Back in the Day

Cheerleaders vs. The Band

2009-01-15T08:01:00.000-08:00

Anne and I stayed friends through high school even though we developed separate friend groups for awhile.

Anne was a cheerleader, and I remember her being very good. Many of the other cheerleaders did not smile very much, but Anne actually looked and acted like a cheerleader. She appeared bouncy and happy, and I think she really loved it. A lot of girls maybe wanted to be a cheerleader so that they could say, “I am a cheerleader.” Anne was one of the cheerleaders who actually wanted to cheer. Maybe it was her dance background.

The trumpet section
Originally uploaded by erinealberty

I, meanwhile, ascended the social peaks of debate team and band.

Sometimes we were mean to the cheerleaders. At football games, they had to perform a dance to the school song whenever a touchdown was scored. Our school song, by the way, was recognized yearly in The Des Moines Register as the worst school song in Iowa. The words went like this:
     Ottumwa High will always be our school,
     and we'll ever love her true.
     We'll yell for her, we'll fight for her
     and, my, what we won't do.
     We'll put her on the map and we'll see that she stands pat,
     for we love her true, we do.
     North side, south side, all around the town,
     we'll all join in together to root for OHS.
     In football, basketball, any kind of sport,
     we'll cheer 'em on to victory for dear ol' OHS.
     Rah, rah, rah for Ottumwa.
          La veevo, la vivo, la veevo vivo vum.
          Johnny got a rat trap, bigger than a cat trap.
          Johnny got a rat trap, bigger than a cat trap.
          La veevo, la vivo, sis boom bah.
          Ottumwa High School, rah, rah, rah.

It's a really hard song to punctuate.

Anyway, after those touchdowns we in the band deliberately would play the song so fast that it was nearly impossible for the cheerleaders to keep the dance together. In 9th grade, two cheerleaders famous for their eating disorders (not Anne) staggered over to the conductor, whose tempo we had opted to ignore after the most recent touchdown.

"Could you guys (pant, pant) PLEEEASE take the school song (pant, pant) a little (pant) slower? We're having a hard time (pant, pant) keeping up."

A trumpet player stood up.

"You know, you need FOOD for energy!"

And that's sort of how it went between Anne's social circle and mine.

Fortunately, she is a forgiving person.

Dancing

2008-11-24T23:15:00.000-08:00

Your mom took dance lessons all the way through high school, and she was a beautiful ballerina. I quit after junior high because I looked like I was wiping mud off my feet, but your mom looked so effortless.

One year we performed The Nutcracker. It was better than the dumb slide show at school. Our class got to perform the battle between the rats and the nutcracker soldiers. We had plastic swords and tap shoes. It was pretty fun. Another year we got to be the flamingos in Alice and Wonderland. We had hot pink feathers all over our leotards.

One of my favorite memories of your mom was her senior ballet solo. She was 17, and she was playing the Little Match Girl in a recital about fairy tales. She danced so beautifully and emotionally that my mom and I cried while we watched her from the audience.

Mean girls, nice girls, Satanic girls

2008-11-23T19:30:00.000-08:00

The Caste

The girls at Evans Junior High School quickly were stacked into a caste system that determined how vulnerable they would be to rumors, harassment, depantsing, fist fights, pranks and general derision.

The classifications were as follows:

1. Rightfully, Predictably and Famously Popular: Fun, Pretty, Not Too Mean
2. Rich, Pretty And/Or Athletic: Popular Without Being Fun Or Nice
3. Bully: Not Subject To Normal Caste Rules Because She Will Bloody Your Face
4. Beneficiary: Has Enough Clout With The Popular Girls To Be Somewhat Terrifying
5. Moderately Popular
6. Seeks Refuge In Anonymity
7. A Droplet In The Vast Sea of Victims

I think Anne hovered around Class Five, but survival instincts drove all of us to Class Four and Class Six from time to time. Junior high girls in Ottumwa were violent and cruel.

A group of Twos and Threes once targeted a Six by surrounding her and concocting a conversation about how they all shave their faces. They wanted to see if they could intimidate her into claiming she shaved her face.

"Don't you hate shaving?" they asked her.

She buckled and told them she cuts her chin and gets razor burn. They spread this around the whole school.

On Halloween, a Three put fake blood on several girls' chairs.
I remember one Super Three. She had blond hair, icy eyes, big legs and a Missouri twang when she'd cuss out the teachers. She was in my music class, where she'd throw crumpled papers at a girl who had a glass eye.

"You're ugly!" she'd hiss repeatedly.

Then she set the girl's hair on fire.

