Cold Turkey at Nine: The Memoir of a Problem Child

By Earl B. Russell

Having been born on April Fools Day, author Earl B. Russell likes to imagine that in an early sign of his precocious nature, the doctor dried him off, held him up for his mother to see, and then listened as the baby looked at his mother and exclaimed, April Fool! Russells mother knew he was a problem child right off the bat. At first glance, his older brother told everyone Russell would never amount to anythingso much for making a good first impression! As his life began in a rural Tennessee farmhouse, disappointing both his mother and brother, he had nowhere to go but up.

In his tragicomic memoir, Russell traces his unimaginable postWorld War II life in the American Heartland through zany and introspective accounts that reveal horrific tragedies, soul-searching life lessons, and amusing adventures. Beginning with his upbringing on a poor farm, Russell shares compelling narrative from his coming-of-age journey as he encounters unspeakable losses, revels in the joys of marriage and family, climbs the academic ladder, and confronts a forty-year-old family secret. Along the way, the problem-child-turned-adult finds himself in raw academic brawls in the halls of ivy, conferring with world-renowned retinal researchers, and crossing paths with astronaut Neil Armstrong, Mickey Mantle, Queen Elizabeth, and Prince Charles.

Cold Turkey at Nine is an engaging story of resiliency, love, and one mischievous little boys path as he explores how ordinary people deal with extraordinary circumstances.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: May 23, 2013
• ISBN: 9781475985849

Earl B. Russell

Earl B. Russell is a writer and blogger whose writings have appeared in the New York Times and the Austin American-Statesman. He is now retired as professor emeritus at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and owns a prized rubber chicken. He has two adult children, Joy and Robert. He and his wife Ellen live in Austin, Texas.

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Copyright © 2013 Earl B. Russell

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Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Source of map on page 9:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Map_of_Tennessee_highlighting_Montgomery_County.svg

Cover photo: Nolen Robert and the author about 1946. Photographer unknown.

ISBN: 978-1-4759-8582-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4759-8583-2 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4759-8584-9 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013907651

iUniverse rev. date: 5/15/2013

Table of Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part 1—Prologue

Part 2—Growing Up Years, 1944-1963

Part 3—Triumphs and Tragedies, 1964-1986

Part 4—A New Life, 1987 to the Present

Part 5—Epilogue

Appendix—Places I Have Lived, with Dates

Selected Bibliography

This book is dedicated to my beloved family members, passed and present. In particular, it is dedicated to the memory of my beloved older brother, Nolen Robert, who taught me so much.

I always believed that whatever had to be

written would somehow get itself written.

—Seamus Heaney

Preface

I began to write this memoir long before I knew it would become a book. Even when the idea of a book became clear to me, a dark family secret had loomed over my life for decades and I was sure I would never write it because of the pain and shame. I felt someone else should write it, but not me.

At the start, I simply felt like I had to document the bizarre and formative aspects of my childhood, some of them involving the Boogersville community that sits between where our farm was and the schools I attended. Inescapably, I therefore had to write about my family. My children and my brother’s children were the initial audience for these early stories. Later I began to share them with friends, as I moved into writing sometimes equally bizarre stories from my adult life.

As I neared the end, I reluctantly decided I could not write the story of my life without writing about the unending tragedy of my parents. After making that decision, the actual writing went much more easily than I thought it would. There were tears as I wrote, but also a release, a revelation about myself. Now I feel I have fulfilled a deep family duty, painful as parts of it may be for my family and others to read.

Four other memoirs had a profound effect on my choice to write about the most tragic and transformative experiences of my life. Those memoirs are Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt, The Liars’ Club by Mary Karr, This Boy’s Life by Tobias Wolff, and The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls. These authors wrote candidly and eloquently about the trials of their youth and the deeply troubled lives of their parents. My book is quite different in describing a colorful and happy childhood—with an underlying unease—that morphed into the trials and triumphs of adult life.

