A girl whom I regularly bought shoes for just asked me to talk about this. Lots and lots of shoes.

My father, Sheldon, who was born in 1907, grew up on a family ranch near Four Mile Creek in Utah, about ten or fifteen miles south of Nephi, which itself is about 90 miles south of Salt Lake City.  With two brothers and four sisters, he grew up working hard on a working ranch, growing wheat, raising farm animals, mastering the many mechanical tasks needed to keep a ranch going, and absorbing the value of self-sufficiency. 

I was born in 1942 at Queen of the Angels Hospital in Los Angeles, California, and when I was about three we moved to a one-acre lot about 20 miles outside of LA.  World War II was still raging, and income from Dad’s job as a machinist needed to be supplemented for our family of four: Dad, Mom, my older brother Hal, and me. Around that time I was usually called Gravy, except by Mom, who, when I had done something wrong, would call me with increasing frustration “Shelly. . .Hal. . .Glenn. . .dammit!”  When not in trouble, I whiled away most of my daylight hours playing “little cars” in the dirt beneath the the trees near our house. My mother continually had to sew patches on the knees of my jeans.

To make good use of the property, Dad put in a half-acre of boysenberries when we first moved in, as well as two large patches of raspberries—one of black, one of red.  He lined our long driveway with four apricot trees.  By the time I was six,  we’d sometimes sell berries and apricots at a tiny mom-and-pop grocery that we could walk to, always referred to as “the little store.”  But usually Mom and Dad would can stuff so we didn’t have to buy it at a store.  My main assistance to these projects was to tinker with the lids to Mason jars and to run and jump behind Dad as he walked behind our two-wheel tractor, guiding its plow or tiller to make long furrows for planting and watering.  Yes, I was literally a clod hopper.

At some point, Dad decided to expand our self-sufficiency horizons by growing rabbits, which he put into a row of cages in a shed behind our garage.  Though he had a commercial goal in mind, such a possibility never occured to the six-year-old me.  I thought of the 20 or so rabbits as interestingly furry playmates—especially the friendliest hare at the end of the row of cages, whom I called “Ralphie.”

One Sunday afternoon, without a hint of ominous warning, we all sat down at the kitchen table for a meal that Mom had prepared.  There was a couple of dishes of vegetables, and, in the middle of the table, a plate with an unrecognized object resting on it. 

“What’s that?” I asked.

After a pause, my Dad said “It’s chicken.  Have some.” 

My brother, older by five years, then spoke up.

“It doesn’t look like chicken,” he  said.  “It looks like. . . .”

An aching silence fell over the room.

Gradually, my childish mind began to connect the numbers, until at last the jagged picture was revealed, and with  a quivering voice, I shouted:

“Ralphie!”  

And I began to cry. And my brother began to cry.  And my Mom began to cry.

And my Dad continued to mutter, until at last he said, “Jesus Christ,” but not with anything like a prayer in mind.

Mom removed the carcass of the bunny.  My father shook his head and continued to mutter.  My brother and I whimpered for a while more.  We all dined sadly on boiled carrots and mashed potatoes without gravy.  Even Dad.

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Our Cub Scout den had two Den Mothers.  The first was Mrs. Winn (“Francis” to adults), Bob Winn’s mom, who was efficient, practical, and fun, and always helped us work on interesting projects.  I can still see her smile and hear her encouraging laugh, which sometimes teased but never mocked.  We looked like this:

L-R: John Bloker, Neil Elliot, Brad Thompson, Alan Snyder, Bob Winn, me. 

Apparently, Alan’s was the only family that did not buy jeans good for two or three years of growth.  Or perhaps he was at the end of a spurt.  My neckerchief slide, representing a steer’s head, was fashioned by my mother with longhorns sculpted from soapstone that my brother Hal had collected on Catalina Island.

Under the guidance of Mrs. Winn, our presentations at Pack meetings were culturally valuable and, it might be said, decent and well-behaved, as in this clarinet trio, which played “White Christmas.”

L-R: Bob Winn, Bill Winn (already a Boy Scout), and me

I was playing a metal learner’s model.  Around this time, when Bob was taking lessons from Mel Ernst, a pro who worked at the 7-story Southern California Music Company in Los Angeles, Paul and Francis Winn would also pop me in the backseat or their car for the 45-minute drive to Ernst’s home, where they would patiently wait a half hour after Bob’s lesson for me to take mine.  On the ride home, we would sing funny or patriotic songs, or perhaps Mrs. Winn would devise some impromptu game in which we would, say, shout out the names of the capitals of the 48 states.  As a Den Mother, Mrs. Winn never closed.  Permanently chipper, she was the personification of can-do.

Our den also participated in public events, such as the Arcadia Peach Festival parade:

Bobby Winn the Inveterate Explorer can be seen peeking from the back window.

We participated in useful community services, such as paper drives, collecting and baling neglected piles from dark, spider-infested garages, and then transferring them to trucks for re-cycling (a term then unknown, at least to me):

Atop the truck, Bob is in full uniform

We dined sedately at the annual Blue and Gold dinners:

L-R around the table: Our Scout Chief, Steven something, Bob Winn, Francis Winn, me, Mom, Dad, Alan, Mrs. Thompson, Brad Thompson, Mrs. Bloker, John Bloker’s little brother, John, Mr. Bloker.  Not shown: ubiquitous photographer Paul Winn. 

Mr. Bloker was a wide-ranging executive with TWA, and for years he would send postcards for my collection from around the world, always signed “Guess who?”

