It couldn’t have been easy:

      • going to my room and make me feel secure and loved and that the world was a good place, then
      • going to the next room where my older brother was slowly succumbing to rheumatic fever.

      They took the brunt of it. My sister especially who was 8 or 9 at the time. Thanks to them I grew up relatively unscathed. Although my therapist told me that’s why I am sort of a “pleaser” … my place in any given group is to make sure everyone gets along and not make unnecessary waves about my needs.

      Growing up in Louisville my Mom made it happen that my dad and I spend time together every summer.
      We never did holidays together, none of that stuff, just once a year in the summer.
      Sounds court-mandated to me.

      Some summers my mom drove us to Springfield where she still had friends. My mom is where I got the travel bug 🙂 (travel posts coming later 🙂

      A few times my dad drove or flew to Louisville.

      At least once my mom put little grade-school me on an old propeller plane to fly to Springfield … all by myself! That was VERY exciting.

      I don’t remember a lot about when he visited us. I imagine it was pretty stressful for my mother.

      One time I must have been annoying because he swatted me (just a little swat!), and boy did that cause a scene!! I don’t even remember the swat, but I remember how mad my mom was about it and how thoroughly she reamed him out abut it.

      The times I visited him were quite fun (for me anyway!).

      It was a big deal to him that the Air Force rejected him to be a pilot because of his bad heart. He was bummed about that for the rest of his life … which wasn’t that long because of his bad heart … so there you go!

      FROM MOM post:

      She met my dad who was in Universite of Louisville Medical School – Hal Elson Freeman

      • He also grew up in the country – a little town outside Springfield MO
        • However, unlike my mom’s family who were farmers, his family were local gentry. My cousins (who I barely knew) were lawyers and doctors, certainly not farmers!
        • Milly was more familiar with them, she must have been in junior high when we moved to Louisville. She did NOT like them!
          • Uncle Flavius Freeman (what a name!) handled the legal business of my tidying up my dad’s affairs.
          • It was probably kind of a mess
            • debentures (whatever those are) for drilling oil leases (good!)
            • partial interest in a couple of uranium mines in the Ozarks (bad!)
          • Milly was quite sure he was robbing her.
            I don’t think so, but it wouldn’t shock me.
      • Dad got his MD at the University of Louisville Medical School somewhere in the 30’s … where he met my mom of course!

      New thoughts

      Not really new new, but thoughts that I have appended after I committed this post to the internet. (Feb 2026)

      Here’s an undiscovered old thought:

      4/19/93 – I called Milly on her birthday. Got some history:
      My dad left at about age 42, and moped about it for the rest of his life.

      That would put it in 48-49, earlier than I thought. That would in fact put it before I was born!

      Hanging with my dad in the Missouri summer

      I am starting a new Jack Reacher book, and the action so far is all taking place in a remote and kinda sleepy Ozarks backwater town.

      I thought “hey my Dad took me to just places just like this!”

      The criminals are meeting in a “cave” that’s really a man-made tunnel that was built as a gold scam in the early nineteen hundreds. Then it had a new life as a uranium scam in the 50’s and 60, and is a place for this criminal enterprise to store their heavy equipment.

      The trigger is that I was in a place exactly like that cave somewhere in the 1958-1962 range! My dad died in the summer of 1963. I musta been at least 10 years old to even remember it, which means the counter starts in 1958.

      We called it a “cave”, but it was obvious to even me that it was a man-made hole in the ground. I actually remember my dad being shown a very at hard, heavy chunk of rock that really was uranium ore! Whether it actually came from that cave is another matter. 🙂

      Why a Dermatologist and where did that money come from?

      The bit above about getting woo’ed to invest in a sketchy uranium mine made me think a bit about my dad’s family. The fact that he was worth being wooed by investment people (in the 50’s!) implies that there were some discretionary savings to go after. He was a practicing MD after all, so there probably was.

      He had a one-person medical practice in the Professional Building in Springfield MO. The anchor of the place was a drug store (handy to the medical offices), part of a local chain called Crank’s Drugs.

      [That’s what it was really called, no joke! 🙂 … If you search it google thinks you’re asking about drug addicts.]

      The building was at the corner of Kimbrough and Cherry. His apartment was a short half-block away on Elm St.

      • He would pick me up at the airport after I’d been put on the plane by mom in Louisville.
      • Stay at my Dad’s third story walk-up on Elm St.
        • Whatever money he was making he didn’t spend it on lifestyle! 🙂
      • While he was seeing patients I would hang out at the lunch counter at the drug store. They would treat me like minor royalty, which was fun!

    • Remembering my mom

      Growing up on the farm

      My mother, Mildred Irene Real, was born on Feb 8, 1911, in English, Indiana.