My music class (Super Three and victim not pictured):

Threes, and sometimes Twos, would pluck victims from the lower rungs at random. For weeks on end, they'd threaten to beat up some girl and scream at her on the school bus, where she couldn't leave. It never would be clear why they were so mad. We Fives would camp out in Class Six for awhile, even if we were friends of the victim.

The victim understood, as she knew she would not be there for us when it was our turn.

Notebooks

In junior high, the girls bought notebooks to trade friendly notes with other girls. We'd get one notebook for each friend, and we'd decorate the covers with headlines we had cut out of magazines — usually Teen or Seventeen. After writing each note, we folded the pages into triangles that gradually stacked into elaborate, jagged patterns between the covers.

I can't remember if the school banned them or if we just got tired of them.

Slumber parties

Your mom had really good parties. The basement in her new home on Raynan Drive was finished, and a dozen or more girls would sprawl out in sleeping bags to watch movies and play games. One time we watched Arachnophobia, which was a pretty bad movie, but we all were scared. It was about a venomous breed of spider that takes over a small town.

Another time we played Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board. There were a handful of creepy slumber party dares kids would play to scare themselves. In one, everyone was supposed to gather in front of a mirror at midnight and chant “Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary,” and the queen Bloody Mary was supposed to emerge from the reflection and kill everybody. That was a too much for us, so we did not play it.

Light as a Feather was more our speed. One person would lie on the floor, and the others would sit in a circle around her. We’d chant, “Light as a feather, stiff as a board, light as a feather, stiff as a board.” That was supposed to cause the person lying down to die temporarily and make her really light and stiff. Then we’d put our pointer fingers under her and try to pick her up.

I don’t remember it ever working. But I do think some of the more religious girls believed we might go to hell if we kept trying.

Girls sorting things out at Evans Jr. High:

Anne peers out from behind Tammy, the girl in the center.

Lunchroom society

Cheerleader captain in training.

Junior high

2008-11-22T19:18:00.000-08:00

In 7th grade, all the kids in town went to the same school. Anne and I got to go to school together for the first time since third grade.

The school was big and wild and smelly. The teachers were incredibly strict and wouldn't let us go to the bathroom very often. We had to go outside after lunch for 20 minutes or so, and most teachers wouldn't let us get our coats first -- even in winter. The kids who were lucky enough to visit their lockers before lunch were obligated to share their coats. I remember getting one arm of someone's coat while another girl huddled in the back and a third girl got the other arm.

Coat-sharing on the junior high schoolyard:

There was no end to the shenanigans. Fist fights broke out at least weekly in the lunchroom. One girl supposedly took some drug -- maybe it was No Doze -- and started screaming about spiders one day. Kids threw plastic bottles at the head of one boy on the school bus and put their boogers on his seat. Sheet music from singing class would appear in the schoolyard, having been tossed out the window by students.

A probable future fight in the lunchroom (between boys at center):

Home Ec

The worst stuff happened in Home Economics. In 7th grade, we took cooking class with a teacher who was obese and had a hearing aid. Students supposedly would whisper to her so she would turn her hearing aid all the way up and ask, "Say that again?" Then the students would yell and hurt her ears. I never saw that, but I heard about it from a lot of other kids. In my class, students would hum incessantly because she couldn't hear direction in her hearing aid.

The only food we ever made in home ec was sweets, and at the end of the term we'd host a "tea party" for our parents. There would be seasonal decorations, and we'd serve food we made in class. I remember seeing a pie filled with so much hair that it looked like someone had baked a wig into it. I ate one cookie, and it tasted like Tylenol was in the dough. At one tea party, the students supposedly set fire to a floral paper backdrop. The teacher told us there had been fires at the tea parties before.

Things got even worse in 8th grade sewing. Our teacher was very spacey, and we all were pretty sure she was drunk. We became more certain when she was fired two years after our class. We had just two sewing projects — a beanbag and a pair of boxer shorts — but a lot of people never finished their projects and still passed.

One reason so few people finished is that my class went through all the students' sewing boxes and stole all the straight pins. We carpeted the floor with them. Then we took the thread and strung it around the back of the room.

There was a rumor that a kid in another class lit a firecracker in his sewing machine and threw it out the window.

Mishaps abounded.
Disputes were settled.
It was a productive learning environment.
And still no one was killed those two years.

Church

2008-11-21T18:00:00.000-08:00

During elementary school, your mom’s family started attending the Presbyterian church, where my family took me. They had gone to Methodist church before that and went back when Anne was in high school.

Our church had a lot of young families, and we got to do fun things. There were ice cream socials and choir dinners. Our Sunday school class sponsored a Haitian boy named Roudli. We sent him money for school supplies and clothing. We organized church chili dinners and other fundraisers for him.

