VACATIONS AND TRAVEL

My grandfather Edwards is quoted as saying, "I'd go a thousand miles to see a friend, but I wouldn't go across the street to see scenery". Myself, I would go a thousand miles to see either, and the travels I had growing up were certainly more memorable than any house we lived in or car we drove (a comment on live in the OC before the current recession).

My earliest travel memory would be from Columbus to the Circleville Pumpkin Show. What I remember most is the orange pennant that I had in my collection (along with the scarlet and gray one that I had at the Rose Bowl later) which may still be in some box somewhere. Anyway, it made a real impression on me. Google says the show has been around October of 1903 and is always on the third Wednesday through Saturday of October.

The show is complete with a queen and her court, a parade and a competition for the largest pumpkin. The latest winner must have been on steroids weighing in at 1375.5 pounds. Even the water tower in Circleville, Ohio is shaped and painted like a pumpkin.

While we were in Columbus, my grandmother Edwards came to visit and we took a trip to Washington, D.C. On the way we stopped off at Abraham Lincoln's boyhood cabin and I suppose that's where brothe r Mark began his boyhood fascination with Mr. Lincoln.

In D.C. I remember two things mos t prominently: the sight of all the cherry trees in blossom and seeing Harry Truman out for his walk early one morning.

After moving to Oklahoma, we gradually visited many of the state parks including Beaver's Bend, Roman Nose and Lake Texoma. Because of my Dad's career in education we went to visit the Fort Sill Indian School, which was the first place my brother and I had ever come into contact with "Native Americans." We were fascinated by the costumes they wore when doing native dances. A little history reveals that the schools were an idea of the government as an attempt to "civilize" the Indian children. "The U.S. government, backed up by eastern humanitarians and church groups, instituted a policy of "civilizing" the Indians in which they felt they must "kill the Indian to save the man." Education was the cornerstone of this policy. Indian children were forced to attend reservation day schools or far-away boarding schools...children were torn from their families and sent to these schools. Officials and humanitarians did not believe that Indian children were capable of becoming doctors, lawyers, or academics so instead they taught them industrial and domestic arts, American history, and English.

The Comanche School was located near Fort Sill and known as the Fort Sill Indian School. This school was founded about 1892. It started with only forty boys the first year. The buildings were all ready but because of the inability to secure ready-made clothing for girls, there were only boys in the school. The next year there were forty girls." (Life Among the Texas Indians: The WPA Narratives By David La Vere) As my brother and I learned, Oklahoma had many Indians, including members of the "Five Civilized Tribes" and much about Oklahoma was about the history of Indians, including the names of many of the towns and counties.

Our longest trip while living in Norman came in 1954. Even though we were by then strong OU football fans, we still all had a strong tie to Buckeye football as well. My Dad promised Mark and me that if Ohio State went to the Rose Bowl we would go. We pestered him so much about it that he even decided to go to California that Christmas even if OSU didn't make it. Grandmother Edwards went with us, partly to finance the trip.

We joined Route 66 in Oklahoma City and rode it all the way to Hollywood through Amarillo, Albuquerque, Gallup, the Painted Desert, Kingman, Barstow, San Bernadino and on to Hollywood. In Albuquerque we stayed at the De Anza motel which is now a historical landmark and being revitalized.

In Hollywood we stayed at the first motel we had ever seen with a swimming pool in the courtyard. Two stories stand out in memories of this trip. While driving in Westwood sightseeing, my Dad somehow got to an intersection where there were multiple lanes and made a left turn from the middle lane, only to be pulled over by a motor cycle policeman who wasn't very friendly to tourists.

The second memory involves the Rose Bowl parade and game. The weather was typical beautiful southern California until January 1. We sat through the Rose Bowl parade in misty cold rain and then moved on to the stadium for the game. At the last minute a Kansas friend of my folks had gotten us two extra tickets, so Mark and Dad sat on the USC side and Mom and I on the OSU side. At half time TBDBITL (Buckeye Band) came onto muddy field and did "Script Ohio", and of course when they left the field you could still see Ohio in the mud, much to the dismay of the USC fans.

My red OSU pennant got soaked and dripped red on some USC fan in front of me, also causing dismay.

