Snippets: a Memoir

By Gordon Strayer

These snippets from Gordon Strayers memory provide glimpses of his life from birth and childhood on the Saskatchewan prairies through school, machinist apprenticeship, basic flight training and some months of Army Air Corps-assigned university study before WWII military service in Europe that included glider infantry training in France and Austria, a Bavarian summer in Hitlers Berchtesgaden, and some months adminis- tering military justice. Postwar journalism study helped prepare him for a career in public relations at a Big Ten university, which yielded another range of adventures for his discerning eyes and sharp commentary.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 19, 2014
• ISBN: 9781499026696

Gordon Strayer

Even as a child, Gordon Strayer was a prodigious reader, fascinated by words. He also developed an early interest in writing, and can even recall a (long-lost, and never paid-for!) short story accepted for publication in a Canadian farm magazine when he was 12 or 13 years old. His Snippets: A Memoir is actually a collection of short memoirs drawn from various periods of Gordon’s life, beginning with early days on a Saskatchewan wheat farm and progressing through high school, WWII service, college and university years, and professional life in public relations.

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Copyright © 2014 by Gordon Strayer.

Library of Congress Control Number:          2014909560

ISBN:          Hardcover          978-1-4990-2670-2

                   Softcover            978-1-4990-2671-9

                   eBook                 978-1-4990-2669-6

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Rev. date: 12/04/2014

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CONTENTS

PREFACE TO SNIPPETS: A MEMOIR

INTRODUCTION TO SNIPPETS: A MEMOIR

THE EARLY YEARS

WE ARE WHAT WE … READ?

Feeding Our Brains With Our Eyes

LIGHTING UP THE PRAIRIE SKY

And the Rockets’ Red Glare

MY RED SCHOOLHOUSE

Readin’ and Writin’ and The Gozintas

SANTA COMES TO SASKATCHEWAN

We Saw Him With Our Own Eyes!

PRAIRIE MATH LESSON

Rolling ‘Rithmatic

DAD AND THE NEW HIGH-SPEED TRACTOR

Farmers on the Move

IT WAS A BLAST!

Well, Sort Of

HIGH SCHOOL

HIGH SCHOOL DAZE FOR THE NEW KID IN TOWN

What Am I Going to Do for Friends?

WORLD’S SMALLEST BIG BAND?

Little, But Loud Enough

FIRST COLLEGE PROM

Bridge Too Far, and Dancing Outta Sight!

WRONG KIND OF WOMEN?

They All Seemed SO Friendly

IS ANYBODY COUNTING?

That Old Gang of Mine

FACTORY DAYS

REMEMBERING PEARL HARBOR – 65 YEARS LATER

That Day That Shall Live Long In Infamy

ONLY SLIGHTLY SHOP-WORN

An Interesting, But Very Different, Way of Life for This Farm Boy

MILITARY LIFE

OFF WE GO INTO THE WILD BLUE… WHAT?

…A Bad Omen, in Spades!

BEING ALL THAT I COULD BE

More Training, Shared With a Comic Companion

FIREWORKS

A Raucus, Deafening, Almost Too Realistic Final Exam

GOING TO WAR, FIRST CLASS

The Queen Elizabeth—A Troopship? You Gotta be Kidding!

DO THEY ALWAYS LAND LIKE THAT?

Another Dawn Surprise

DEATH OF A PRESIDENT

It Couldn’t Be—But It Was

SUMMER IN HITLER’S HANGOUT

A Beautiful Site for Ugly Business

SOME REALLY GUARDED MOMENTS

Five Sad Soldiers

MEMORIES OF TWO ALPINE SUMMERS

42 Years Apart, But Much In Common

BAVARIAN HOMECOMING

Early Morning Drama, Viewed From an Upstairs Window

MEMORIES OF JACK

A Magnet for Trouble

A MEMORABLE TRIAL

… And Justice For All!

THE DAY MY PARACHUTE DIDN’T OPEN

Disappointing! Or Just My Lucky Day?

TARNISHED BRASS – Or, A Timely Reminder

When Power Got Taken To the Woodshed

MY PERSONAL D-DAY

This Time It Stood for DISCHARGE

HIGHER EDUCATION

UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO EXPERIENCES

Mostly Good

AQUATIC ADVENTURES

First Of Faye’s Many Lessons for Me

TRAILER LIFE ALONG THE RIVER

Fancy Living it Wasn’t, But ‘Twas Home, Sweet Home at the Time

FAMILY LIFE

BROTHERS ALL

Whole Family of Boys—Poor Mom!