The kids sometimes put on plays for church services. Once we did a play about St. Francis of Assisi, and all the kids dressed up as animals. We had a traditional Christmas pageant, and Anne and I did a ballet dance as angels with two other girls.

I once was really jealous of your mom because she got to dress up as a mouse for a Christmas play about Silent Night. The story was that three mice ate the leather bellows in a pipe organ on Christmas Eve in this little church in Germany. The music
director had to come up with new music for the service, so he wrote the song Silent Night and played his guitar. In the play, Anne got to be a mouse and do a ballet dance with the choir.

We had church on Sundays and Wednesdays. Wednesday church was for choir and structured playtime with lessons. It was called Logos. We didn't like the work sheets, but there were some theme nights with corresponding dinners. That was fun.

Each week, one kid was supposed to bring after-school treats. This was especially important when we were older, because our school cafeterias served all the kids — even 6th graders — the same portions they were serving the kindergarteners. We’d arrive at church famished.

One week, a boy named Troy forgot to bring the treats. We all surrounded him and chanted, “We want treats! We want treats!” We chased him up a tree, and then he ran away to the YMCA across town, where his mother was working.

We all got in a LOT of trouble when our parents found out about that. I was grounded for the first time in my life. You should ask your mom what her punishment was.

Music lessons

2008-11-20T15:20:00.000-08:00

Your mom and I first sang together in the church choir, which was way more fun than school music class.

The school music teacher was a difficult woman. She always scrunched up her nose when she played the piano, I think because the line in her trifocals made the keys look blurry. She kept a bunch of fun percussion instruments on the wall and never let us play them. At Christmas time, she became obsessed with this fruity little carol called “A Caroling We Go.” Then she’d make us watch a slide show of The Nutcracker. Slide shows were old-fashioned even in your mom’s day. A drawing the Sugar Plum Fairy would appear on the projection screen while a speaker played a tinny excerpt of the music.

Why would you show a ballet in still pictures? Worse yet, it didn’t even show photos of real dancers. They were cartoons.

I think this music teacher had been a hippie at some point because she kept making us sing Woody Guthrie songs. We had to sing “This Land is Your Land” almost every day. She didn’t let us sing the awesome verses about trespassing -- just the boring lines about golden valleys and ribbons of highway. We changed the words to: “This land is my land, it isn’t your land. I got a shotgun, and you don’t got one. If you don’t get off, I’ll blow your head off. This land was made for me, not you.”

We also had to learn that song for the 4th grade recorder concert. That was awful: a wall of 400 kids blasting out-of-tune recorders in unison inside a basketball gym.

I think church choir is one reason your mom and I stayed enthusiastic about music. Our choir director was a fun, talented, pretty woman whom we all looked up to. She gave us music we liked. One of our favorites was "Rise and Shine," which is about Noah and the Ark. We also liked a pretty song called “All Things Bright and Beautiful,” and another called “Signs of Life,” where different kids held up road signs that went along with lyrics about making decisions.

We stayed in school choirs through 12th grade. Here is Anne in 8th Notes:

West Alta Vista

2008-11-19T14:38:00.000-08:00

In second grade, I moved to the same street where your mother lived. It is called West Alta Vista.

Trading stickers

There were several other kids on the street. One girl, Kristy, was in sixth grade, and she taught us how to trade stickers. We would collect stickers from successful school assignments, county fair expos and store-bought sticker packs by Lisa Frank, who made a colorful line of school supplies.

Our sticker market operated under sort of a medieval-Persian-bazaar model, wherein each kid was left to his own devices and defenses as far as cons were concerned. Kristy was older and smarter than the rest of us, and I seem to remember her often tricking the younger kids into trading their best stickers for her crap.

The Awesome 9

We kids formed a club called the Awesome 9. The Awesome 9 convened in a shed behind the house of our pastor, who lived a couple doors down from your mom's house. I don't remember Anne being heavily involved in the Awesome 9, which probably was wise. We fought a lot. I think the pastor eventually locked the shed.

Fort Evergreen

Your mom had a large evergreen tree in front of her house, and it was great. The lowest branches were huge and formed a small canopy over the ground. It made a great playhouse, and Anne and I spent a lot of time making carpet out of the pine needles.

Entrepreneurship

A girl named Karen Fancy lived around the corner from your mom, and the three of us made a lemonade stand one day. We had a disagreement over the cups. I said we should use paper cups, and Anne and Karen wanted to use our parents' plastic cups and wash them after each customer. I still think that was a silly idea, but I was the minority voice. Our enterprise failed after an hour or so.

Tramp and O.J.

Tramp was your mom's dog, and O.J. was her cat. Tramp had yellowish-red fur and a collie-like face. I remember him being a nice dog, but I think he sometimes humped people's legs. I don't remember much about O.J.’s personality, but I know he had long black and white fur. I liked to hold him. They both were in a lot of pictures with Anne.

