Retired

I have now retired, and one of the things I plan to do is to spend more time on these blogs! Got Abby's wedding coming up in two weeks, the Park City timeshare coming up, so I'm busy, but when things slow down, I will try to contribute regularly to all of the blogs.

Tom

Brothers: Alan

It is time to introduce you to my brothers, starting with the oldest, Alan. Alan was a freckled faced kid with dark red hair. Since Alan was eight years older than me, he circulated in a different world than mine, but to my delight, he often brought me into his world. At home, I remember him best for the games in either made up or taught us to play. Many entertaining hours were spent playing Canasta, Pit, Hearts, and poker (we played for buttons or pennies). We also played board games like Monopoly, Clue, or Chutes and Ladders.
He also made up games for us to play. In the summer we were engineers, building a series of dams in the back yard and connecting them with artificial rivers made from the gutter water. We also played "Prospector" one of Alan's unique games. He gathered up a bunch of gravel and colored the bottoms with crayon, with different colors representing different metals. Black and Gray iron and aluminum, plentiful and cheap. Copper, silver and gold were more valuable with the number of rocks representative of their value. Only a few gold rocks were scattered, and finding one was a real thrill. To make the game more realistic, Alan bought candy (with his own money) that we could buy with our rocks. Now THAT is a brother.
Alan was resourceful, and started his career as an avian biologist early, collecting eggs and making nesting records of any birds in our area. He also started working in his early teenage years and was so good at it that before long he was managing a local fast food drive in called the "Pink Bunny". Some of the money earned was used to buy a car, and we had many adventures in that vehicle which will be mentioned in more detail as this blog proceeds.
While Alan listened to the pop music of the day, he also had a love for classical music. I will never forget hearing him cry when he fell asleep and missed hearing a rebroadcast of the annual Messiah production by the SLC Oratorio Society.
Alan was a great brother, and while he could tease as well as the others, he treated me OK. I never felt body or limb threatened when I was around Alan.

The "Tinkelator" machine.

All of my brothers (except for Alan the oldest, who was perfect) and I were bed wetters when young, so the memories of my youth are tinged with the sweet smell of urine.

At one point in time, my mother had to change sheets on three beds EVERY DAY. Needless to say, she didn't liked doing this, so a variety of things were tried to remedy the situation. We weren't allowed to drink anything after a certain time of the day, and my parents made sure we were all "well drained" before going to bed. But none of these plans worked. Finally my father, the inveterate inventor, decided to take matters in hand and invent something that would work. So he created the "Tinkelator" machine, and at the same time a legend that will probably be passed on for many generations.

Here is how it worked: Two metal window screens were placed under each bed, separated by a sheet or towel. As long as the cloth was dry, the two screens (which represented the negative and positive ends of an electric current) would not conduct electricity and the circuit was opened. As soon as the fabric got wet, the circuit was closed and a bell rang. A very loud bell, in fact, an old school hallway bell.

It worked! While the bed of the guilty bed wetter would get wet, the bell would wake up the others who could then be drained. (Actually, it woke up everyone in the house.) Best of all, it managed to do this without anyone being electrocuted.

Unfortunately the bell also woke up the neighbors! This ultimately lead to the demise of an otherwise splendid invention, and my mother had to continue washing sheets until we outgrew the problem.

Brothers... and a sister!

Brothers are wonderful things, and I am always happy to visit with any of them any time (they are scattered far and wide). But it wasn't always this way. Not exactly. It wasn't that I didn't LIKE my brothers, in fact I wanted to go with them where ever they were going, when ever I could. They just didn't want me! I was a "Tag-along-tuna-fish", a "Slimetooth" a "Stinktiveolich" and "Pigeon Chested". I was also a "moron" and a "pest". How do I know this? Because they me told me every day! Yes, brothers can be brutal, but looking back, I never felt brutalized. It was just the way things were. In some ways their teasing and their punching and persecuting made me feel good... at least I felt noticed. Being the youngest of four boys works out that way. After all I was supposed to be the girl. And at one point I tried to oblige.

