Sunday's Child: Memories of a Mid-Western Boyhood: 1923-1943

By Robert Ayres Carter

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 20, 2005
• ISBN: 9781469123967

Robert Ayres Carter

ROBERT AYRES CARTER is a widely published and versatile writer of fiction and non-fiction, as well as a poet and playwright. He has written several books on publishing topics, the novel Manhattan Primitive, and two mystery novels: Casual Slaughters and Final Edit. He is also the author of a biography, Buffalo Bill Cody: The Man Behind the Legend, and a two volumes of memoirs: Sunday’s Child: Memories of a Midwestern Boyhood; and Nobody Yet Knows Who I Am: A Personal History: 1943-1953. A native Midwesterner, he now lives in Richmond, Virginia, with his wife Reade Johnson and their mixed-breed rescue dog Rolfe.

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SUNDAY’S CHILD

Memories of a Midwestern

Boyhood: 1923-1943

Robert Ayres Carter

Copyright © 2005 by Robert Ayres Carter.

Library of Congress Number:   2004098532

ISBN:      Hardcover    1-4134-7327-X

                Softcover      1-4134-7326-1

                eBook            978-1-4691-2396-7

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

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Contents

Foreword

Acknowledgments

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

Twenty-Five

Twenty-Six

Twenty-Seven

Coda

DEDICATION

To Jonathan Barlow Carter

and Randall Ayres Carter,

so that they will know what

their father’s life was like

when he was young.

O lost, and

by the wind

grieved, ghost,

come back again.

—Thomas Wolfe

Something will turn up.

—Benjamin Disraeli

The bonds that unite another person to ourself exist only in our mind. Memory as it grows fainter relaxes them, and notwithstanding the illusion by which we would fain be cheated and with which, out of love, friendship, politeness, deference, duty, we cheat other people, we exist alone. Man is the creature that cannot emerge from himself, that knows his fellows only in himself; when he asserts the contrary, he is lying.

—Marcel Proust

FOREWORD

The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.

—L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between

It is a brave writer, I believe, who sets out to write a memoir. Autobiography by its very nature can be both intimidating and embarrassing. Intimidating because there is the basic problem of getting things right. For that, the writer must be able to summon up remembrance of things past—and what if you have a sometimes undependable memory? Embarrassing because of the constant repetition of the perpendicular pronoun: I… I… I… ad infinitum; it can get tiresome, even for a monumental egotist, which I am far from being.

There is, of course, the possibility of telling one’s story in the third person, but that seems awfully coy and self-aggrandizing, for you can claim all sorts of heroics and grand deeds if you’re talking about he and not I.

Or you can fictionalize your life story—but no one will be fooled by that, certainly. So you might as well be straightforward and tell it in your own words, with all the deadly I’s included.

Recently, I clipped an amusing cartoon out of The New Yorker. It showed a young woman on a window seat, writing a letter. The caption read: Dear Mom and Dad: Thanks for the happy childhood. You’ve destroyed any chance I had of becoming a writer.

Is this true? Are the only memoirs worth reading (or at least worth buying), the ones whose pages are suffused with misery—the wretched children mired in dysfunctional families, plagued by poverty, crime, illness—all the elements of a blighted life? Is that what is needed to make a memoir interesting?

Lord, I hope not—for I did not grow up in what I would consider a dysfunctional family—though I could argue, with convincing evidence to prove my case, that every family is dysfunctional in one way or another. What was it Leo Tolstoi wrote, the first sentence of Anna Karenina? Happy families are all alike: every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

So, if I have no tale of woe to tell, no boyhood replete with beatings, neglect, scorn, no servitude in a blacking warehouse, such as the 12-year-old Dickens experienced—why am I writing a memoir at all? More to the point, inasmuch as mine is not a household name, what’s so important about my life that makes it worth writing about?

W.H. Auden once said that in order to have lived fully, a man ought to have written a book, fathered a son, and planted a tree. Having fathered two sons, written more than eight books, and planted a good many trees, I believe that I have had a full and satisfying life, and a not undistinguished career—but that’s not the true subject of this memoir. What I’m writing about is my boyhood—about growing up in Nebraska, Minnesota and Wisconsin. All well and good, but why?