      • There is some nice writing about where my mom grew here also!
      • Hospitals weren’t really an option for country people back then,
        even the doctor’s office was too far away.
        I think she was born right there in the family farmhouse.
      • The closest settlement big enough to have a post office and a school was English Indiana.
      • She thought of herself as coming from Temple Indiana, a tiny unincorporated collection of 4 or 5 farms centered around the Southern Railroad tracks and a county road and the creek.
      • They walked to school in English, 3-ish miles away. They walked on the railroad track rather than the road. The tracks were straighter and graded better!
      • She had five full brothers from her mom and two half-sisters from a different mom. They were a lot older.
        • Four of her brothers were older, one younger.
          • I think that was rough for her, being the only girl with 4 older brothers.
          • She learned early to keep her own council and how to get along with big, not-very-sensitive men.
            A valuable skill in her life as a nurse and then as a single mom.
          • As she remembers it, her brothers teased her a lot.
        • I remember a very vivid story that on a frigid winter day walking to school on the tracks and her asshole brothers tricked her into putting her tongue on the rail. It froze to the metal instantly and she has a very painful time getting it unstuck. The brothers got the tanning they deserved when she told her mom!
        • One brother, Charles was younger. He was spoiled be everybody.
          • She felt she had to mother him and protect him from the older boys.
        • When I was young, we would drive over to that part of Indiana at least once a month, often more. There were two brothers we would see every time.
          • Uncle Omer lived in a nice little house along the highway in Temple.
            • About a mile or so away from original family farm where she was born.
              • The original farm was across the railroad tracks and a creek. The old road is long gone, so nowadays it’s reachable only with 4-wheel drive.
            • The sign for unincorporated Temple was still right there, at the edge of their front yard!
          • My other uncle, Uncle Temple (named for the little town I guess) lived “in town”, in English, on the same highway as Omer, but a few miles further west at the edge of town, right where the highway makes a sharp right turn from going past the high school to being the main east-west street.
        • Where were the other brothers and sisters?
          • Uncle Charles, the youngest (the spoiled one), lived in New Albany.
          • Uncle Wayne (the quiet one) lived in Marion Indiana.
        • As to the two older half sisters:
          • Aunt Vada (the nice one) and her hubby John Ike lived in a little house in Terre Haute IN. They were super quiet.
            • I really enjoyed visiting them!
              It was kinda slow, but very pleasant.
          • Aunt Hurcel (the crabby one) offered the opposite experience. She would start complaining about something as soon as we walked through the door and did not stop complaining til we left. The subject was usually her husband Ellis.
            Ellis Toney was the owner of the Mobil gas station next door to their house in Marengo IN.
            • By the time I was old enough to notice things, Ellis and Hurcel had settled into a mutual non-aggression pact where she had the house to herself and he lived in his “fishing cabin” outside of town on the Blue River.
            • He would drive in from the fishing cabin every day to work at the gas station literally 50 yards Hurcel’s house.
            • Every day Ellis would walk up the path from the gas station to the back door of the house, Hurcel would fix him lunch.
            • She would bring him a sandwich and he would eat in silence while she bitched about his shortcomings and every little thing in the world until he was done eating … when
            • He would trudge back to the gas station for the afternoon, and then home to the fishing cabin … then do it all again tomorrow.
            • He was a nice enough fellow at the gas station, but he pretty much stayed mute at Hurcel’s table. Who could blame him!
              He didn’t argue or respond, he just took it and went back to work.
              I dare say she had worn him out years ago.
            • Their grandkids (my second cousins) Richard and Rita Ann lived with their parents (my first cousins) a mile or so away down the highway in Marengo.
              Richard and I were born on the very exact same day – Nov 4, 1948!
      • The highway went through Marengo, past the gas station and Hurcels’ house, past Omer’s place in Temple, then past Temple’s place in English . It was old State Route 64.
        • Google maps shows that the state has improved it and moved it north, so it bypasses all these places except Marengo, which evidently has grown while English has shrunk … which shows what effect the highway has!
          • I guess the road where my uncles live is no longer a highway, it’s just an under-maintained county road. 🙂
        • Back in my day, which was the 50’s and early 60’s, my mom and I must have driven that road 20 times a year.
          • Drive more or less north to the George Rogers Clark Bridge to New Albany.
          • Bear left through the western suburbs of New Albany to pick up …
          • SR 64 to Marengo/English and all those relatives,
        • OR maybe we went to Corydon first SR 62.
          • To visit more relatives
          • or to get our Chevy sedan serviced at Parks Chevrolet
            • Always a sedan, always a Chevy, always huge back then.
          • Estel Parks was (I think!!) an old boyfriend. In any event they had a little something going, and he always hooked her up on a real nice late-model Chevy sedan

      Everybody liked my mom, and she had a way of enforcing her “ways” without making a big deal of it.

      Leaving the farm

      As far as I know, my mom was the only sibling that escaped Indiana, and for sure the only one that got any kind of degree beyond high school.