WELL, I CAN’T SAY I WASN’T WARNED

Dale Does His Best To Be … Helpful?

OUT OF THE MOUTHS OF BABES

They Were Wiser Than They Knew

WALLPAPER

SOME Enchanting Evening!

A CRUEL SURPRISE FOR HILARY

Color Just Drained From Her Face

BLOODY SATURDAY AT OUR HOUSE

Quick! Who’s Got the Tourniquet?

A MODERN CHILD’S CHRISTMAS GREETING

Remember, It’s The Spirit That Counts!

MOTHER’S LITTLE HELPERS

Endearing, Yes-–But Helpful?

ON THE JOB

MY ROAD NOT TAKEN

What If …?

YES, IT REALLY WAS ROCKET SCIENCE

Next Stop—Outer Space!

WHERE THERE’S SMOKE, THERE’S TV NEWS

And That’s a Given

A RESTFUL ROSE BOWL

Don’t’ Bother Reading This, Rabid Fans—You

Wouldn’t Believe it, Anyhow

IF I CAN MAKE IT THERE…

A Country Mouse in the Big City

A LATE NIGHT DECISION

What To Do? What To Do?

A POWERFUL MAGNET: KENT STATE

Drawn to View a Tragic Site

CAPITALISM…IT’S WONDERFUL!

And There’s Nothing Like It—A World In Itself

THINGS NOT ALWAYS AS THEY SEEM TO BE

Sometimes A Pleasant Surprise Awaits the Fact-Finder

I JUST WANTED TO HEAR YOUR VOICE

A Totally Unexpected Call Leads to a Tragic Finding

PRE-DAWN MYSTERY

Just What WAS That Strange Light In the Sky?

ART BUCHWALD AND THE IOWA COEDS

Big City Columnist Hears Pipes, Drums and Story of Iowa Highlanders

HIGHER MATHEMATICS IN THE PRESS BOX

The Science of Crowd Counting

TRULY ONE OF A KIND

See Things Not Always …, above

COME RIGHT ON IN AND SIT DOWN

Guest Navigator; Long Ride, Voluble Driver

EPILOGUE

APPENDIX

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

PHOTO CREDITS

snippet

a small part, piece, or thing;

especially: a brief quotable passage

as defined in The Chicago Manual of Style

17th Edition

PREFACE TO

SNIPPETS: A MEMOIR

While I don’t remember my mother actually teaching me to use the word, I clearly recall that she employed snippets from time to time to describe bits and pieces—words, phrases, sentence fragments she couldn’t recall completely, when quoting a motto, for instance, or a line of poetry to make a point.

Hence my use here to identify these activities, events or behavior that I recall having occurred during various periods of my life, such as childhood, school and college, military service and employment in manufacturing, and university administration—snippets of memory, if you will.

Given more detailed identification or description of their human subjects, or more effort at continuity, some of them might have earned short story classification—but even an overworked teaching assistant with a reputation as an easy grader couldn’t possibly bring herself to label these efforts any higher than snippet on the literary scale. I truly believe I know that for sure.

INTRODUCTION TO

SNIPPETS: A MEMOIR

This volume has its origin in a question put to University of Iowa retirees late in the 1990s and the early days of the University of Iowa Retirees Association (UIRA). For the moment, suffice it to say that enough UIRA members asked for instruction in learning how to write memoirs for my kids and grandkids, to inspire our Board to find leaders for an experimental program of teaching each other by work-shopping our individual memoirs.

A typical agenda for one of our bi-weekly sessions appears in the appendix at the end of this book.

While in the past I had never developed any over-arching interest in committing my life story to paper, I had reflected occasionally about the contrast between my own early days and the early lives of our two children.

The eldest son of American immigrants from Iowa and Illinois, I was born and grew into my teen years on a Saskatchewan wheat farm. I spent 200 days each year in a four-room village schoolhouse, enduring (among other things) the considerable discomfort of -20 and -30 degree temperatures through winters that seemed to last longer every year. Faye’s and my two children, in contrast, were born and grew up in a sophisticated urban setting, almost literally on the edge of a great university campus whose faculty members, among them, deal each day in nearly the full spectrum of human knowledge, and whose 30,000-plus students are drawn from throughout the world.

By the time those Strayer children came to know and converse with their parents in any depth, they were asking good questions about our olden days (their term), which I knew I would enjoy exploring on paper, hoping that our kids and perhaps even a few friends might eventually enjoy reading. Thus I was an early recruit to the first UIRA memoir group in 1999, and have thoroughly enjoyed our bi-weekly workshop gatherings, where we react to each other’s writing while teaching and learning from each other.