The dedication to this book says it all. I want my sons to know what life was like for me when I was growing up in the 1920s and 30s. How I would have liked to have such a memoir from my father, or his father! My wife Reade has spoken of a short memoir written by her great-grandfather, I believe, who writes of traveling from Richmond to Abingdon, Virginia, during the Civil War—but how did he get there, Reade wonders, and how long did it take him? Was the trip made by train, on horseback or by horse and buggy? Where did he eat or sleep along the way?

I think we are all at least somewhat curious about our forebears—how they lived, what they did and thought, but too few of them trouble to put their recollections on paper.

There are other ways of achieving this, of course. Oral histories on tape, for example. And videotaping. In the summer of 1991, when Reade and I lived in Woodbury, Connecticut, we had a reunion of all my siblings and their spouses: Bud and Kay, Harry and Janet, Jo Ann and Carl, and Reade and me.

At one point, we sat on our deck and exchanged reminiscences. I was struck then and—now that I have been viewing the video—I am struck again, by how often our memories differ on the same events or personalities. That is why my memoir will not be the same as a memoir written by my sister or brothers—not that I expect them to write memoirs—although I wish they would as well.

I have often regretted that my father did not say more about his early life. He did provide us with a quite complete listing of births, marriages and deaths in the family, going back to the 1869 birth of his mother Helen Florence Ayres, through the children born to me, my sister Jo Ann, and my brother Harry. (My oldest brother George, or Bud, and his wife Katherine (Kay), had no children.)

Going even farther back on our family tree, I have two reminiscences, one written by W. Douglas Carter and W. Dudley Carter; the other written by Thomas Marion Carter, who, we believe, was probably our great-grandfather. However, absent a more complete family history, we can’t be sure of that; Alexander Carter, Jr., Thomas M.’s younger brother, is another candidate for that role.

Both these reminiscences are short. Both describe the journey brothers Thomas and Alex Carter took from Scioto County, Ohio to Nebraska—a trip that took them four weeks by steamboat and stagecoach, horseback and shank’s mare—but Thomas’s is by far the more interesting, since he was one of the original founders of the town of Blair, Nebraska, in 1855.

He describes his first sight of Nebraska from the town of Council Bluffs, Iowa: I thought of Daniel Boone as he wandered westward on the Kentucky hills looking into Ohio. ‘Fair was the scene that lay before the little band, that paused upon its toilsome way, to view the new found land.’

Thomas M. Carter was, we are told, a prosperous farmer, a Mason and, in his own words, worthy patriarch of the First Sons of Temperance organization in the county. He lived in De Soto Township long enough to see the last of the whiskey traffic banished from the township. Old Thomas would surely be displeased with the drinking habits of some of his descendants!

At the end of his brief account, he adds this tantalizingly matter-of-fact recollection:

In October 1862, I joined the Second Nebraska cavalry for service on the frontier. Our regiment lost a few scalps and buried a number of Indians. We bivouacked on the plains, wrapped in our blankets, while the skies smiled propitiously over us and we dreamed of home and the girls we left behind us, until reveille called to find the drapery of our couch during the night had been reinforced by winding sheets of drifting snow.

There are no Indian fights or cavalry charges in my life story, though I served overseas in World War II, and saw plenty of winding sheets of drifting snow in my early years.

What I have to offer in the pages that follow is a picture of America as seen through the eyes of a member of what has been called (pretentiously, I think) The Greatest Generation. Born in the Roaring Twenties, grown up in the Great Depression, in my young manhood propelled by history into a world torn apart by war, I consider myself a typical middle-class American of my times, fortunate to be able here to bear witness to the small part I played in that great drama. All of this I saw, and part of it I was.

—RAC, Richmond, Virginia

April 30, 2004

A Partial Cast of Characters, In Order of Their Appearance:

Robert Ayres Carter, the author

Zeta Aylene Hart Carter, the author’s mother (her middle name has also been spelled Aileen. I’m not certain which is correct.)

