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Steel and Steam

I was a terrible student.

I rarely did homework but somehow slid by with Cs and just barely advanced from grade to grade. What homework I did was driven solely by fear of a teacher's wrath but, over time, my skin grew thicker with each passing year. "Homework time" was spent alone in my room with doors shut as I worked on hobbies or reading Science Fiction.

One weekend morning when I was perhaps nine or ten, I vaguely remember a statement I overheard my mother make; it was something to the effect that maybe my Dad needed to spend more time with me.

So, he and I were off that morning in his bright red Ford Crown Victoria to play on the steam locomotive that was on permanent display outside the Fairgrounds north entrance.

I had been there many times. It was a fifteen minute bike ride from home which was almost like being next door with the shortcuts a two wheeler and a youngster with little supervision could make.

But when we arrived that day, the city had put up a fence enclosing the locomotive.

The gate was closed and locked.

We walked all the way around with Dad probably trying to figure out what we could go and do instead.

Getting back to the closed gate and apparently having no other ideas he simply said, "Go ahead and climb over. It'll be fine."

My Dad was a surgeon and for those of you who don't know, when a surgeon gives an order, you do it.

"Scalpel."

Slap.

"Hemostat."

Slap.

To the question, "If all your friends jumped off a cliff, would you jump off the cliff, too?" my answer would have been, "If Dad said jump, of course I would."

So when Dad said to climb the fence, I only hesitated for the briefest instant before grabbing the storm fence with my fingers, sticking the toe of one high-top tennis shoe halfway between ground and hand grip, and pulling myself up and, after a couple of repetitions, dropping down inside the fence.

I ran up the wood ramp and into the cabin of the locomotive to see if anything else had been changed with the arrival of the fence. But no, most of the valves could still be turned by hand and the throttle lever, although rusty and sluggish, could still be yanked out or shoved in an inch at a time.

But after a couple of minutes, I became aware that Dad was talking to someone.

Looking out, I saw an empty Police car, lights flashing and the driver's door open. And standing in front of Dad was a Memphis police officer with hands on hips and leaning toward Dad.

I couldn't hear what they were saying but Dad somehow seemed much smaller than normal. Dad was nodding but, from the general tenor of his voice, I picked up an emotion I hadn't heard from him before.

He was apologizing.

I froze in amazement. I'd never seen him like this before.

Dad turned his head toward the locomotive and motioned for me to come out. In a few seconds I clambered up and over the fence and moved to stand behind him.

The conversation with the officer ended with a statement to the effect that he wouldn't give my Dad a ticket "this time" but that this shouldn't happen again.

"Thank you, Officer," my Dad said.

I was stunned.

Not only had Dad done something wrong, but he had actually acknowledged it.

He had made a mistake and, even more astonishing, he had admitted that he'd made a mistake.

Doctors don't do that.

Never.

Suddenly, this was someone I'd never met before, my own father.

Neither of us spoke a word on the drive home.

The More Things Change ...

On Saturdays, Dad would sometimes go to the hospital to see a couple of his patients. And sometimes he would take me along.

For years until trading up to a fire engine red Thunderbird, he drove a 1955 Ford Crown Vic, the Skyliner model that had a clear plastic roof over the front seat. The car was red and white with matching interior. At the hospital parking garage, it was very much "the Doctor's car".

Our initial destination was always the same. We would walk across the enclosed pedestrian bridge from the Doctor's office building where he had a monthly parking pass over to the hospital. We would then take the main elevator down to the basement. Following a couple of long halls and passing the kitchen, we'd end up at a small room with dozens of 3" diameter tubes coming out of the ceiling and ending just above long, wide canvas troughs.

The pneumatic tubes wound up and down through the hospital's twelve floors with ends at various stations. Each of those stations had two tubes, one for sending and the other for receiving. On his rounds, if my Dad wrote a new prescription for one of his patients, he would give it to the nurse who would put it in a carrier, set the three digit tumbler on the end with the code for the pharmacy and then push the carrier up into the sending tube where it would be sucked up.

Moments later there would be a "thwoomp" as the carrier dropped out of the tube and into the canvas tub. The attendant would pick it up, show me the three digit code and I would match it up to the outgoing tubes before inserting the carrier into the correct tube where it would sucked up and on its way to the pharmacy.