Me holding O.J.

First Presbyterian Church preschool

2008-11-18T13:27:00.000-08:00

My first actual memories of Anne were from preschool. When we signed up, they gave us orange T-shirts and vinyl bags emblazoned with a row of little black footprints.

There was a 3-year-olds’ preschool and a 4-year-olds’ preschool. The 3-year-olds' room had a tiny bathroom, where the teachers would take us for talking-tos (more on that later).

I don’t remember much about what we learned there. I do remember sitting on carpet for lessons and stories that would be interrupted by Velcro.

A lot of the students in our class were wearing their first pairs of Velcro shoes, and we liked the scratchy sound. We’d strap and unstrap our shoes constantly while we were sitting on the carpet. That made a lot of noise and wore out the Velcro before we had outgrown the shoes. “Don’t Play With The Velcro” became a new rule of life.

I also remember juice and cookies. A lot of times they were just graham crackers, but sometimes we’d get the gingery animal crackers with pink icing and sprinkles. The fruit punch came in big cans. It was really rich and usually made me sick. I don’t think it made your mom sick because when I imagine Anne’s face as a preschooler she always has a juice stains above her lip.

School friends

I remember playing with Anne more than any other kid in preschool. As I remember, she was smaller and quieter than I was. She liked painting more than I did and was much better at it than I was.

We liked to play games where we would act out stories we made up. I remember playing house sometimes, but we wouldn’t just cuddle dolls and pretend to be mothers. We’d make up pretend tasks, like figuring out what pretend food we could afford to buy at the pretend store. Building and furnishing the pretend house was part of the game. When we had props, like a doll crib, we would celebrate that we found a crib for the baby. I don’t know if we were imagining ourselves as pioneers or vagrants or what.

Play dates

Sometimes my mother would take me to Anne’s house to play. That was a big deal. I’d get so excited for the trip to her house, but I remember feeling shy and intimidated when we’d first get there. Then we’d start to play as usual.

Anne had Care Bears, which I didn’t have. I thought they were awesome. Each one was a different color, and each one had a symbol on their stomach that represented its personality. There was a yellow sunshine bear that was always happy, a pink heart bear that was always cuddly and a blue storm cloud bear that was always … I can’t remember. Maybe he was grouchy or sad or just intellectual. We had matching Care Bear sweatsuits, and one time your grandma took us to a photo studio and had our pictures taken in them. That was a big treat.

I think Anne’s mother also had kept some of her old toys as decorations. I seem to remember some beautiful dolls and other toys that fascinated me. They must have been in a guest room or your grandparents' room.

Anyway, we’d chat and play with Anne’s toys until we’d inevitably get in a fight over them. I don’t know if we ever hit each other over toys during a play date, but we’d cry to our mothers and then gradually make up and start playing again.

Then my mom would say it was time to leave, and we’d burst into tears again.

The Big Fight

I don’t know who instigated this, but I think it started with a puzzle piece.

It seems one of us was putting together a jigsaw puzzle, and the other one stole a puzzle piece. That really sounds like something I might have done, given my history of coveting your mother’s toys.

In any case, the victim of the theft shoved the offender into a bookshelf. There was some crying and rolling around on the floor. One of us ended up with bite marks on her finger and the other with a big scratch on her face.

It was the scandal of the year at First Presbyterian Church Preschool. We remained enemies for what seemed like weeks. Finally, a teacher pulled us into the little bathroom and instructed us to apologize and make up.

“I’m sorry,” I mumbled.

The teacher looked expectantly at Anne.

“Anne? Are you going to apologize?”

“I don’t need to apologize to her because I already apologized to my mom!”

We eventually made up on our own.

Field trips

The best part of our preschool was the field trips.

We went to the fire station and saw the firemen slide down the metal pole. I remember being disappointed because they wouldn’t let us slide down it, and it looked like fun.

We went to a pizza parlor and saw a man tossing crusts.

We went to a farm in the fall and selected a class pumpkin from the pumpkin patch. I think we may have taken a hayride, too.

But the BIG trip was the spring train ride to Mount Pleasant. It was about an hour trip, and none of us had ridden a train before. I don’t think many of us had even ridden a bus, and if we had it was only one or two times. The idea of walking around in a moving vehicle was really great, but not as great as being able to pee in one. I think everyone used the train bathroom at least twice. Another friend, Sarah Chmelar, remembers we all wore tie-dye T-shirts, which I think we made in class.