This book is organized along two lines of thought that are interwoven to make the narrative—a compelling narrative I would hope. Childhood stories that stand out in my memory and helped form who I am comprise one strand of thought. As an adult, places I have lived and life’s developments are the focus of the other strand. Both strands follow a rough chronology. Taken together they tell an unlikely life story of an often troublesome little boy from a relatively poor Tennessee farm who ventured into an uncharted adulthood and restlessly pursued shifting ambitions amidst great loss, setbacks—sometimes crushing disappointments, triumphs, and strokes of exceptionally good fortune. In short, this book tells of my roots and the subsequent path I took into a then unimaginable future.

After so many years of mulling over the formative aspects of my life, after searching for meaning in them, I concluded my memoir with my truth, with a small t, having grown skeptical of anyone’s truth with a big T. My truth is partly presented in the form of life lessons that I hope will be of some help to others who seek their own truth.

Through it all, I wrote this memoir with love and a deep gratitude to others. I hope that will be unmistakably clear.

Acknowledgments

A great danger of tipping one’s hat in gratitude is that someone will be inadvertently omitted. But I especially want to thank the following for their help in various parts of this work.

My wife and best friend, Ellen, has provided ceaseless encouragement throughout this effort and has listened to many of the stories and ruminations here more times than she could count. She has energetically applied her substantial insights and skills in helping me refine this work, even when she no doubt tired of hearing about it from time to time. Were I to describe the perfect partner and collaborator, she would be the person.

My daughter Joy Russell Stollings and her husband Luke Stollings have been superb readers and critics of several of the stories. My son Robert has offered insightful reactions and scalpel-sharp interpretations of what I have attempted to describe. Both of my children have become key parts of my story, as children are in the lives of nearly all parents who have ever lived. Their lives will become known to you, but through the obvious limitations of my perspective.

My niece Ruth Russell Nunn has been kind enough to provide vivid accounts of her experiences with my brother and her father Nolen Robert, and my parents and her grandparents, N. W. Russell, Jr. and Mary Eunice Shelton Russell. Ruth’s accounts have not always been pleasant for her to share, but she has done so out of love and compassion. Her mother and my sister-in-law, Penny McWhorter Russell, has likewise been helpful in filling in some of the gaps in my memory and in providing details that I had not previously known. Some of those details have been tinged with sadness as well as happy times in our family. Her sons and my nephews Glen Russell and Tim Russell are also an important part of my history. Their willingness to share recollections and listen to my stories around the dinner table has been a great comfort and a source of motivation for me over the years.

Earl Cragon Baggett, a cousin by marriage who still lives a short distance through the woods from where my childhood home stood, has helped me understand the history of both sides of my family. He was like an extra father to Nolen Robert and me. At birth I was given his name Earl, while he, known to all of us as Cragon, recuperated in an army hospital in Naples. He is one of the finest examples of the Greatest Generation. At age eighty-nine he published a book on his experiences in the war, Uncle Cragon’s War, inspiring me to finish this book, which I started without knowing it in 2001. He has also helped me with verification of a number of facts in various stories. My gratitude to him cannot be completely expressed in any vocabulary that I know.

I also wish to thank several of my cousins for sharing memories, photos, and positive reinforcement as this work took shape. Bettye Russell Tidwell, Uncle W. G.’s daughter, talked with me often about her father and other family members. She reviewed a draft of the story I wrote about Uncle W. G. and sent me a deeply touching letter in reply. Ghoram Russell Adkins was a participant in the story about travelers’ checks for my first trip to far away Knoxville. Her sister Edna Russell Jackson, along with Gabe Smith and John (Bud or Buddy) Russell stimulated my memory with recollections and photos of our rock-solid grandparents and my beloved aunts and uncles.

John L. Mitchell of Cunningham, Mitchell, and Rocconi law firm was my father’s junior attorney through an exceedingly difficult case four decades ago. He graciously reviewed the portion of this memoir dealing with Daddy’s trial and subsequent appeals. He confirmed the basic accuracy of my recollection and pointed out a couple of technical errors that I of course corrected. I am deeply grateful for his kindness and consideration to my family.