George Whitfield Carter, Jr., the author’s father

George Whitfield Carter III, the author’s oldest brother

Harry Hart Carter, the author’s older brother

Jo Ann (christened Joan) Carter, the author’s younger sister

In St. Paul, Minnesota:

Helen Florence Ayres Carter, the author’s paternal grandmother

George Whitfield Carter, Sr., the author’s paternal grandfather

Ardis Carter, the author’s aunt

Miss Gundlach, an English teacher at Groveland Park School

The Goltz family: Eddie, Eleanor, Neal and Bob

In Ponca, Nebraska:

Harry Hillis Hart, the author’s maternal grandfather

Nellie Isom Hart, the author’s maternal grandmother

Lamont Hart, the author’s uncle

Esther Hart, the author’s aunt

Billy and Shirley Hart, cousins

In Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin:

Doris Connell Carter, the author’s stepmother

Grace Connell, Doris’s mother

Tom Connell, Doris’s father

Bill Rodiger, a close friend

Margie Malmberg, a close friend

Jack Pangborn, a good friend

Miss Averill, the author’s high school French teacher

Miss Whelan, the author’s high school English teacher

Grace Walsh, the author’s high school speech coach

Marshall Wiley, a local attorney

Harold Stafford, a local attorney

Edith (Dids) Lambert, a girlfriend

At Lawrence College:

Professor William Bark, history

Professor Warren Beck, English

Bob Curry, a roommate

Gordon Shurtleff, a friend

Charles Kenyon, a friend

Beth Deering, friend and lover

George Garman, an acquaintance

In Chicago, Illinois:

Paul Martin, a friend

Mr. Puckey, a resident of the Quadrangle Club

Miss Raines, manager of the Quadrangle Club

Rev. and Mrs. Vogt, the author’s landlord and landlady

Abe Freyman, a University of Chicago friend

Homer Goldberg, another University friend

The Deering family, Father, Mother, Beth & Buzz

Note: It has also been suggested that I clarify my marital history, because I refer to several wives in these pages. I have had four wives (this is not something I am proud of, but when I entered into these marriages, I sincerely thought that each one would be till death us do part.) My first wife was Mary Janeway Conger: we were married twice, in New York City in May 1949 and in Brattleboro, Vermont in August 1949; separated in October 1949, divorced in 1951. My second wife was Marjorie Anne Marker: we were married in New York City in December 1954, separated in April 1971, divorced the following year. (Marjorie, God rest her soul, was the mother of my two sons, for which I am everlastingly grateful to her.) My third wife was Winnie Allen Scott: married in September 1973, separated in November 1976, divorced in 1980. My fourth and last wife is Reade Johnson: we were married in December 1983. (This time it really is till death do us part.)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

As always for the past twenty years, I have been grateful for the support and encouragement of my wife, Reade Johnson, who was also my first reader and editor. Information and photographs were supplied to me by my brothers George (Buddy) and Harry, and my sister Jo Ann. I have had access to family photographs and records as well. I must also acknowledge the invaluable copy-editing and proofreading skills of Joan Losen, Librarian of the Christian Children’s Fund in Richmond, Virginia. She not only kept me grammatical, but also provided useful research material as well. A word of thanks, too, to my friend Gerald Wadsworth for his fine work in preparing my cover art for publication. I suppose I also ought to thank the Internet and whoever invented it; this book could not have been written or published without it.

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Zeta Aileen Hart, the author’s mother, c. 1916.

ONE

Beginnings

I am searching for my earliest memories, ransacking the past, so to speak, for those first impressions, before I learned to read and write. Call it prehistory, if you wish. We are born with a link to the distant past, a genetic chain going back generations, centuries, millennia. The primeval stuff of life, the human genetic code, is immortal. It came to me from my father and mother; their mother and I gave it to my sons, who will in turn bequeath it to their sons or daughters. To put it in a religious context, we own nothing except our souls and bodies, and they are on loan from God.

We are also born speechless if not mute, with no memory, although there are those who claim to remember life in the womb, and others who remember life in the cradle. I do not, and I doubt that anyone else does either. As for remembering having lived previous lives, as one skeptic put it: why is it people always remember having lived celebrated—and never ordinary—lives? And why do they apparently have no recollection of the specific, day-to-day events taking place around them centuries or millennia ago, when those are just the kinds of memories we take with us to our graves?

And if, as some believe, the dead can speak to us from beyond the grave, why do they never seem to have anything significant to say?

We are born without the ability to survive, dependent on others for nourishment, warmth, shelter, and love.

What then is that first, elusive memory?

The mother, holding us in her arms and feeding us?