My earliest memory of being teased by my brothers was when I got a doll for Christmas (I named her Cherry Cheeks). This happened when my sister Mary was about to make her arrival, and I'm sure it came about because I said something to my mother like "I want a baby too". I really did love Cherry Cheeks, and couldn't figure out why my brothers didn't get dolls.

I don't know what happened to that doll, but I have a vague memory of my brothers eventually dismembering her. But by then I had probably figured out why boys don't play with dolls.

I have quite a few memories associated with the advent of my sister's development and birth, since I was hanging out with my mother the entire time. I can remember watching my mother being examined by Dr. Peterson and wondering what was happening to her, I remember several conversations about the baby to come with my mother, many times speculating if it would be a brother or a sister. I was holding out for the sister. I KNEW what brothers were like. As Huck Finn said, "I'd been there before."

Finally Mary was born, and my Dad, attempting to describe for us what made a sister different than a brother, said "Mary is soft... softer than John's earlobes!"

Well, John had the undisputed softest earlobes in the entire neighborhood, and we tried to feel them whenever we dared, but not often, since John was the toughest and strongest of us all. I did manage to feel them once, they were incredibly soft, and the experience worth the pummeling. So the thought of an entire girl being that soft was hard to imagine. And Mary didn't disappoint. She was (and still is, I suppose) very soft.

About Families and Rememberimg

I am going to break away from the narrative of this blog (something that will probably happen often) to talk a bit about family and memories.

When I was in my mid twenties, living and working in Salt Lake City, my brother John dropped by on his way to somewhere else and we spent the night visiting. The conversation drifted toward family, and the result was a revelation to me: each child in a family grows up in an entirely different family, and has a totally different perspective on what it was like. My oldest brothers, Alan and Bob grew up with parents struggling to make ends meets, and three younger siblings. Alan was doing everything first and blazing the path for the rest of us. Both were essentially gone from the house after high school graduation. Alan went to USU and the military, Bob got married and joined the Navy to meet his duties as the head of a new household. When they were gone, I was in the 5th or 6th grade, still enjoying my childhood. John, the closest to me in age, also left the home after high school, but it many ways, he was gone after turning fourteen. He was the most independent of us all and didn't spend much time at home.

So from the seventh grade on, I lived in a family of essentially four at a time when my father's income was peaking. The house was quiet, clean, remodeled, and living was comfortable. My parents had more time, and as a result Mary and I grew much closer to them. In the summers, Mary and I would often go on trips with my parents using my father's various trailers and campers. I don't recall John going on any of these trips, but he might have. It seems to me John was spending his summers working at a friends ranch, but John will have to clear that up for me.

I ended up living at home, off and on, till I got married at 27! My stay at home was interrupted only by a two year mission for the LDS church to Austria. I attended school from home, left again to live in Salt Lake for almost three years, then returned for the last time when I was hired to teach at Clearfield High. So in the end, it was just my parents and me, and it included one last family vacation, I went with them to my first Pomeroy reunion in Wisconsin (a very nice memory for me, by the way)

My point is something that should have be obvious: These are my memories and are colored by my experiences and perceptions and age. Everyone who shared them with me perceived things differently.

I hope that any of my friends or family who follow this blog will feel free to comment about events described from their point of view. I also hope they correct any errors in my remembering or add details that I have forgotten. It will make this whole blog more interesting.

If I am able to follow through with this, it will become an important family document for my posterity and perhaps for others as well. To put it into perspective: What if any of my Great Grandparents had had a blog where they remembered and discussed family events?

As it stands now, the details of their lives are sketchy at best.

And now back to the stories...

A life remembered...

Davenport Family begins: Esther, Don and Alan (baby)

Most of the lives that have inhabited this planet are unknown and forgotten. Those that aren’t have left little behind but a birth, marriage, and death date. In between those dates a life was lived, and I think all lives are filled with stories, drama, achievements, humor, suffering, and triumph. All of us have stories to tell, but sadly they are forgotten, because we “never get around to it” and then death comes, and as the last breath escapes so do the stories, never to be told.