Later, the filled prescription would make its way back through the basement switching room and up to the nursing station by the reverse route using the destination number written on the prescription by the original nurse.

While Dad made his rounds, I would stay in the pneumatic tube "grand central" station, anxiously awaiting the arrival of the next canister. But Saturday mornings were slow and the attendant and I often just sat there with not much to share.

I was very young, very white, and very ignorant of the ways of the world.

He would be black, old, say "Yes, Sir" and "No, Sir" and not much else.

This was the deep south of the 1950s. In the department stores, there were separate White and Colored drinking fountains. In filling stations, the White rest rooms were conveniently located on the side. Colored was around back.

For the attendant in the pneumatic room, it was a good job, a very good job. It was easy, required no special training, it allowed him to work in air conditioned comfort on most of the near 100 degree summer days in Memphis and he would associate with other nice and similarly advantaged people.

Doctors had a code. If someone in a Doctor's family, office or one of the hospital workers became sick, the attending physician would often "forget to send a bill." The pneumatic room attendant and select members of his immediate family were no exception.

It was a very good job.

And so we would sit, a young white doctor's pre-adolescent son, and a senior black man who knew the realities of life in the American south.

 

In the 1950s there was white Memphis and there was black Memphis. We lived in white Memphis. Black Memphis was down past Southern Avenue and beyond the railroad overpass. Oddly, it was called the Orange Mound. Driving to some address on Lamar we would sometimes pass through it. And it seemed perfectly normal that this is where the blacks lived. That's just the way it was.

For the big department stores and public places, it was the day of the week that decided black or white, Colored or ... well, not Colored. Tuesday was black day at the Fairgrounds. And Thursday was Colored at Goldsmiths, the downtown department store.

 

So, after I have been forwarding the pneumatic carriers for a while, Dad would be back, all done with his patients. He would thank the attendant and I would too. Dad and I would walk back through the hospital to the parking lot where another attendant would drive Dad's Crown Victoria up to us from where it had been parked.

And we would drive out Union Avenue past the Methodist Hospital and then the Union Avenue Church of Christ and the Memphis Bible College, over the viaduct to Poplar Avenue before turning right and down Fenwick to Picardy Place where we lived at one end of the double-headed cul de sac in, of course, an all white neighborhood.

Later, I'd probably hop on my bike and ride over into Chickasaw Gardens and along its deeply shaded winding streets, past carefully manicured lawns with red brick houses with huge and equally tended back yards. My destination was possibly the artificial lake, occasionally stocked for neighborhood kids, or I might ride around the sidewalks that wove through the grounds of the Pink Palace, possibly stopping to look at the real shrunken head in its glass case, semi-hidden in a corner of an infrequently seen room.

The Orange Mound never entered my mind.

The Wiring

East encompassed kindergarten through senior high school. The elementary, East Elementary School, had the right half of the building while the high schools, junior and senior collectively referred to as East High School, had the left. I started there with kindergarten and attended for twelve years but at the end of my eleventh grade it was clear that something had to change. My grades were dismal and only with summer school was I advanced to the twelfth.

Tech High, several miles toward town from East, was the "technical" school with job-focused courses as well as the usual academics. My friend Russell had gotten me somewhat interested in electronics and so Mom took me down to see the school and look at their two electronics-focused departments.

The Radio and TV Repair classes were focused on repair shop skills and sat at one end of the Shop building on the upper floor. The teacher was overweight, unattractive and there was something in how he spoke to my mother that was very wrong. My dislike was instant and intense.

No, I'm not interested in Radio and TV Repair.

Not one bit.

So we walked to the other side of the Shop building to the Electronics Department.

And I met Mr. Schroer.

Franklin Delano Schroer wore polished black shoes with black pants that weren't quite long enough to completely hide his white socks. That day he had on a short sleeve white shirt and a slim black tie. He wore black horn rim glasses and had his black hair combed straight back.

His face beamed sincerity and his eyes sparkled with intellect.

I liked him instantly.

He showed us the classroom and then the adjacent electronics lab. One of the T-racks of electronic subassemblies was sitting on a table and he briefed us on how his students would take measurements to prove the hand calculations of voltage and current done earlier in the classroom. "Theory meets practice," he would say. He also proudly showed off the Tektronix oscilloscope that his best students were sometimes allowed to use.