The Amtrak picked us up in downtown Ottumwa and dropped us off at the Old Thresher’s Park in Mount Pleasant. There was a big festival there every fall that celebrated agricultural history and heritage. They had a little pioneer village in the park, including a one-room schoolhouse. They had a chair in the corner with a little dunce cap to try on.

The dunce cap was an old-fashioned punishment for students who misbehaved. They’d have to stand in front of the class and wear this tall, pointy hat to make them look silly. Teachers stopped using them generations before our time because they believed it was too mean to humiliate students as a punishment. We thought it was a gentle punishment compared to a talking-to in the preschool bathroom.

Memorial Park

2008-11-17T12:20:00.000-08:00

I don’t remember meeting your mom. The story I heard is that we were at Memorial Park in Ottumwa, and our mothers put us together on the see-saw because we were about the same size.

Memorial Park was one of the best parks in Ottumwa. When Anne and I were very small, the city kept monkeys in cages at the park. They were taken away, I think because people threw things at them.

There was a big water tower in the parking lot. The water tower was a city landmark that you could see from far away. The bigger kids would climb the tower at night and paint large words on it. Usually they were cuss words. I heard that someone once wrote “E.T. PHONE HOME.” Make sure your mom shows you the movie E.T. It was a big deal when we were kids. The city painted the water tower with a picture of a bulldog -- the high school mascot -- to discourage graffiti.

Memorial Park had some little cabins and a pavilion where our friends sometimes had birthday parties. There were big trees, little trails and a scummy pond at the bottom of a hill.

There wasn’t a lot of playground equipment, but what they had was great. The swings were really tall and they were built on a hill, so when you jumped out of them downhill you had even farther to fly before hitting the ground. There was a really long slide that was boring and slow unless you sat on waxed paper. Then it was awesome!

But the best part was the swinging merry-go-round. A normal merry-go-round was just a circular metal floor with bars you'd hold onto while pushing it round and round. This merry-go-round was different. It was built onto a tall axle with spokes that spidered out several feet above our heads. Benches were suspended from the outer wheel, so you could swing the whole merry-go-round back and forth or spin it round and round, or both. It felt almost like a carnival ride.

Stories about Anne for her son

2008-11-17T12:16:00.000-08:00

These are stories I wrote for my friend Anne (Detlie) Darrah and her son Collin when he was born this fall. I just gave the stories to her this weekend, so it won't ruin the surprise to post them here.

I have known Anne since we were 2 years old. She has been my friend longer than any other friend. We went to preschool together, we went to church together, we were neighbors for a few years, we went to junior high and high school together and we sang and danced together. We saw each other grow up.

Here are some things I remember about our childhood in Ottumwa.

Rundell stories

2008-10-15T15:59:00.000-07:00

These are stories about my grandparents, Ruth and Dugie Rundell, and their parents. They are taken from interviews with their two children — my mother, Mary, and her older brother, Sam. I wrote them down and gave them to my mom for Christmas.

The parable of the olives

2008-10-14T16:27:00.000-07:00

Anyone else might have felt a little bit proud of themselves.

Indulging a greedy impulse in defiance of an always-critical parent — that's a moment. That's something exuberant and delicious to look back on when you're old.

But that wasn't how Grandma Rundell put it. In her version, the rebellion was frailty and the plunder disgrace. Oh, the sin, the hypnotic power of temptation, the tragedy of human weakness, the shame that befalls little children who disobey their parents.

Come to think of it, Grandma really did love to tell us this story.

At the time, of course, it probably was every bit as awful as she said. No one knows if Ruth ever thought she could make her mother happy. Disapproval kind of was Hannah Clark's default mode. To not let her down was pretty much the best that Ruth could hope for.

The worst, well, Ruth just didn't go there. Ruth was a slight, painfully shy girl. The Clarks' money — quite a bit for a South Dakota family in the 1920s — didn't spoil her. A kid wouldn't complain or beg or whine with Hannah. You'd barely say anything to her. You'd hold your breath and answer questions when she asked you directly.

Grandma never told us that part, maybe out of respect. Anyway, it would have killed the allegory.

See, Hannah occasionally would take a break from being stern and throw fancy tea parties — "foo foo" parties, as my mother calls them. These were not donuts-and-coffee affairs. Out came the good dishes and a spread of delicacies seldom seen in Armour, S.D. Hannah arrayed tiny serving platters with dainty cookies and hors d'oeurves, like little sweet pickles and, Ruth's favorite, stuffed olives.

You wouldn't have found stuffed olives in a deli or a grocery rack in Armour back in the 1920s. It's still a small town — about 700 people — and even now there's only one market that sells olives. When Ruth was little, her mother had to order those special-occasion treats from a catalog. And they were about four times as expensive as they are now.

But Ruth loved them.

