Book excerpt: 'Call Me Ted'

My time in Mississippi provided constant exposure to nature.  Living with my grandparents on the edge of town I observed all kinds of animals and birds and insects and they fascinated me. I spent hours fishing off a nearby bridge with a piece of bacon hanging at the end of a string and had fun catching turtles. While I was still isolated from my immediate family and I had plenty of lonely moments, I enjoyed spending so much time in nature and my memories of this time are mostly positive.

My father returned from the war the following year and our family was finally reunited in Cincinnati. After sending me to public kindergarten in Sumner, for first grade my parents enrolled me in a private school named Lotspeich. I was a restless kid and got in trouble a lot. I didn’t do anything really bad, just a lot of little mischievous things like putting pebbles in the other kids’ galoshes. Today’s schools would probably jump to the conclusion that I had Attention Deficit Disorder, but that wasn’t the case. After being isolated and alone for so long I was simply craving attention.  My teachers became exasperated and after just one year they made it clear to my mom and dad that they didn’t want me back for a second.

My parents didn’t have a lot of money back then and while it may have been a financial relief to send me to public school, I’m sure they were disappointed to have to do it. For the next couple of years I attended Avondale, a local public school, and my behavior in this new setting was pretty much the same. I caused plenty of mischief but it was a lot harder to get kicked out of public school than private and I managed to stay there from my second grade year through the first part of my fifth grade.

After all the moves and separation of my earlier years, this was a time of relative stability for me. But that didn’t mean that our home life was always smooth sailing. My dad was a complicated man. He was a perfectionist in every aspect of his life—from his dress and overall appearance to the way he conducted his business and raised his family. He was also a deep thinker. He wanted to do the right thing and he read a lot, including books about parenting.  Putting into practice all the different approaches he learned about meant that his style was often unpredictable.

One constant in his parenting, however, was strict discipline and a firm belief in the value of hard work. I was only eight or nine years old when my father started making me work during summer vacation. I began at about four hours a day, and in those earlier years my chief responsibility was working in our yard. We had a manpowered push mower and if you’ve ever used one you know how tough they can be. Every little stick or acorn you’d hit would jam the thing up. And all these ants and chiggers would get you while

you were down on your hands and knees pulling weeds. I’d be bent over, sweating up a storm, and my friends would come skipping by and say, "Ted, you want to go fishing?" I hated having to tell them I still had three hours more work to do. It was such drudgery that to this day I don’t like to do yard work. I might have been out of school, but summertime for me was not a vacation.  My father was also an alcoholic and a heavy smoker. I don’t know how much of a problem he had with these addictions before the war but I’m sure his experiences in the Pacific had an impact on him. He told me that he loved his time in the Navy, but while he appreciated the opportunity to see places like Australia and the Philippines , he also saw combat. He told me that he once killed a Japanese sailor at close range with a pistol. My father and some other guys were looking for souvenirs on a Japanese ship that was half sunk in shallow water in Manila Bay. Out of nowhere, a starving, crazed man came running out at them. He was screaming and hollering in Japanese and continued to charge my father so Dad shot him in self-defense.

But regardless of the reasons, my dad was a volatile man with a quick temper. When he drank, his temper got worse, and when I acted up, he’d spank me. This upset my mother and I can remember times when I was getting a spanking and my mother stood outside my door, begging my father to stop. Dad would have me across his knee and say things like "I’m doing this to help you learn to do the right thing and to grow up to be someone we can both be proud of." Oftentimes he’d use a razor strap and he would say that it hurt him more to beat me than it would if I were hitting him.

I had no way of knowing if this was true but one time when I was only about six or seven years old he decided he’d prove it to me. I’ll never forget it. He handed me the razor strap, lay face down on the bed, and told me to spank him. I tried to obey him but I couldn’t. I loved him so much that I dropped the strap and broke down and cried.

Looking back, some of the biggest arguments my parents had concerned his treatment of me, but my dad ran an old-fashioned household and he insisted that pretty much everything had to be his way.

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