His Electronics course was three hours a day, five days per week. While Tech High offered all the classes I would need to graduate, they would have to be fit into the morning hours. Electronics completely filled the afternoon. It was a two year program and even though I only would have one year before graduation, I was hooked. I wanted that class.

And Mr. Schroer was the consummate teacher. He would present material, work on the chalkboard, ask probing questions of individual students, listening carefully to their answers and then reward or gently chastise them.

He was a caring man.

He was an intelligent man.

And he was a compassionate man.

I like him intensely.

At Tech High, my declining grades reversed almost overnight. I had an "A" in Electronics, and nothing less than a "B" in all other courses. The year flew by and, two semesters later, I graduated.

By then, I knew I wanted that second year of Electronics. Mom knew why that year had been so important, so positive for me and so she talked to the principal and school administrators, and then the city-wide Board of Education and she got permission for me to attend Tech High for another year in what should have been called the 13th grade.

But late in the summer before the school year had started, we got word that Mr. Schroer had received a promotion to the Board of Education. He would not be teaching this year.

Well, that's OK, I thought, it's still the Electronics I love.

Enter Mr. Pascal in a shiny gray suit, white shirt and brown tie with highly polished brown shoes and thin socks to match. When he spoke, he measured his words slowly and carefully but stopped often to see how his listener would react. He would then "clarify" his words and invariably take it in a direction more to the listener's persuasion.

Where exactly Mr. Pascal was in all that was hard to say.

In the classroom, he called roll every day instead of simply noting who, in the six person class, was or was not present.

He read verbatim from the chapter we had been assigned to read the night before and then copied the math examples also from there to the chalkboard and worked through each transformation in the book as if he were figuring it out.

Labs, too, were straight from the book.

I hated it and I hated him.

He disgusted me. He had a snickering kind of insincere laugh like we were the butt of some inside joke and I just couldn't stand to be around him. I wanted to be anywhere other than in that Electronics class.

A few days after my first semester grades came out with a low C in Electronics, Mom took me to visit Mr. Schroer at his new Board of Education office.

She showed him my grades and, without waiting for his reaction, asked him to come back and teach the class.

Mr. Schroer was momentarily taken aback. After regaining his wits he said his new job kept him completely occupied.

"I couldn't possibly fit it in."

Mom asked me to step out and she closed Mr. Schroer's office door as I exited.

Through the door, I could hear their muted voices, no words came through but the emotions did.

Mom was pleading and growing more and more desperate.

Mr. Schroer was sympathetic but adamant.

I could make out some of his words and it sounded like the same sentence each time; "I couldn't possibly fit it in."

The pitch and volume of Mom's voice increased with each round and there was an edge to the sound as if something was being pushed too far.

Her desperation clear, I wanted to rush inside, tell them to forget the whole thing and then leave, get away from there, never come back.

And I heard her voice break, the pitch warbling out of control.

Standing in the hallway outside Mr. Schroer's closed office door, my throat closed up. I choked. I was overwhelmed with emotion.

Several minutes passed, their voices quickly growing too soft to hear.

Finally, there was just silence.

When the door finally opened, her eyes were red but her makeup was neat and straight. She was always composed.

Mr. Schroer would teach the morning session of the advanced Electronics class and then do his normal work for the Board of Education in the afternoon. Mr. Pascal would continue with the first year class in the afternoon but I wouldn't see him.

And in a month, my grades were back on top.

Fishing Chickasaw Lake

The near-wealthy lived in Chickasaw Gardens just a few blocks from Picardy.

In Chickasaw Gardens, the roads curved and meandered while ours were straight or dog-legged. Decorative street lamps were spread too far apart to be functional in the Gardens. Our street light, on the other hand, was very tall and anyone trying to dash to it, home base in the summer evening game of hide-and-go-seek that ranged over nearly a dozen homes, would be easily spotted three houses away.

But the Gardens had a lake and we didn't. In the winter it sometimes froze thick enough for skaters. In summer it was stocked and ready for junior anglers.

Chickasaw lake was long and irregular. One end had a large curved area with a fountain that was sometimes turned on but that’s not where the fish were. The other end narrowed to a low earthen dam less than a hundred feet wide but, again, the space was too big for the fish.

In between, there were two adjacent islands that created three channels between the two ends of the lake. One island connected to the shore with a foot bridge but the other was isolated, unconnected and overgrown by late summer. The only way to this second island was to wade across the muddy bottom which almost no one ever did. That island stayed wild.