She found the jar shortly before one of the parties. The olives looked like precious green stones, ripe and shiny. Ruth imagined the firmness of the fruit between her teeth and the smooth, salty flavor.

The jar was full. The olives bobbed, identical in the briny water. Just one, Ruth told herself. Who would know?

She stretched her fingers into the jar and pulled out her prize. A bead of juice trickled down her chin as she moved the olive around in her mouth slowly, memorizing the flavor before biting in. It was as good as she imagined, as good as she remembered.

Ruth reached for the lid. But as she placed it on the rim, the olives jiggled against the glass, catching her eye.

"If they won't miss one, they won't miss two," they seemed to say. The stuffings peered out like little, inviting eyes. Ruth snuck another.

That's enough, she resolved, reaching for the lid. The olives floated at the top of the jar, as crowded as when she first broke the seal.

She reached for another.

It was usually at this point in the story that Grandma's audience — her children, her grandchildren, her great-grandchildren — would begin to gasp and cover their faces. I don't think any of us remembers what upset us so. Was it that Grandma was doing something bad, or that she probably would get caught? I just remember the pang in my stomach as I listened to Grandma dig herself deeper into the hole, knowing there was no turning back.

My uncle Sam had more faith. "No, no, mommy!" he'd beg, listening as a small boy. "Put it back! Don't take another! "

She took another. And another.

And another, until a couple of lonely olives waited — themselves astonished, it seemed — inside the jar.

The game was played out. Ruth ate them.

I vaguely remember the story ending with a stomach ache. The getting caught, the confession, the punishment — was that even part of the lesson? I don't know. What I'll never forget, though, is Grandma's laughter ringing out over our horrified faces.

That's how it would end — we'd all start scolding her in the relieved, impressed way you scold someone who has taken a terrible, stupid risk but lived to tell about it. We'd moan and we'd clap our hands to our foreheads, which utterly delighted her. She'd lean forward in her wheelchair, clasp her hands in victory and, with only a tiny hint of sheepishness, she'd burst out laughing.

Yes, Grandma loved to tell that story.

The truth about Santa Claus

2008-10-13T16:48:00.000-07:00

No matter how jolly they make him, Santa Claus will always be a little creepy.

A fat, old man watches children when they're sleeping, puts them in his lap and wields the promise of gifts to control their behavior? And then he shakes his belly like a bowl full of jelly?

A little creepy.

But we kids got it easy. The happy forces of commercialism, political correctness and a general aversion to pedophilia have mellowed the power-tripping, dark-side-of-the-moon phenomenon our grandparents endured.

Gone is the idolatrous mystery of an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent judge of character who rewards our good behavior with gifts we don't deserve. Now embrace we the idolatrous magic of a limitless, tolerant giver who rewards our whining with gifts we expected all along. We got the Disney adaptation.

And that's a darn good thing if you saw Santa Claus through the eyes of little Ruthie Clark. Growing up in the 1920s and 30s, the Santas she saw were less fat, less jolly and more deranged:

Ruth particularly disliked the mask. There's something sinister about the eyes in an old Santa mask. The true person gets to peer out from behind his piece of plastic, seeing the little girl unobstructed on his knee but showing her only that he is deceiving her with a costume.

Then the voice: "What would you like for Christmas, little girl?" Ruth felt suspicious and afraid of the man — and kind of disappointed. She mumbled something about a pony, wanting only to get this Santa ordeal over with and return to her parents, whom she could trust.

She went to bed Christmas Eve with wishes somewhat deflated. The plastic man with the scary eyes surely would not bring her a pony. Ruth was a little embarrassed to have hoped for such a thing only to be duped.

Oh, but a pony.

She could sit atop her own little mare and ride like an elfin princess. The mare would become Ruth's loyal friend and join her on every kind of adventure.

The idea made her want to believe again, if only to not ruin her chances.

Ruth awoke Christmas morning to a fresh blanket of snow. The stockings hung heavy on the mantle, and gifts lined the bottom of the Christmas tree. It was so perfect, she almost forgot about the pony.

Almost. It was different, Christmas after Santa. The spirit was still there. But the magic was only in her memory of all the Christmases when she still believed, and that was fading every time she thought of her pony and the plastic man with scary eyes.

Her father stood at the window and watched his pensive daughter survey the presents.
He called her over.

"I think Santa Claus left something outside," he told her.

Ruth stomped into her boots and flung the door open. There, tied to the fencepost, was a Shetland pony. Her father followed her as she tiptoed with her usual bashful excitement to the small horse that stood quietly in the snow.

The snow! Ruth had noticed something was missing as soon as she laid eyes on her little Betsy. Even through her joy, she could see that the scene at the post didn't made sense. She approached Betsy with new caution, looking closely at the ground on either side of her hooves.