The score of the game also caused USC dismay as the unbeaten "great Ohio State football machine sputtered from time to time in the muck and mire of a field wetted down by a day-long rain."

(written for the UP by the first female sports writer to ever cover a Rose Bowl game, Miss Faye Loyd)

Ironically, many of the places on this trip would be prominent in my later life, as my folks wound up just south of Amarillo in my Dad's last years at West Texas A&M,

we moved to New Mexico (and stayed at the De Anza many times visiting Albuquerque) after leaving Norman,

and Vera and I left Chicago and medical school to live just east of Hollywood during residency at Childrens Hospital of Los Angeles in the early 70s.

FORKS IN THE ROAD

ROAD LESS TRAVELED

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth

Then took the other as just as fair

And having perhaps the better claim

Because it was grassy and wanted wear

Though as for that, the passing there

Had worn them really about the same

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet, knowing how way leads onto way

I doubted if I should ever come back

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence

Two roads diverged in a wood

And I took the one less traveled by

And that has made all the difference

Robert Frost

Last Wednesday while walking with my longest walking partner, John Bruce, we got onto the subject of the forks in the road that ultimately determine where we are for the next segment of our life. Often the path chosen, although initially causing those  out-of-control feelings, turns out to be the perfect choice when we look back over the decades of life.

My parents decided to leave a comfortable teaching and band directing job in Garnett and go off to the midwest. They weren't even really sure which road they would take, Ohio State or Michigan, until they had gone through Columbus and on to Ann Arbor and then back to OSU.

Leaving Ohio State to return to Oklahoma was probably an easier choice because of having family in Kansas, one state away. However, choosing to go from the University of Oklahoma to a much smaller school in the wide open spaces of New Mexico must have been a much more difficult choice.

The next fork in the road was mine, and it involved really a series of turns. When it came time to apply for college, I really wanted to go to Cal Berkely and I was admitted with honors.

 I also applied to K.U. and my parents had far fewer out-of-control feelings about me going to a college where my aunt and uncle lived and where my grandmother lived only a short distance away. What they didn't realize was that having never allowed me to have those out-of-control feelings in sufficient number had set me up to have a poor fund of knowledge regarding consequences. As a result, I had one of the most exciting years of my life, but my grades were not as exciting; and the grades guaranteed that I could not go to KU med as an out-of-state applicant and that I would have to 4 point out through the next three years of college to have any chance at any  medical school. In the end, I returned home to New Mexico, attended college where my Dad was the Dean and later Vice President, ate crow at home because of my freshman grades, and  thought that I would have a better chance at medical school entrance than was really realistic.

 

At the time New Mexico had just started a medical school in Albuquerque in 1961 and admitted their first class in 1964. So had I gone there I would have been in the third class to go through. I applied to 10 medical schools, was accepted at UNM and received eight "sorry" letters in the mail. 

I applied to Northwestern probably for two reasons: it would be back to the Big Ten and I'm sure it crossed my mind that it would get me quite a ways away from all my family and hopefully to somewhere that I could be the ultimate person in charge of my future. It was 18 degrees below zero the night that I interviewed at Northwestern, but that didn't deter my wanting to go there. My interview went really well and the dean of students  fortunately took time to listen to my story and to my strong desire to be a physician (none in my family); and maybe he thought they needed a little southwestern drawl to add diversity to the class.  I will never forget being at the ENMU library studying one snowy night, when Dad came trudging through the snow with the telegram from Northwestern. I was going to be able to take the turn in the road that I truly wanted.

The next turn was about my significant other. I went to medical school still "attached" to a New Mexico girl that I had gone with during my junior and senior years. She even came to Chicago to visit in the spring of my freshman year at NUMS. But a fork in the road arose that summer when I chose to do an elective in genetics at Children's Memorial. 