It was in the channel between that latter island and the shore where the fish stayed. The tree-lined banks on both sides created cool, dark hiding places and the catfish -- “Bullheads, not catfish,” John corrected ... the bullheads wallowed-out holes among the roots in which to hide.

Walking up, you had to move slowly and walk gently, making sure your shadow didn't fall on the water. If it did, you’d invariably see a V-shaped wave moving away as the Bullheads swam to the other side.

But a patient angler or a small boy in black high top tennis shoes could move slowly up through the bushes, sit and bait a hook and get it into the water without disturbing the fish in the morning's cool shade along the bank.

The best bait, usually from the Weona grocery across from East on Poplar Avenue, was uncooked biscuit dough. The tubular package would make a dozen such rolls but there was no way to use that much in hours and hours of fishing.

In the beginning, I tried different fishing poles, different reels, different lines. I’d cast out into the middle of the channel, let it sit for a while and then slowly reel it in.

Nothing.

John said, “You gotta drop it into their hole under the tree. They won’t come out for it.”

John's Dad, living up in Tipton Tennessee must've taught him.

John knew a lot I didn't.

And following his advice, it became apparent that my ability to cast the hook and bait into such a hole beneath a tree on the far side of the canal was more likely to catch a tree or a bush, not a fish.

On the other hand, getting it into a hole on the near side required no more than playing out five or six feet of line and giving it a gentle swoop.

So much for powerful casts.

“They’re on the bottom. Just wait. When you feel a tug,” John went on, “don't move. Pretty soon he’ll swallow it and then slowly swim away. Don't yank it or nothing. Just reel him in.”

My vision of a silvery fish leaping out of the lake and three feet into the air with a multicolored lure hanging from its lip like I'd seen in the sporting magazines at the barber shop wasn’t gonna happen at Chickasaw Lake.

“There, see the line movin' out? You got one. Reel him in smoothly. He's yours.”

Bullheads, like the much bigger catfish, have the same spines in their fins. Pick ‘em up wrong and you’d get stuck -- and the slime and germs would hurt for days at a time.

John showed me what to do.

“Lay him on the ground on his belly and wait for him to stop floppin’ around.”

“Then, put your hand over him like this and put your thumb behind the side fin and push it out so he can’t poke you. Put your middle finger on the other side and sort'a do the same while your forefinger is in front of that far-side fin. Then, wait for him to raise up the fin in the middle of his back and get the skin between your thumb and forefinger under the it and lock it forward. He can't poke you then. Finally, snug your fingers under his belly and pick him up.”

“Once you're holding him, squeeze just a little and he’ll open his mouth and you can look down his gullet to see where the hook is caught. If it’s near his mouth, just reach and and push the barb out. He won't bite if you keep squeezing him a little.

"But if he swallowed the hook real good, then just cut the line and get the hook back later when you gut him.”

Cleaning bullheads isn't easy. They have skin, not scales. You cut the skin all around the head and then grab it with a pair of pliers and pull it off -- but it's stuck on real good. You needed pliers with good grippers.

And of course, you had to slit the belly and rake out stomach, intestines and God knows what else before that.

All the skin and guts were thrown out into the lake -- we figured Bullheads weren’t very smart and would probably each other’s guts as well as uncooked dough.

Packing up when it was time to go, the remaining bait dough would be tossed into the lake to feed the fish and whet their appetite for more, hopefully hiding a hook attached to a line attached to my fishing pole the next time out.

The first couple of times I brought Bullhead filets home for dinner, Mom fried them up for my dinner.

“You caught those?” Wendy would ask.

“In Chickasaw Lake?” Terri would add raising her eyebrows.

“And you carried them in your pocket from the lake to here?” Dad would finish.

Uncertain why they were asking so many questions, I could only tell the truth.

“Yes,” I'd say but with my voice rising at the end turning it into a question.

Never having eaten Bullheads before, I guess they tasked like Bullheads. Fishy, a lot like catfish, but stronger. And a lot like how the lake smelled after a dry spell with no fresh water coming in.

It only took a couple of meals to realize that nobody wanted to eat them, myself included. So from then on it was “catch and release” and then wonder if the fish survived the hook extraction ability of a ten year old.

And then the realization came, that fishing is not really about fishing or eating.

Fishing is about solitude.

It’s about listening to the wind, bushes and trees.