Ruth found nothing but a smooth, white layer of snow where Betsy's hoof prints should have been. It was as if Betsy had come from the sky and landed right where Ruth had found her.

Ruth looked up at her father, mystified.

"Do you want to ride your new pony?" he asked her. "Santa brought you a good one.”

Hannah's tempests

2008-10-12T17:05:00.000-07:00

West of the Missouri and east of the Rockies live two kinds of people: the ones who shudder in terror at a cirrus cloud and a tall breeze, and the ones who sit on the porch with a glass of lemonade to watch the summertime hail and lightening and flash floods that hit the Midwest like candy at a parade.

Both kinds of people are sort of ridiculous, but then again, so is the weather in those parts. Winter is a wind-ripping, icicles-up-your-nose, subzero misery. Summer is worse. Hannah Clark could tell you all about it.

Days in the high nineties were not her problem. You learn to deal with extremes in South Dakota. The sweltering humidity is a fact of life —— even a little womb-like and comforting in its constancy.

When it stops, when the temperature drops 40 degrees in half as many minutes, that's when you start watching the sky.

And that's when Hannah Clark would lose it.

See, a rush of cold in a South Dakota summer is not a reprieve; it's a warning. It usually comes after 4 p.m. A dullish green tints heavy clouds that come out of nowhere. They get lower and darker as the air chills and starts moving around.

The porch-and-lemonade camp could tell you what happens next. My great-grandma Hannah and I always knew better than to stick around and watch.

It only takes one close call. For me, it was a series of tornadoes that chased our car over the South Dakota state line when I was eight. For great-grandma Hannah, it might have been the one that picked up her relatives' house, turned it around and dropped it back on the foundation.

You had to expect things like that in South Dakota. Everyone had a storm cellar dug into the ground and covered with a heavy, wooden hatch door, just for emergencies.

But you might have guessed the Clark 's storm cellar was Hannah's happy place as often as she scurried the family down there.

"Oh dear, here's a wind. We've got to go down in the cellar," she'd announce.

Children and grandchildren and husbands would dutifully make their way into the little dirt room. Beams of sunlight would glow around the door in the ceiling. The crowd watched the dust particles floating in the rays. Hannah, at least for a moment, was at peace.

You gotta do what you gotta do. That's what tornadoes teach us.

Music lessons

2008-10-11T17:13:00.000-07:00

To someone who can't play, the piano might feel kind of remote, kind of unattainable -- like multivariable calculus or Japanese. Maybe it's the 88 buttons. Maybe it's the dexterity or the demand to remember and play multiple notes and phrases at once. It just seems very hard.

When Ruth was a child that didn't matter. You just learned. You wouldn't find a well-to-do farm family in the 1920s and 30s without a piano; it was part of civilized living. And you wouldn't find a young girl who had a piano but never learned to play it.

The piano actually is tricky. Maybe more than other instruments, the piano involves a lot of rigid structure. Sure, you need that to get really proficient at anything, but there are just so many notes and so many chances to screw up in piano music. You really can't play piano even a little bit without a decent level of discipline.

In that sense, Ruth was well-poised to learn.

She got plenty of discipline from her mother. Hannah Clark picked up her severity early on. Her own mother died very young, when Hannah was just a teenager. As the eldest girl, Hannah was forced to assume adult responsibilities prematurely. She worked as what we now would call a hospice nurse, tending to patients on their deathbeds. If Hannah ever felt like a child, she didn't get to enjoy it for long.

Hannah's two sisters, Esther and Florence , were different. They were as nurturing as Hannah was stem. Esther and Florence actually seemed to like that Ruth was a child. They treated her like she was special. They listened to her secrets and taught her to play and to love the piano.

It stuck. Music may have been an expressive outlet for the timid, waif-like girl. She had advanced through grade school quickly and started high school by age 11. She was small for her age and tiny for her class. The older students terrified her. Six decades later, Ruth's eyes still would well up when she described an incident where some boys scrawled her name with soap on the car of an upperclassman who was said to have a crush on her.

But she was comfortable with music. When she asked to learn another instrument, she received a method book and a flute, which she taught herself through trial and error.

And still she played the piano. After achieving a solid classical repertoire, she began to offer lessons. As an adult, she was the primary piano teacher for all of Turner County. For every lesson, her students would bring a silver dollar, which she kept in large jars for a rainy day. But she was happiest when she was accompanying someone else, especially her husband. She probably would have preferred that to her own standing ovation. That was just how she was.