Myra McIlvain, a writer, and Betty Wood, friends from the University of Texas-Austin continuing education program LAMP, Learning Activities for Mature People, offered constructive suggestions and encouragement to keep plugging away. They are exceptional, inspiring individuals and I am grateful to them.

Several people I met through the Writers’ League of Texas deserve special note for their advice and support. Foremost among them are Bill Minutaglio, noted author and University of Texas journalism professor, who challenged me with critiques that sent me away scratching my head, and Shennandoah Diaz, president of Brass Knuckles Media, who got me moving into social media in a more comprehensive and sensible way. Other colleagues in the League who have provided immense support are Kelly Besecke, Betty Duff, Jean Germaine, Howard Hatfield, Leigh Hopper, Brenda Schoolfield, and David Steinman. Their comments have been insightful, challenging, and constructive.

Special thanks are due to Bob Warmbrod, my graduate advisor of over four decades ago at Ohio State University, who later became a colleague and treasured lifelong friend. He provided his unique brand of encouragement as this memoir took form.

Since April 2011, when I launched my blog, I am indebted to readers around the globe who have taken time to read and sometimes comment on posts containing several of the stories interwoven in this memoir. While those blog posts appeared in mostly random order, I have attempted to add context and chronology in this book to paint a clearer picture of how those small stories add up to a larger, and I hope a more informed, story. Reader comments posted on my blog have been invaluable in helping me refine the writing found here.

I am indebted to my gifted editor, Cecily Sailer, who read, commented on, and raised questions about parts of my manuscript in a way that often stopped me cold, made me think more deeply about the story, and reach for a deeper level of understanding. Beyond her technical edits, she often challenged me intellectually, and I am grateful to her.

Incredible professionals at iUniverse, many of whom are unknown to me, deserve a most sincere Thank you! Among them are Sarah Disbrow, Traci Anderson, Alexandra Jones, and Deborah Cantrell.

Folke Dovring handed me a course syllabus years ago on which he had written across the front, The art of boring the reader is to leave nothing untold. By that measure, readers of this book should not be bored because I have left out much. But I hope I have included the key pieces of my story so that at its end, it will be of some value to the reader.

I have relied heavily on family members and friends to help me get my facts straight in this memoir. The magic of Internet searches has also helped me craft accurate accounts of events and circumstances and times. But memory is inherently flawed, even as I reconstructed conversations and comments to the best of my ability. Any error of fact or interpretation is my sole responsibility, but certainly unintentional.

Introduction

T his memoir is deeply personal, maybe too personal for some. Humor was rampant in my family, including pranks that sometimes tested limits, and so was beauty in its own way, overlaid by tragedy of the most shocking kinds. I learned that my religion and my spirit were two completely different things. I left behind the world I knew and ventured into another world of sorts, guided by family influences, my basic nature, and shifting dreams.

It begins with the darkest time of my life as my family prepared for my mentally ill mother’s funeral after her grizzly death. Wrenching tragedy struck our family early in my career, more than once, seemingly almost more than I and other family members could bear. I don’t know the words to describe all the loss, all the sorrow. Surrounding all that were love, beauty, elation, tears, laughter, successes, failures, and life lessons that emerged slowly—common elements of nearly everyone’s life.

Parenthood has been and still is a major part of my story. My children are adults now and there has not been a day since their birth that they were not on my mind in some combination of wonder, pleasure, concern, uncertainty, or outright worry. This frame of mind is probably common in nearly all parents in the natural order of things. As our lives unfolded together, I became one source—among others—of great pain to them. Seeing their agony then and feeling powerless to protect them from it remains a great, irreconcilable regret.

Unlike my parents, travel became a key part of my entire adult life, becoming increasingly important as I got older. Travel experiences affected my family and my evolving thinking about the world, significantly influencing my life story. A few of those experiences were so profound that I have written about them here.