Like most other members of our two groups, I have avoided going the linear, autobiographical route, and instead have confined my efforts to recounting experiences at significant points in my life. It follows that there are many holes of various diameters in this document, but I decline to apologize for that.

A final word of explanation: the date that follows directly beneath the title line of each memoir in this little volume was the actual date, or during the period of, the event, activity or occurrence related in that memoir. The date that usually appears at the end is the date on which I wrote, or completed writing about, that memoir.

August 11, 2014

THE EARLY YEARS

Following my birth on June 23, 1923 in a Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan hospital, my parents brought me the 20-odd miles to my, and their own, first home – a small, 1-1/2-story farmhouse without electricity, bathroom, central heating, or running water. A hand pump in the kitchen sink pulled in water from a cistern adjoining the house.

At my tender age I was completely unconscious of any missing amenities or of the fact that Saskatchewan had only graduated from its Northwest Territory status to become a Province of The Dominion of Canada as recently as 1905.

My parents, Carl and Nina Carr Strayer, were Midwestern Americans from Iowa and Illinois, respectively. When I was born, Dad was farming with his older brother, Ralph, who lived with his wife and young children several miles northeast of my folks.

The brothers had first ventured to Saskatchewan in 1912, along with a train-car load of other young men who were attracted to the opportunities to homestead in that area. Carl and Ralph spent the summers of 1912 and 1913 breaking-out the raw prairie to make cropland of the rich black clay loam that underlay the thousands of acres of tall grasses then growing in such profusion there.

Several successive years of poor crops were enough to convince the brother that farming was not for him, and he moved his family back to the USA. Carl and Nina (pronounced NY-nuh by her family) bought and moved to the larger farmstead where his brother’s family had been living, and life became more comfortable for us. Running water! Indoor bathroom! Wow!

I must have been about six years old when Dad converted from farming with horses to mechanized farming. A McCormick Deering gasoline-powered tractor took its place in our farmyard, followed by larger plows, harrows, drills for seeding, and a J.I. Case combined harvester, which cut and threshed the grain in one operation, marking an end to the days of large temporary threshing crews gathering up sheaves from the fields and pitching them into the maws of the gigantic threshing-machine. By my 10th birthday I had acquired three younger brothers, two of whom (Richard and Barry) still live in Canada while the third (Allan) has been a Southern Californian since the 1940s.

Other highlights of my younger days included occasional trips to Illinois and Iowa to visit relatives. The 1934 trip included several days in Chicago at the World’s Fair, then winding down its final year of A Century of Progress, where we viewed such wonders as a Douglas DC-3 airplane, and a primitive early form of television.

WE ARE WHAT WE … READ?

1926-36

Some years ago we were being told that we are what we eat: that the food we ingest affects not only our growth, but also most of our behavior and performance.

If this be so, it seems likely that we are also what we have read, and are reading, since for so many of us that is our principal method of collecting, evaluating and absorbing—or rejecting—information and knowledge.

Which might explain some of the sizeable gaps in my knowledge, as well as some of the behavioral quirks that I am accused of possessing.

I learned to read at an early age. At the end of my first year of school the teacher used my reading ability as the reason for recommending that I pass directly into third grade.

Loving family members have since put forth their own theory: that in fact, Miss Jamison wanted so badly to avoid having me in her Second Grade, that just to get me out of her room, she would have sworn to any authorities that I was more than ready to advance to Grade Three.

We had no library in our four-room village schoolhouse, so those of us who really wanted—nay, needed—to read must make do with whatever reading matter could be found in our homes, or on the few bookshelves in the basement of the only church in our village: the United Church of Canada.

The books in that church library ran strongly to stories of boys in what the Brits call public schools to this day, e.g. Eton and Harrow, but what we here would know as private schools. The only authors of that period whom I remember were George Henty, Rudyard Kipling and Edgar Rice Burroughs, author of the Tarzan stories.

True, the local Ladies Aid established a one-room library for several years in an unused corner of Pete Smith’s oil station, at the corner of Drinkwater’s Main Street and Saskatchewan Provincial (Soo Line) Highway 39. The south terminus of that highway ended at North Portal, Saskatchewan; crossing the Canada-US border into Portal, North Dakota. The highway then immediately becomes the north end of US 52, which wends its way southeast through that state, Minnesota, northeast Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina and ending in Charleston, South Carolina.

(There now, wasn’t that little geography lesson interesting? Sure it was!).