College

2008-10-10T17:17:00.000-07:00

Like high school, college came a little early for Ruth Clark. She didn't have any say in the matter, and it's not clear what she had planned to do after she graduated. All we know is that her father chose her school and told her about it later. He enrolled Ruth in the 2-year teachers' program at Yankton College because it was affiliated with a religious denomination called the Christian Church, which was the Clarks' church.

So Ruth went. She never questioned such edicts and didn't seem to see them as dictatorial. In fact, when her own son finished high school, she unilaterally decided to put him in the University of South Dakota's pre-dentistry program. He didn't even remember applying. And he still doesn't know why she picked dentistry. My Uncle Sam quickly changed his major to history and ultimately went into sales.

His mother, on the other hand, just went with the flow. She hit the books and found friends and then a boyfriend.

No one ever knew Maurice Kayle Rundell by his real name. His poor mother was so proud of it, too. Maurice Kayle Rundell. It sounded so majestic, so smart, so graceful.

Shortly after he was born, she took this baby with a name like a grandfather clock to Parker for a day of showing off. Her friends looked at the infant. Forceps had misshaped his bald head during the delivery, giving it a striking resemblance, they said, to the head of Mr. Dugenstein, the banker.

The days of Maurice Kayle ended before they began. From then on, all of Turner County knew him as "Dugie."

At college, he finally shook the nickname and became Rundie. Rundie Rundell. The girls called him Love 'Em and Leave 'Em Rundie Rundell. That was the first thing Ruth ever heard about him.

But it wasn't the only thing. Rundie was Joe Campus, the charismatic football star who made all-conference every year until a knee injury kept him off the team as a senior.

And there was the gorgeous tenor voice, which, along with the football, got him a full ride scholarship. He never would have gone to college without it, coming from a poor farming family.

His penchant for practical jokes also brought Rundie a certain infamy. He and his mends once led a horse into the music conservatory and up to one of the top floors. It's common Midwestern wisdom that horses and cows will walk up stairs but not go back down them. We don't know how that story ended. It's probably just as well.

Anyway, Ruth and Rundie had heard about each other before they met. He saw her during orientation, which also was the unofficial first-year Hell Week. Rundie walked up to her and said, "Well, you must be the beautiful freshman girl I've been hearing about." He then demanded she carry his books around campus for him.

Ruth had heard the warnings about Love 'Em and Leave 'Em Rundie. But she was smitten. So was he. They didn't have many opportunities to go out on real dates or hang around during daytime hours. The women's campus was segregated from the men's campus, and R.A.s enforced a strict lights-out policy. That was when Rundie would sneak up to Ruth's dorm and chuck rocks at her window. She'd climb out and run off to the music conservatory with him —— something that had to be a real thrill for the once excruciatingly shy, obedient girl.

They dated for the year, right up through Rundie's graduation. Ruth had another year to complete her teaching certificate, and it wasn't clear where things were going.

Rundie knew he wanted to sing professionally, but getting there was a subject of controversy between himself and his teacher. Rundie saw himself as a Hollywood crooner. The teacher, however, envisioned him on an opera stage and pushed the classics hard. The teacher also was horror-struck that his star tenor played football. By the end of four years, he dismissed Rundie as a jock and wrote on his recommendation for music teaching positions, "I think he would make a really good coach."

So Rundie decided to do things his way. He went off to California, leaving behind Yankton College, the old Turner County farm and his sweetheart Ruth.

Ruth finished her studies and got a job after graduation. In her free time, she'd go to dances. At the dance hall was a man named Earl Nixon, who took quite a fancy to the single teacher. "Who is this Earl Nixon sniffing around my girl?" my grandfather would ask playfully. We don't know if Ruth and Earl ever actually dated —— only that his name kept coming up in conversations for years and years.

While Ruth went to dances, the letters from California kept coming. Rundie was doing any work he could find. He had two brushes with fame. One involved a producer or manager of some kind offering to give Rundie a gig in return for ... favors. Rundie took it about as well as one might suppose a South Dakota farm boy in the 1930s would take a homosexual advance: He punched the guy in the nose.

The second was a job as a gofer for Hopalong Cassidy. Rundie would stand out of the view of the camera and push Hopalong's mechanical horse back and forth.

But there's not much money in mechanical horsemanship. He started to get more singing work, and things looked promising. But he still was very poor, and for days at a time he would eat nothing but Los Angeles' cheap, abundant oranges.

That may have had something to do with the perforated ulcer. In that day, almost no one survived it. The surgeon who treated Rundie previously had taken 12 perforated ulcer patients. They all died.

Rundie was lucky No.13.

It was about that time Rundie said what so many people have said after moving to California: "It's time to get back to reality."

Rundie returned to Turner County, switched his name back to Dugie and found Ruth, who apparently ditched Earl Nixon.

The rest is history.