I met two Lithuanian sisters, one who was working in tissue culture and the other who was a nursing student at Loyola. The older one who worked in the lab seemed pretty "fast" for me. She was always dragging in on Monday mornings after partying all week-end at Indiana Dunes. But her sister, the nursing student had a boy friend. Regardless, the began asking me to come to the South Side to have dinner at the home (and it was amazing food for a starving medical student who was heating canned food in a popcorn  popper and eating "all you can eat" fish and chicken nights at the local hotel near the medical school). I gradually got to  know both sisters rather well and thoroughly enjoyed their family. In the fall, I wound up asking Elvyra, the eldest, to a concert by the Kingsmen at the Northwestern main campus. We had a really good time and began dating thereafter. I continue writing to my girl friend in New Mexico, but eventually realized that she wasn't the one and sent her the horrible "dear john" letter. I took the Lithuanian road and it was because of Vera that we took the turn to California rather than Denver Childrens or Seattle Childrens, where I thought I would have preferred.

The next to last turn in my life road was at the end of residency when we were torn between coming to Mission Viejo or going to Thousand Oaks. The areas are really quite similar and were at about the same stage of development in 1973. The deciding factor was probably that we had spent several week-ends in Laguna Beach at the rental home of a Riverside dentist  on the ocean side of Coast Highway just south of Laguna Royale condominiums. Some resident family would rent the place for the week and we would all drive down for Saturday and Sunday.  It was on some of those week-ends that we got a good chance to look at Mission Viejo and made the choice

.

The last turn in my road of life was to leave my original pediatric practice mid-career and for maybe the first time in my life, choose what was truly best for ME. That choice has turned out to be the second best of my life, the first having been being lucky enough to choose my loving wife, Vera.

MY LOVE AFFAIR WITH TRAINS

http://trainweb.org/rwy/MerleHaggard-MyLoveAffairWithTrains.mp3

The first train I can remember vaguely was the train that my friend in Buckeye Village and I rode out bikes out to see as it crossed the road west of the housing area in Columbus. I can only remember that it was a steam engine and nothing more.

The next train thing I remember was being in the railroad station in St. Louis, probably going from Columbus to Emporia, Kansas to grandmother Edwards.

St. Louis Union Station opened on September 1, 1894, and was owned by the Terminal Railroad Association of St. Louis. Designed by Theodore Link, it included three main areas: the Headhouse, the Midway and the 11.5-acre (47,000 m2) Train Shed. The headhouse

originally housed a hotel, a restaurant, passenger waiting rooms and railroad ticketing offices. It featured a gold-leafed Grand Hall, Romanesque arches, a 65-foot (20 m) barrel-vaulted ceiling and stained-glass windows. The clock tower is 280 feet (85 m) high. Union Station's headhouse and midway are constructed of Indiana limestone and initially included 32 tracks under its vast trainshed terminating in the stub-end terminal. At its height, the station combined the St. Louis passenger services of 22 railroads. At its opening, it was the world's largest and busiest railroad station and its trainshed was the largest roof span in the world. As railroad passenger services declined in the 1950s and 1960s, the massive station became obsolete and too expensive to maintain for its original purpose.In August 1985, after a $150 million renovation, Union Station was reopened with a 539-room hotel, shopping mall, restaurants and food court. The hotel is housed in the headhouse and part of the train shed, which also houses a lake and shopping, entertainment and dining establishments. Omni was the original hotel operator, followed by Hyatt Regency Hotel chain and now Marriott Hotels as of December 2008.

In Norman Mark and I received our first American Flyer train set with transformer. As I remember we had a plywood 4x8 across our two dressers for the layout to be on.

A little American Flyer history: In 1938, W.O. Coleman sold American (Chicago) Flyer to Alfred Carlton Gilbert, a former Olympic pole vaulter who first made a name for himself in the toy industry earlier in the century when he created and manufactured Mysto Magic sets for youthful magicians. A few years later, his A. C. Gilbert Company also became the makers of Erector Set construction toys. The two toy magnates were just finishing shooting on Gilbert's game reserve in New Haven when Gilbert casually mentioned he was thinking about manufacturing toy trains. Instead, Coleman said he'd give his struggling American Flyer Co. to Gilbert in return for a share of the profits. Gilbert quickly agreed. Although popular, American Flyer was always the second-ranked brand to Lionel in terms of market share at the high end of the market. With Marx and a handful of other brands relegated to the low end of the market, Lionel and American Flyer shared premium status. A rivalry emerged between both companies' fans that continues today. Like Lionel, Gilbert was caught off guard by the popularity of HO scale trains that offered better realism at a lower price than its American Flyer S gauge products.