Books and magazines donated by residents of the district comprised the library’s collection (if you’ll pardon the expression) and the library was open just a few afternoons each week, staffed by volunteers from that same Ladies Aid. That little library served a second useful purpose: it provided a place for farm wives to rest, and perhaps use a bathroom, after shopping in the Dorlands’ or Taylors’ grocery stores, Bob Johnson’s hardware store and Charley Ashwin’s so-called drugstore, with its several racks for magazines and newspapers from the outside world that came in, most of them from the US, via one of the Soo Line passenger trains that came through our village every day.

In our farm home were to be found multi-volume sets of the works of Rudyard Kipling and Eugene Field, all of which I had read avidly by the time I was halfway through the elementary school years. I especially loved the Jungle Book. Kipling’s Captains Courageous was my favorite seafaring tale of. I also took his poem, "If, very much to heart, and to this day have at least tried to keep (my) head, when all about (me) are losing theirs."

Before marrying Dad in 1921, our mom had directed a traveling company of the Ellison-White Chautauqua organization for several summer tours of the American and Canadian Midwests, and even to Alaska in a compassionate fund-raising effort to benefit victims of the terrible influenza epidemic of 1919. Some days she filled in on the Chautauqua stage in the capacity of Story Lady, other days as the Poetry Lady. She read stories and poetry to my brothers and me, so was herself a source of literature of the times.

We subscribed to a small handful of periodicals: two daily newspapers, the Regina Leader-Post and the Moose Jaw Times-Herald, a weekly, the Rouleau Enterprise from the next village down the Soo Line railroad from our own, and the bi-weekly Western Producer, published by the big producer co-op in which my dad was involved for many years, the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool.

But the biggest day of the week for my brothers and me was Wednesday, when Dad brought home a copy of the Chicago Herald-Examiner, which had circulated to Chicago readers the previous Sunday and reached the racks of the Ashwin drugstore by mid-week following.

With its color comics—Maggie and Jiggs, featuring Lord Plushbottom and that odd couple, the cigar-smoking Jiggs and his domineering wife, Maggie; Flash Gordon, who preceded Superman by many years; hillbilly Barney Google and his sidekick, Snuffy Smith, and those pestiferous Katzenjammer Kids—William Randolph Hearst’s Herald–Examiner was highly entertaining to four small boys landlocked on the prairie, when it brought big-city news, features and fashions to their parents.

At home we had several general magazines, among them Collier’s, The Saturday Evening Post, and American Magazine. Collier’s brought us the Nero Wolfe detective stories. The Saturday Evening Post carried wonderful stories about Alexander Botts, the inept but always successful Earthworm tractor salesman. It carried sea stories by Guy Gilpatric, and fantasies featuring Grandpa Hopewell and his Flying Tractor by Wilbur Schramm, whom I was delighted to find heading the journalism school some years later when I enrolled at the State University of Iowa for graduate study there.

One of my favorite Saturday Evening Post fictional characters was Tugboat Annie, a tough-talking oversized old woman who captained a tugboat in a harbor that might have been Seattle’s. Marie Dressler played the part in the only movie ever made about Annie, but that fictional old gal was also the subject of fabricated jokes and occasional cartoons.

The only cartoon I remember showed Tugboat Annie in an oil-station apparently looking around as if seeking something. The station attendant asked her Are you looking for the restroom? To which Annie roared, "Restroom? Hell, I ain’t tired—where’s the can?"

Clarence Buddington Kelland was the author of several stories each year in the American Magazine about Scattergood Baines, that devious but beloved old codger who apparently only lived to help his neighbors.

With its yellow-bordered cover, the National Geographic looked much the same 70-plus years ago as it still does today, minus the many pages of high-quality color photography its readers now enjoy.

In those days, however, I think the National Geographic enjoyed almost a monopoly in its display of women who for whatever reason had overlooked wearing shirts when the photographer happened by.

For some reason I remember the magazines better than most of the books I read while working my way up to and through adolescence. I do recall the Hardy Boys and Tom Swift series, as well as Jack London’s tales of the far North and Richard Haliburton’s account of his world travels. I especially liked the Bulldog Drummond detective series, and, of course, the stories of Sherlock Holmes.

If it appears that I lived pretty much among the heroes, villains and adventurers of fiction, then that is probably the case. Which may prompt any reader of these little fragments of personal history to wonder just how close to the truth did they actually come?

And, sometimes, so do I.