Do you wonder what the hats were for?  Me too.  But I’m sure we made them for. . .some reason relevant to the dinner’s theme.  There are models of airplanes and ships as table ornaments.  Were we all admirals?  Pirates?  Egg salespersons?

At times, our Pack would go on field trips, as laboriously annotated in my Cub Scout scrapbook:

Buster Brown on the radio!  Midnight the Cat and Froggy the Gremlin!  I believe it was Midnight who first revealed to me the depths of feline evil.  Whenever that cat said “Nice,” you knew she was lying.  At that time, the brunt of Froggy’s gibes was Andy Devine.  For many years, I had a rubber Froggy figurine with a small airhole on the back.  If you covered the airhole with your thumb and then squeezed, Froggy would stick out his tongue at whoever stood before you.  Infinitely amusing.  Hi-ya, kids, hi-ya, hi-ya.

And then. . .thanks to a fortunate entertainment-related segue. . .ENTER BETTY JEAN BROADHEAD!

Some background:  A few years after Mom married Dad, she damaged her wedding ring.  Like any other resourceful young bride, she finagled a ticket to the “Queen for a Day” radio show, or maybe “Strike It Rich.”  That doesn’t matter.  It was some show in which contestants offered competing sob-stories for a cash-prize-funded happy ending. What’s important is that, in order to fix her ring, she filled out a prospective participant’s form by asking for “$18 to mend a broken heart.”  A phrase with media magic.  Maybe the monetary value was greater than that, but it doesn’t matter.  The thing to observe here is the masterful TUGGING AT THE HEARTSTRINGS in the setting of ENTERTAINMENT MEDIA.  She was on the show!  I can’t remember if she won.

Later on, Mom got a picture of her mother, her sister, her, her sister’s daughters, and one of the daughter’s daughters to be shown on the Al Jarvis TV show (featuring a young Betty White).  YES! FOUR GENERATIONS IN ONE PICTURE!  SEE IT NOW ON THE AL JARVIS SHOW!  FOUR GENERATIONS OF FEMALES!  ONE PICTURE!

At school functions, such as a Longley Way Elementary School fair, other mothers were ticket-takers, cookie-bakers, punch-providers, helpful guides.  My mom was a brassy clown in a puffy, dazzling, parti-colored costume, with painted face and an eye-shocking red nose.

Show-biz has many faces.

Inevitably, at Pack meetings, den-mother Betty Broadhead’s charges put on skits that she wrote, produced, costumed, and directed.  Here’s one, for which we made marrionnettes and manipulated them for a (presumably) amusing scene:

The marionnette show

Here’s another, more modestly-costumed extravaganza:

?

Do you wonder what this skit was about?  So do I.  A musical number?  A dramatized joke?  Why is Brad holding a tiny umbrella?  Very hard to tell.  It was the 1950s.  Move on.

Eventually eschewing the stage for the Southern California TV scene, Mom finagled us a spot on a popular, daily afternoon show hosted by Doye O’Dell:

Doye O’Dell was a movie actor (oaters exclusively) and country-and-western singer, to say nothing of afternoon kids show host.  Here’s his genial mug on an 8×10 glossy:

My friend, Doye O’Dell

And here we are on the set:

At rear, Doye O’Dell.  L-R: John, Bob, Alan, Brad, Bill, me

I had recently broken my leg while not quite climbing over a picket fence.  Wearing a mukluk on one foot (kind of like Prince, later on) made me all the more endearing.

During the show, according to my brother, I stared lasciviously on screen at some pre-adolescent female singer who performed in front of us while we sat on fake logs.  I dispute this.

One of the perks of appearing on TV with Doye was meeting other KTLA personalities:

Stan Chambers was a TV news reporter at KTLA who won several Emmys during a career that lasted from 1947 to 2010.

Dorothy Gardiner was a minor actress and at times an announcer on KTLA’s coverage of the Rose Parade.

Dick Garton was an all-purpose announcer and actor who both appered in and wrote for Betty White’s unforgettable series, “Life with Elizabeth.”

I wish I had gotten an autograph from Dorothy Gardner, shown above with her sister Aleene (Aleene on the left).  Dorothy had a daily show called “Handy Hints,” which often featured cooking in the studio’s functional kitchen (kind of like her KTLA colleague of the time, Betty White, in White’s later memorable role on the Mary Tyler Moore show).  Dotty, as I have always called her, using the nickname by which she was known among Hollywood insiders, was very beautiful, and nice, and really, really handy–and invited us onto the kitchen set for some cookies that he had just baked.  You couldn’t get any more beautiful or handy.  Dorothy is the only woman who ever challenged the standing of my kindergarten teacher, Miss Black, as the object of my unflagging devotion, smitten-wise.

And then this:

Slim Andrews was an actor on the Doye O’Dell show and in B westerns of the 1940s and 1950s, almost exclusively as “the humorous sidekick” (like Gabby Hayes and Fuzzy Knight).

Slim

Eventually, our den graduated into Webelos and the earthy challenges of Boy Scouts, and my mother’s entrepreneurial reign over boyhood talent came to an end–and with it any efforts at gaining public attention that I might have sought.  Not that Mom couldn’t be impressively emotive on other occasions.  But she spruced up awfully well:

The Den Mothers of Pack 3 in Arcadia, 1950-51

Mom is fourth from the right.  Nice shoes, Betty Jean.  Grand-daughter and semi-namesake Emily Jean-Marie Kuhlman would approve.

 

Thanks so much, Francis and Betty Jean.

What a wasted childhood it would have been without the two of you.