      She left and went to the Louisville General Hospital Nursing School. Not sure what years somewhere in the early 1930’s.

      She met my dad who was in University of Louisville Medical School – Hal Elson Freeman. He became an MD in 1934. His story is here.

      They got married right after graduation.

      I was the last of three children:

      • brother Butchie (Hal Jr), born 1937.
        • He died 1949 of rheumatic fever.
        • My father was never the same, and it broke up our family.
      • sister Milly, born in April 1940.
      • me! born November 1948.

      My dad had heart issues all the way back then.

      We know this for sure because the Air Force would not take him even though he was an MD and World War 2 was going on.

      The Army however, would take anybody with a pulse, especially a doctor!

      So that’s how my mom, my dad, my sister and my brother (and the idea of me 🙂 ended up in a little bungalow in Long Beach CA somewhere in the early 40’s!

      I know no details, but Butchie died of rheumatic fever in 1949. I was 1½ (Nov 4, 1948), Milly was 9, and he must have been 10 or 11, which must have been just heartbreaking for everybody!!!

      Milly was old enough to be scarred by that for life.

      Family lore is that my dad was a high strung person anyway, and the fact that he, a medical doctor, couldn’t stop this from happening to his oldest son was devastating to him.

      I always told myself I was too young to have been much affected, but a little therapy in the 90’s showed that I was old enough to pick up that folks greeted my cute little toddler self with a smile but they were otherwise very sad all the time, no matter how cute I tried to be. So I became something of a “pleaser”, trying to make sure everyone in the room is happy.

      Here in the hellhole of the Trump Era, my social media still has a lot posts about how women have a tough time in the world, and makes me think about my mom and what kind of crap she may have gone through as a single mom in the 50’s. I know nothing about it really, but I do know that respect for women is bred into my bones, maybe even to the point of messing up my relationship life a little….

      After WW 2 – Back to the midwest

      I lived with my mom in a rental house in some nice suburb, and my dad was ended up in a third floor walk-up apartment on Cherry St around the corner from his office.

      I think Dad lived in the same place from when we moved back in 1950-ish until he died in 1963. A nice 3-story red brick building, he had the right hand half of the top floor. His office was in a “professional building” right around the corner. He lived on Elm ST, but worked on Cherry as I remember it. But all traces if both building seem to have been wiped out by a massive expansion of Southwest Missouri State. 🙂

      We moved to Louisville in 1954. The story of what all these moves meant to me is here.

      Working as a nurse in Louisville

      When we moved to Louisville my mom entered the working world at her old alma mater – Louisville General Hospital – as a regular RN.

      She worked in a clinic, not ward. It was on the 3d floor as I recall. I think it was the Hand Clinic. All the doctors that I remember were quiet, polite Indian fellows. They loved her steady, un-racist presence!

      When I was in 2nd grade I would take the city bus from outside my grade school downtown to the Hospital, and go hang out in the hospital coffee shop (they had one of those back then 🙂 until my mom got off work and we would drive home together. That’s how she solved the daycare problem!!

      Somewhere in the late 50’s (late in elementary school), she switched jobs to be a different kind of nurse! Instead of a staff nurse at the hospital, she went to work for the government as a visiting nurse!
      I think she did it so she could control her schedule a bit and be home when I got home from school! No more bus rides to downtown Louisville! 🙂

      It may have paid more . .. it should pay more because it carried quite a bit more risk!

      Driving her own car around the mean streets of the West End of Louisville, trying to run down folks who had a concerning result on some kind of cancer screening to convince them to go to the hospital for follow-up. A unknown white lady knocking on your door is not a welcome thing in some parts of town.

      Really, it was a very brave thing for her to do! Just her little ole late 50’s self:

      • white nurses uniform,
      • white nurses cap
      • white skin,
      • gray hair (she was prematurely gray as long as I can remember),
      • cruising in her big ole 1957 white Chevy Impala …
      • which she would park in the sketchiest parts of Louisville to go knock on doors.

      The cutest little part of it was that she carried a golf ball in her purse as part of her standard equipment! 🙂
      She used it to save her knuckles since she had to knock on so many doors!

      She was a kind of a super star at what she did in her quiet way. The hospital loved her, she had a very high success rate compared to the national averages. She was successful because the patients they visited also mostly loved her!

      Visitations

      It was court-mandated (I think) that I see my dad at least once a year. In practice that meant I visited Springfield or he visited Louisville every summer.

      • He visited us at our house in Louisville a few times.
      • Mom and I drove to Missouri as our summer adventure a couple of times(?).
      • One special summer I actually flew there unaccompanied(!) on one of those puddle-jumper prop-jets. It was so cool being fussed over by the stewardesses for the whole trip!
      • More on my dad’s side of all is this here.