12/2/2013

LIGHTING UP THE PRAIRIE SKY

Boyhood Summers

When I was a kid, the strip of farmland extending 25 to 30 miles south of Regina, Saskatchewan’s capital city, was generally referred to as Yankee Ridge, largely settled by families who had emigrated from the American Midwest—Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Nebraska, Missouri, and both Dakotas. In the scores of years that have passed since my boyhood days, many if not most of those Yankee-Ridgers must surely have moved to other parts of the world—but I’d be surprised if that area isn’t still called something that identifies it with the USA.

My folks farmed some 40 miles west of there, and several of our neighbors, too, came from Midwestern states. Most, if not all of them, I’m sure, had become naturalized after moving to Canada. Neither of my parents had gone that route, at least in part, I believe, because to become naturalized at that time did not mean that the immigrant became a Canadian citizen; rather, it made one a British subject. Canada did not have a Citizenship Act until shortly after World War II.

Whether or not that was the real reason, my dad, born in Nebraska and raised in Iowa, sometimes said he didn’t choose to make himself a subject of a king in a little island 4,000 miles away.

While they couldn’t vote in Provincial or Federal elections, my American parents conducted themselves as good Canadian citizens, taking part in a full range of neighborhood and community activities and, indeed, providing leadership in many of them. They never made any particular point of their American heritage, except on one day of the year—the Fourth of July.

On the afternoon of the Fourth in those years, my family would gather in the late afternoon at somebody’s farm home—usually ours—to picnic with several other neighborhood families whose roots were in the American Midwest, including my paternal grandparents and a family of Strayer third-cousins. The male grownups would entertain themselves by pitching horseshoes or playing a pretty slow game of softball, the women might work on a quilt or other handiwork, and the kids would run some races, play on an old steam-engine or other big piece of machinery, or swim in the farm pond.

After consuming the ubiquitous hot dogs, potato salad, sweet corn and tomatoes fresh from their gardens, the adults were content to lean back and chat, while the kids might get out the marbles, Snakes and Ladders or other board games, until it got dark.

That’s when the real fun began. My dad always seemed to be the source of supply of assorted fireworks, purchased across the border on one of the Strayer family’s fall trips to visit Iowa and Illinois relatives, and he and one of the other men would take charge of the entertainment at that point.

They would push or pound a wide board along one of its two long edges lengthwise into the ground at a fairly sharp angle, piling dirt or stones behind it to stabilize it, then lean a few of the rockets against that board, pointing upward at an angle, and proceed to light them, one at a time. The rest of us stayed back at a distance, where we could safely admire their ascent and subsequent explosions against the dark Saskatchewan sky.

Our Canadian neighbors kept an eye in our direction after dark on those Fourths of July. Across all those thousands of virtually flat acres, where nothing but wheat and flax were growing more than a couple feet high, there was nothing to get in the way of their viewing the quick bursts of many colors during the 10 or 12 minutes that our fireworks display lasted—and those neighbors always remarked on the pleasure the pyrotechnics had provided for them, even at a distance of several miles.

Later, in October, would appear the truly extraordinary aerial displays of color and bright whiteness, when Northern Lights flickered, danced and sometimes rumbled across our skies each night for two or three weeks. But in the meantime, those Yankee picnic fireworks on the Fourth of July colored the prairie summer night skies most satisfactorily.

And perhaps they even helped the neighbors, who had begun their own lives in the British Isles or continental Europe, to forgive my parents and that handful of other Yanks for being born on the wrong side of the longest unfortified border in the world.

7/2/2007

MY RED SCHOOLHOUSE

1929-1936

We’ve all grown up hearing references to that famous American icon, the Little Red Schoolhouse. Yet in travels throughout every state in the Lower 48, as Alaskans refer to the land south of the 49th parallel, I have yet to see a little one-room, red, country school house.

Most of them that I’ve passed have been painted white—and in fact, for years now, the paint on many of those buildings has largely scaled off their exterior walls, leaving bare wood to weather most unattractively.

Even the so called Little Red Schoolhouse in which the armistice was signed at the end of hostilities in Europe in early May of 1945 turned out to be a creature of the media, as I discovered when I saw it days after the signing, on a visit to Reims, some 30 kilometers from my 327th Glider Infantry base camp to the east. Yes, the building was red—red brick—but Little it wasn’t, being a large industrial school, perhaps half the size of the Chemistry Building on The University of Iowa campus.

My first eight grades were spent in a red brick schoolhouse, which, along with the post-office, were the only public buildings in the farm village of Drinkwater, Saskatchewan. It was a four-classroom building, and I had been a pupil in each of them by