Part 1—

Prologue

N olen Robert and I agreed that I would take Daddy to buy a suit and other things needed to get him ready for Mother’s funeral as soon as he was released from jail. Nolen Robert was completing funeral arrangements, including transferring Mother’s body from Erin to Clarksville for a visitation that evening. I drove Daddy from the jail to a department store in a mall off Riverside Drive where we bought him a new suit, shirt, tie, belt, socks, and shoes. As we shopped—rather quickly, I might add—I was struck by the image of Daddy still dressed in that same plaid shirt and undershirt with the bloodstains below the neck, the one I had first seen him wearing in the jail the previous day. Nolen Robert or someone had arranged for him to change from the bloody pants he had on at the time of his arrest. I never knew why all of the clothes Daddy had been wearing the day before had not been confiscated by the authorities or why he had not had a chance to shower and put on clean clothes.

Then came what was perhaps the most bizarre and painful experience of my life. I drove Daddy home with his new clothes by mid-afternoon. Arriving at the house where Mother had been alive early in the morning the day before brought a pain I had never felt in all my life. Daddy and I made a tearful entry into the living room of the suddenly eerie house and proceeded back to their bedroom and hung his new clothes in the closet off the hallway where Mother’s clothes still hung as she had left them. Daddy picked out some clean clothes and I walked with him through the dining room, then the kitchen where the tragedy had played out the day before, to the small bathroom that Daddy and Mother had built in a part of the old screened-in back porch a year or so after I had married. Neighbors had cleaned up the kitchen, but walking through it had to be hell for Daddy because it was hell for me, with memories of happier times and what I knew of the current tragedy pouring over me like a waterfall.

Without speaking much at all, through tears in our eyes and choked voices, I began to help Daddy remove his shirts and other clothing to take a shower. When he removed his plaid shirt, I could see that his white long-sleeved undershirt had been soaked in blood from his wrists almost to his elbows. Inexplicably, I took his bloody undershirt, put it in the sink, and began washing Mother’s blood out of his shirt. It didn’t seem right to burn the shirt, but it didn’t seem right to be washing it with my own hands, either. At any rate, something inside compelled me to wash out the bloody shirt while Daddy got in the shower.

Within the hour I left Daddy there to rest and drove to Nolen Robert’s house where the cars of several relatives and close friends were parked. He and Penny had worked out the final details for Mother’s funeral to be held the next day, but they had been unable to talk to their children Glen, Ruth, and Tim—ages twelve, nine, and seven, respectively—about what had happened. Certainly they knew a terrible thing had happened from overhearing conversations in the house, but no one had sat with them to explain it and give them a chance to ask questions, grieve, or otherwise talk about it. Nolen Robert and Penny asked me if I could take the children for a drive and stop somewhere and talk to them about what had happened. They just didn’t feel like they could do it. Of course, I agreed.

Nolen Robert asked Glen, Ruth, and Tim to go with me and we quietly got in the car and drove away. Glen sat up front with me and Ruth and Tim sat in the back seat. We headed east on Highway 13, not knowing exactly where we were going. This was no time for small talk—we all intuitively understood that. I drove past Penny’s parents’ house and their sawmill and pulled into the empty parking lot of Don’s Skating Rink and Café less than a mile further east. I turned in the car seat so I could see all three of them and began to explain what happened with Mother and Daddy, their Granny Russell and Granddaddy Russell, as accurately as I could without the vivid details.

I stayed with Daddy that night, sleeping in the bed that Nolen Robert and I had shared growing up. The same bed where my wife and I awoke around dawn two or three years earlier to see Mother standing beside me, staring intently down at us in silence except for the odd smacking of her severely-dried, cracked lips.

Part 2—

Growing Up Years, 1944-1963

I was a series of disappointments from the start, but nearly three decades passed before I understood the depth of the disappointment my mother felt from the time she learned she was pregnant with me. Making matters worse, after she adjusted to the idea that I was on the way, she had her heart so set on me being a girl that she could hardly believe it when Dr. D. H. Atkins, who attended my birth in our farmhouse, broke the news to her that I was a boy. The cruelty of the moment was exacerbated for my mother by my birth on April Fool’s Day.

In fact, I like to imagine that in a very early sign of my fluky precocious nature, as soon as Dr. Atkins dried me off and held me up for Mother to see, I looked her square in the eye with a toothless smile and said, April Fool! My very appearance—an especially bewildering moment for my mother—was my first cruel prank. She knew I was a Problem Child right off the bat. More trouble was coming. I later saw myself in a remark by Mark Twain, My mother had a great deal of trouble with me, but I think she enjoyed it.