The father, tossing us up into the air and catching us as we fall?

The sound of their voices, perhaps, and the sound of our own voice, calling out to them…

I was born in Omaha, Nebraska, on September 16, 1923—a Sunday—the third son of George Whitfield Carter, Jr., and Zeta Aylene Hart Carter.

Monday’s child is fair of face,

Tuesday’s child is full of grace,

Wednesday’s child is full of woe,

Thursday’s child has far to go,

Friday’s child is loving and giving,

Saturday’s child has to work for its living,

But a child that is born on the Sabbath day

Is witty and wise and good and gay.

gay adj. 1. joyous and lively; merry; happy; lighthearted.

And then:

n. a homosexual; esp. a male homosexual

Alas.

Years later, I needed a birth certificate, and found that for some unaccountable reason, I had none. My father wrote the doctor who performed the delivery to verify my date of birth. With his verification, and to my great amusement, he submitted a bill for $50, which my father had neglected to pay at the time.

Just for the record, what was the year 1923 like? I cannot remember any of it, certainly, but a flyer I have in my files notes that in 1923 Pan American World Airways was founded, as was Time Magazine. Milky Way and Butterfinger candy bars appeared, as did Sanka, Welch’s grape jelly, Hertz Drive-Ur-Self and electric lights on the White House Christmas tree. Airmail postage was eight cents, and postcards were a penny. The best seat on Broadway went for $2.50. The Maidenform Bra was introduced. The newest movie star was a dog named Rin Tin Tin. President Harding died abruptly, just in time to avoid entanglement in the Teapot Dome scandal, whose chief malefactors were members of his own cabinet. I could go on, but I’m sure I’ve made my point: in innumerable ways, it was quite a different world from today.

I have no clear memories of Omaha, either, because we moved from there to St. Paul, Minnesota, when I was three. I was told later that the move was made because the seasons in Nebraska were too harsh for my grandparents’ health; there may have been other reasons. My father worked for a time at an Omaha trucking firm; the companionship of truck drivers had apparently not improved his manners or his vocabulary; perhaps my grandmother and grandfather felt that a move would be beneficial to his character. But the chief reason must have been that my grandfather, George Whitfield Carter, Sr., who had been a railroad conductor most of his working life, for the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific Railroad, had come off the line and moved into a desk job. He had been made a representative of labor to management, a transfer—and, I suppose, a promotion—which involved a move from Omaha to St. Paul.

I wish I had known my grandfather, but he died not long after leaving Omaha. He was apparently an affable man, and one who took family ties seriously. I am told it was his habit on Sundays in Omaha to visit one relative after another, to find out how they were doing, or just to pay his respects.

As a young married man, he had first worked for his father-in-law, Marion Oscar Ayres, who owned a bank in Dakota City, Nebraska. Apparently, George Whitfield Carter, Sr. didn’t care much for the life of a bank teller, because, as he once observed, there wasn’t enough chance to steal. This was a reference to the way railroad conductors in the 19th century operated. They were used to having a free rein on their cars, charging passengers whatever they pleased, tossing them off the train if they misbehaved, and deciding themselves how much of the fares they collected they would turn over to the line. Or as Grandfather Carter put it: We’d throw a silver dollar up to the ceiling. If it stuck, it belonged to the railroad; if it came down, it was ours.

I have a photograph of my Grandfather Carter before me as I write these paragraphs. He is in his early fifties, wearing a stiff detachable collar, a four-in-hand necktie, and a Chesterfield topcoat. He has round, black-rimmed spectacles, and a soft felt hat creased at the top, the brim turned up at the back. The photographer caught him almost smiling: a grimace, really, his mouth slightly open and baring only the teeth on the left side of his jaw. His ears, like my own in my early years, are somewhat wing-like. He looks firm, decisive, respectable; his stealing days, if he wasn’t joking about that subject, as I suspect he was, are long over.