After we moved to Cruce street, a gentleman whose house was on the corner of Broad Lane and Boyd invited me to see his HO trains and I became an HO fan. My second job in Norman was working in the hobby store near the tracks on Main street. Of course I made very little money because I always had more train stuff on lay-a-way. I read Model Railroader from cover to cover and created dream layouts in my head and on paper.

Addendum: Found the gentleman's name in a letter my Mom wrote her mom April 1960:

"Mike went down to Mr. Reid's the engineering professor who lives by Porter's and is a great model railroader, last night -- went for a minute and stayed 2 hours. Came home with an armload of stuff that Mr. Reid gave him. He was still building kits and whistling his heart out when Gail and I went to sleep."

In the 50s John Allen began the creation of the Gorre & Daphetid Railroad which became what is still probably the most famous of all HO layouts ever created. Almost monthly there were new article about his phenomenal scenery with mountains and trestles and his hand made cars and structures. There is still today a very active group of John Allen fans who continue to reminisce over his greatness.

My next and one of the most memorable train events was going to Durango one week-end while my Dad was teaching summer session at the University of Colorado. The narrow guage passenger winds slowly up and down the Animas River canyon from Durango to Silverton whistling and blowing smoke and cinders through the valley air all the way. It is one of the most magnificent train rides and I will return someday with my grandsons to do it again.

I remember riding the Sante Fe from Lawrence home to New Mexico my freshman year at K.U.

and I also remember riding the Sante Fe home from Northwestern Medical School to New Mexico for Christmas break. Later in medical school after getting married I began doing some kit construction of HO structures without having any layout to put them on.

After Michael A. got to the appropriate age, I built an HO layout that folded up onto the wall of his room and had storage for the cars and engines on shelves on the enclosed wall. And as we speak, I have purchased a beginners HO set which is hidden in the closet for the appropriate Christmas for the grandsons.

One of my favorite C & W artists is Merle Haggard and he recorded an album called "My Love Affair with Trains". Hence the title for this segment.

http://trainweb.org/rwy/mh-NoMoreTrainsToRide.mp3

~ Thom Jurek, All Music Guide

For anyone who has followed Merle Haggard's career over the decades, train and hobo songs seem to be recurrent in his work, no matter which decade -- or century -- he recorded in. My Love Affair With Trains is one of the last two records Haggard cut for Capitol in 1975. It is also is one of Haggard's trademark concept albums, upon which he pays tribute to and laments the railroads' decline as a centerpiece of American life. Haggard has made a life in music of charting the previous and its decline in the present. In between each track, Hag introduces the next, as these songs cover different historical eras. There's the stunning title track written by Dolly Parton; Stephen H. Lemberg's corny but nonetheless compelling "Here Comes the Freedom Train"; Mark Yeary's "I Won't Give up My Train," which he re-recorded later for MCA; Dave Kirby's "So Long Train Whistle" and "Where Have All the Hobos Gone"; as well as "The Hobo." It isn't only in the songs that Haggard chronicles the romance and decline of the American railroad; the grain of his voice is a lament, full of mourning and a genuine bittersweet grief -- Haggard grew up on the rail lines as his father worked them. Interestingly enough, the tune of Haggard's to appear here is "No More Trains to Ride"; he introduces it with a short reflection on how it had become damn near impossible to hop a freight to ride coast to coast. The oddest inclusion here is the Jerry Jeff Walker/Jimmy Buffett collaboration "Railroad Lady." Hag justifies its inclusion by saying it was stories like this that helped further the legend of the great Black Iron Horse. As Haggard's records go, My Love Affair With Trains may seem a bit quaint in retrospect, but its soul and emotion don't date. There is great truth in his performances of these songs, and like virtually everything he records, he tells the truth through these songs as he sees it.

EARLY YEARS SPORTS IN OKLAHOMA

Of course there is only one sport in Oklahoma -

 

       OU FOOTBALL

And we loved it and lived through arguably the "best of it". 

But because of Dad, we got introduced to two other sports. My father was a long-time St. Louis Cardinal fan from listening on the radio in the small town in Kansas where he grew up. So we knew about the Cardinals early on. In the 50s in Oklahoma organized youth sports were not as prominent as it is today. In grade school we played what we called "work up".