Huh! He’s so little he never will amount to anything! This was my six-year-old brother Nolen Robert’s assessment the moment he first laid eyes on me that April Fool’s Day evening. Daddy did not offer an opinion as far as I know.

Thus began my life in our rural farmhouse in Montgomery County, Tennessee. So much for making a good first impression. I had nowhere to go but up.

But in spite of all that, I am proud to be among the nearly one million people in the United States who were born on April Fool’s Day. This explains a lot about my personality, as I often tell people when they appear perplexed by something I do or say. The quirky holiday of my birth has given me a license in a way to rationalize my behavior and attitudes, a license to be different and to take pride in it. Abundant evidence for this is woven throughout this memoir.

But there is a larger, more important story here. It is as Margaret Mead observed, We are all immigrants into a new time.

Daddy and Mother, as Nolen Robert and I called our parents, were farmers, having come from farming families about sixty miles as the crow flies northwest of Nashville. They each had an eighth grade education. Daddy had one day of high school education, but on that first day his teacher took the class out to collect bugs, and he concluded that he could do that on his own so he never went back. Both of our parents were avid readers of the Clarksville Leaf-Chronicle, the oldest newspaper in Tennessee, and Mother was an avid reader of the Bible. She did not drive, so every Sunday she, Nolen Robert, and I got ready for church and Daddy took us in the pickup, dropped us off, and came back shortly before church was over and waited for us in the parking lot.

I took where I grew up for granted into young adulthood, came to avoid it because of the painful memories it evoked, and was later drawn back to it to reach a clearer understanding of myself, my family, and other people who had a profound effect on me. Place is of extraordinary importance in my story, as I suppose it is in everyone’s story. Over time my bittersweet memories of home have become less bitter—and sweeter. Place is always with me.

My place was Montgomery County in northwest Tennessee. It is still a largely rural county in a farming region noted for livestock and tobacco. The county was named for pioneer John Montgomery whose Scottish family immigrated to Virginia in the 17th century. He served in the Revolutionary War and was founder of the county seat Clarksville, a historic city at the junction of the Cumberland and Red Rivers, incorporated in 1785. The Scotland of Montgomery’s origins will unexpectedly and significantly come into my story much later.

Several things from my early childhood that stand out are the soothing sound of rain on our tin roof, the dusty gravel road about forty feet from our front door, our wide front porch, the catalpa tree in front with foot-long pods in late summer that we called Indian cigars—yes, I smoked a few but tobacco was much better—cardboard crates full of baby chickens, our wood-burning stove in the living room that was piped into our chimney about seven feet above the floor, our dining table of delicious foods that became a desk for homework or a place to spread out the newspaper, cats milling around the back of the house, hogs in the fenced-in lot behind two of our chicken houses, and the smell of mud around the ponds in our cow pastures.

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Montgomery County, Tennessee, where the author grew up and where many of the stories in this memoir are based. (Source: Wikipedia, map of Tennessee highlighting the county.)

The only grandparents I knew were Daddy’s and their farm was about a mile south of ours. Pappy and Mammy, as we called them, had seven children and Daddy was the baby of the family. Pappy was widely loved and respected and served for many years as the superintendent of Sunday school at Shiloh Cumberland Presbyterian Church, where we worshipped, a position that Nolen Robert would hold many years later. Their house was on the southern edge of a wide creek bottom with their front porch facing a limestone bluff. A cemetery sat at the top of the bluff with another large, beautiful hill to the east. Beneath their long back porch facing the creek was the beginning of a small swampy area that lead to a shallow pond. Clumps of cattails grew there, and the muddy area between the house and the pond was dotted with circular mounds of little mud balls made by burrowing crawdaddies, or crawfish. In dry weather I liked to walk among those crawdad holes, but I never wanted to eat those little critters. None of our family did.

Pappy was noted for frugality, efficiency, and neatness. He saved everything of