I have another family portrait in front of me as I write this. It is a sepia photograph of my two older brothers, George Whitfield Carter III, and Harry Hart Carter, and me, perched above them. I was told once that I had long hair until I was two, and that my mother wept when it was finally cut short. In this photograph, my hair is bobbed, and I am wearing what appears to be a dress. I look happy; I’m sure I probably was happy—at that age, most of us haven’t got a thing to worry about; all our needs are met, all desires satisfied. While I am smiling, however, my brothers look watchful, attentive. George—who was always called Buddy or Bud—wears glasses not unlike those of my grandfather: round with black rims. My older brothers were probably six and five years old, respectively, and I was about two. There is a younger sister, Joan, but she did not arrive on the scene until 1926, a year after we sat for this portrait. Given our ages, the picture was taken in Omaha; we would be moving north in about a year.

When my sister was christened, Mother named her Joan, mistakenly thinking it was pronounced Jo Ann, instead of Jone, the correct pronunciation. Jo, as I have always called her, recently corrected Mother’s error, and now calls herself Jo Ann, but in this memoir I will spell her name as I did in our early years.

What was Omaha like when I lived there? I have no idea—no memory of Omaha, except what I was told later, or what I could surmise from family snapshots. I do know that when I was a year old, and still in Omaha, my tonsils became infected and an operation on my throat was required. I still carry a scar from the surgery, just above my Adam’s apple. However, I have no memory of the operation, either.

So, it is St. Paul to which I return now … .

TWO

Early Memories

I must have been about four. My brothers have told me that we were living in an apartment on Summit Avenue, and that they attended the Longfellow School. Summit Avenue is St. Paul’s premier boulevard, one of the great urban avenues, like Fifth Avenue or Park Avenue in Manhattan, the Champs-Elysees in Paris, or Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia, where I am writing this memoir.

Summit Avenue runs four miles from the Cathedral of St. Paul and the brownstone mansion once owned by railroad magnate James J. Hill to the Mississippi River, dividing St. Paul from its Twin City, Minneapolis. On the avenue are some of the best-preserved Victorian mansions in the country. Of the structures built, a hodgepodge of Queen Anne, Romanesque, Beaux Arts, Georgian Revival and Italian Villa styles, 85 percent remain intact. They are much admired, despite architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s dismissal of them as the worst collection of architecture in the world.

Summit Avenue is of particular importance to me as a writer. F. Scott Fitzgerald finished his first novel, This Side of Paradise, on the third floor of his parents’ home at 599 Summit. On one visit to the city, I photographed the house, an unprepossessing brownstone squeezed between two other houses. Author Sinclair Lewis, vilified in his home town of Sauk Centre, Minnesota, for writing Main Street, lived for a while at 516 Summit, and Donald Ogden Stewart, future playwright and screenwriter (The Philadelphia Story) lived in Mrs. Charles Porterfield’s Boardinghouse at 513 Summit Avenue. In 1919, when Fitzgerald was working around the clock on his debut novel, one of his few respites was visits with his friend Stewart.

It was probably a Sunday, since my father was home and he and my mother had decided to drive over to my grandmother’s house at 2183 Summit Avenue. (The cross street at that address, unfortunately, is named Cretin.) The houses along Summit vary from ordinary brick or frame dwellings to grand mansions. Grandma’s house, which she and Grandpa Carter built when they moved to St. Paul, was much less pretentious—a salmon-colored stucco building in an approximation of the Spanish hacienda style, with green and red striped awnings.

It was a hot, humid summer day—the kind of heat that shimmers in the air. If indeed my parents and grandparents left Nebraska in search of a milder climate, they didn’t gain much. Minnesota is every bit as hot in the summer as Nebraska, and a great deal colder in the winter.

I am not sure where my two brothers Buddy and Harry were. They may have accompanied my parents, or have gone off to play somewhere in the neighborhood; they considered me too young to be a suitable playmate. By the same token, my sister Joan, three years younger than I, was, as an infant, only of passing interest to them, and to me as well. I suppose she went along with the adults. At any rate, I was left behind, and I waved good-bye as the car drove away.

Then I got an idea, a notion really. I would walk after them, follow them to Grandmother’s house. So I set off along Summit Avenue. I don’t suppose I got much farther than a few blocks from home, and certainly nowhere near my destination, though it must have seemed like a long walk indeed to a four-year-old, when I saw a vacant lot across the street that somehow beckoned to me. It was a low, barren hill, hard-packed dirt, uninviting, I suppose, but irresistible to the small boy that was myself. Why did I climb it? Because it was there, naturally.

At the top, I found a