I am sitting here, recovering from surgical prostate removal, which had complications which brought me right to the brink. I am only 60 years old, and I think it is time to start telling my story. Of course like all stories it is shared with many others, so it will also be part of the story of Don and Esther, Alan, Bob, John, Mary, Roy and Ione, Lyle and Christine, Carl, Glen and Lucille, Keene, Kelly and Denny, Lyle and Beth and Brent and Christine and.... well you get the drift. Lots of people and friends have entered my life, and all become part of my story. Because this is a public forum, you will only learn their first names, except for those of my family, which is Davenport. My family will have the key that gives full names, and those of you who lived with me know who you are. So let’s get started on a trip which will take the rest of my life to finish. As long as I am alive, my story continues.

Beginnings
Mom tells me I was born in laughter. On March 18th, 1948 she was reading a story from one of my dad’s “Man Magazines” this one called “True” which was filled with the kind of stuff men care about (but no dirty pictures). My mother was reading a section where readers tell humorous true stories, and this one caught her fancy. She was laughing and her water broke, Dad rushed her to the hospital and I was born. I don’t know my weight or size, or even the exact time of birth, but I do know that I had red hair and the nurses called me “Sweet Pea”.

I loved this story, because I loved my mothers laugh, and right now would be a good time to introduce you to her, the woman that would be the center of my existence for the next 10 or so years (my mother was important to me my whole life, but it was 10 years before I ever noticed that other women could be interesting...)

My mother was an Angel. Yes, I know everyone says that, but my mother truly was and anyone in the neighborhood would vouch that this was right. They all knew that there was no one as gentle, and perfect and complex as Esther Davenport. All the mothers of all my friends were interesting people, and good people, and you will get to meet them all, but my mother was universally acknowledged as the kindness, sweetest, and most motherly of them all (although Brent might disagree with me, since his mother was also one of the finest women I have ever known, and a second mother to me).

The center of her universe was her family. My mother didn’t drive and there was no place she particularly wanted to go if her family wasn’t with her. She was smart and shrewd, a college graduate with a Minnesota mind. She could have held her own with anyone, but it wasn’t her way. What WAS her way was to be inclusive, as our lives expanded she liked nothing better than to see us reach out to those considered “different” because of skin color, disability, or nationality. She didn’t have any prejudice in her unless it was when her uncanny sense of character detected a false spirit. Then her protective instincts flared up and she let us know that this person would not make a good friend, and she was always right. Of course she didn’t do this by “laying down the law”, that wasn’t her way. Instead you would detect a hesitation in her voice, an attempt to give the person the benefit of the doubt, but without real enthusiasm. They didn’t pass muster, and Mom couldn’t fake her feelings.

I remember one new friend I brought home, and I noticed my mother was hesitant. Two weeks later he stole my bicycle. How did she do it? She just had an uncanny perceptiveness about other people.

It was impossible to not be genuine or honest around her, she had some kind of radar that instantly detected fraud, and she was especially upset if she detected it in one of her own. You just couldn’t fool Mom. But oh, what a mother! She loved nature and birds and flowers, and loved to join her children in discovery. She read books and played with us, and molded our minds. As my children grew I observed how my mother took time for each of them, sat on the floor and played with them, helped them build block towers, and enjoyed their imaginations as the burst forth. It was exactly how I was raised. I can remember my mother listening to me, reading to me, taking naps with me, making potato soup with golden pools of butter floating on top sprinkled with parsley. I had her all to myself for the first four years of my life, and didn’t mind sharing her with my sister Mary for the next year before I started school.

And her laugh! When something caught her funny bone she would laugh to the point of tears, and we couldn’t help but laugh with her, and our world was filled with perfect light and happiness. I know cynics like to say that the world of “Ozzie and Harriet” or “Leave it to Beaver” didn’t exist, but I know better. I lived it, and so did a lot of my friends. I loved, and will always love, my mother, Esther.