This type of baseball was also called "Scrub" as described on the

 Minnesota Public Radio blog:

http://minnesota.publicradio.org/collections/special/columns/baseball/archive/2005/05/scrub.shtml

I ( the blogger not MWS) was fortunate to grow up in a home next to a ball field. And every day -- or so it seemed -- we'd find enough neighborhood kids around to have a little ballgame. And if there weren't any kids around, then between me and my two brothers and two sisters, we

 could find something to do with a bat, glove, and ball.

The game was called Scrub and I don't remember who taught it to us but it's baseball without teams. When someone wanted to play a game of Scrub -- say on the playground behind the school at recess or before the doors opened (before Mommy and Daddy dropped kids off in the SUV to the school's front patio) -- he or she simply yelled "Scrub!" (pronounced Scruuu ---

 uhhh--- uubbb) and then the next person would yell "Scrub One," and the next "Scrub Two" and so on and so forth. (This was, we would later realize, our first foray into computer language in which the first item is not one, but 0.)

Scrub, Scrub One, Scrub Two, and Scrub Three would bat first and everyone else would take the field. You could bat as many times as you wanted, until you made an out. Hit a fly ball out to Scrub 11? Scrub 11 comes in to bat and you go to Scrub-11-field. For strikeouts and regular outs, the field would rotate as in volleyball until the pitcher was the next to go to bat.

It was perfect baseball. Nobody kept score. The goal was just to ... you know...play.

We also got introduced to tennis by our father, who had helped take care of the tennis court his father built in the pasture by their house in Wellsville, Kansas. As he described in his autobiography, "My Dad like to play tennis so he built a tennis court in the pasture just south of our house. It was fenced off from the rest of the land, had steel backstops covered with "chicken" wire. Since he was an electrician, Dad put lights on the court so we could play at night. (Dad said at least he knew where we were.) My responsibility (with Dad's help) was to keep the court in shape, which meant since it was a dirt court, to clean the grass and weeks off each year, roll the court with a hand-pushed roller, and put the white lines on using a special roller filled with lime." So Mark and I learned tennis on the OU courts just west of Owen  Stadium and practiced in the handball courts in the stadium proper. 

I continued playing tennis at Norman High (where we had to talk the administration into building the first courts in about 1958 - they were asphalt, faced east and west and had "chicken" wire nets - as I said, tennis was not a very important sport in Oklahoma at that time).

  

Tennis was an interesting game in both Oklahoma and New Mexico because of the wind. If it was blowing, you could just touch the ball (playing with the wind) and it would sail over the baseline. Conversely, if you had the wind against you, you had to really hit the ball hard just to get it over the net. In college I played on the team at Eastern New Mexico University. 

We had a basketball hoop on our driveway in Faculty Heights and I think also on Cruce street. We just played "horse" and never anything organized. I did manage to break my nose playing a pick-up basketball game at the gym in the high school building where my Mom went to school in Hamilton, Kansas. This lead to my first sub mucous resection, which was the second surgery that I got to watch while still in high school in New Mexico. 

I am just remembering that we took swimming lessons at OU with a South African swimmer named Graham Johnson. We got to swim in the university pool after our lessons. I tried out for the swim team at Norman High, but kept falling asleep in my books at night and let it go. Looking in Google, "Johnston was a pioneer in college athletics. One of the first foreign-born athletes to enjoy a full scholarship at an American college, Johnston received a full scholarship for swimming at the University of Oklahoma. While there, he achieved NCAA All American status three consecutive years." Graham Johnson continues to swim today at 77 and "set 8 world records at the 11th Fina World Masters Championships in California in 2006. Previously, that same year, Johnston was voted "Inspirational Swimmer of the Meet" at theCanadian Masters Nationals for breaking 4 World Records in the 200/400/800 and 1500 meter freestyle and accomplished all of them in the 1500 meter event.

He swam across the Strait of Gibraltar in December 2005, traveling 13 miles in 5 hours 9 minutes. He was the oldest swimmer at 74 to ever complete the swim."

http://www.usms.org/hist/sto/index.php?ID=86&srt=