It’s about the colors of spring, summer and fall.

It’s about the cool feeling of damp soil along the bank in the shade of broad trees on a warm quiet day.

It's about people walking by but being anonymous and unseen in the bushes.

It's about solitude.

It's about choosing what you’ll do for the next minute. And then choosing again for the minute after that.

Shall I go?

Shall I stay?

Shall I stretch out my legs and lean back against the tree and gaze up at the leaves?

Should I get out the fishing pole, line, hook and put on some bait and try to catch a fish?

Naw, I think I’ll just sit.

Sitting is good.

Nice day.

I adopted a nautical term for times like this.

They're important.

They are “rudderless”.

There's no direction except what comes in the moment, and if nothing comes, then you just enjoy the moment.

In rudderless moments, I would do and go, or wouldn't go and do, all according to the whim of the moment.

The wind blows.

That's nice.

Years later as I would travel the world, I would cherish those rudderless hours and days when circumstance or the occasional and very intentional plan would make some of that time available.

Rudderless.

I wandered a backstreet in a residential section of Wuhan China, rudderless. I bought a six pack of beer and shared it with local residents who had come out, set up a table and chairs beside the street where they live for an early evening and apparently regular game of Mahjong. Other than offering and accepting my beer and their chair, we couldn't communicate. But we all knew it was a nice moment. Everyone smiled and nodded.

And I’ve explored a mountain preserve a couple of miles from my home and found a secluded rock on which to sit and contemplate the life hiding all around me. That life lay hidden, quiet, and it just "was."

In moments of great stress, I can close my eyes and imagine the cool dirt, the gentle shade and the "shush" of wind and leaves overhead. I'm back to that stillness and peace beside the lake.

Alone, nothing to be done, no place to be.

Today, I'm between flights in Charlotte North Carolina with a couple of hours to wait.

But, for some of that time at least, I'll be back there.

You know where now.

I'm rudderless while around me swirls a sea of people going, drinking coffee, checking voice mail, boarding flights, arguing over make-up flights for missed connections and not having a very nice time.

Me? I'm enjoying that moment, back on the bank of Chickasaw Lake.

Rudderless for a couple of hours.

Nice.

Winter Fun

A Long Time Ago

Some things change, some don't.

Heavy snowfalls meant no school, sometimes for several days because the city had no snow removal equipment and if it didn't melt, nobody could get there.

At the other end of Picardy was Henry Nall's house. They had the steepest driveway and when the snow packed down (or someone sprayed a garden hose on it during the night), it became extremely fast. And because the sidewalk momentarily levelled out the ramp before the final drop to the street, you could get airborn for a moment.

But in the early years, the street covering was gravel, not the solid asphalt of later years. One of my sisters went down the hill on ice skates, lost it on the "jump" and ended up with gravel in her hip. Not good.

In a good snow, it was common to build a couple of ice forts within throwing distance of each other. A stockpile of snowballs -- no ice balls allowed! -- would be accumulated and then quickly exhausted as soon as the first one was thrown.

Over on Lombardy, passing cars became targets. The slick street and deep gutters along the sides of the street made it hard for drivers to stop safely and depart their cars -- by the time they gave chase, we were long gone.

And if it stayed really cold for several days, Chicasaw Lake would freeze thick enough for skating.

Yeah, winters were pretty good.

Mom

You can't really tell one person's story because, if you know them and they know others, there's not one story, there are many, and they're all intertwined. They are much like the roots of a tree, branching, turning, winding themselves around one another, each one growing, expanding and pressing on those nearby.

Mom's life was like that.

Mom and Dad, Helen [Love] Draper Skinner and Edward Folland Skinner

Mom was about as traditional a housewife and mother as you'd find in the 1950s in the mid-south. She always dressed and had her makeup on before breakfast. When the weather was very bad, she drove us to school and picked up again in the afternoon. But when the weather was tolerable, we were expected to walk or ride bikes. In the evenings, dinner was always in the dining room while we were little kids. The meals were what she knew from Michigan; beef tongue, boiled potatoes and green vegetables, and roast lamb with green mint jelly were typical.

Being a Doctor's wife, she usually had some hired help around the house. Betty Washington, Ella and Sadie were some of the maids that cleaned, cooked and helped raise the kids. Mom ran the clothes washer and dryer but the maids ironed and put away. And they cooked Mom's dishes, not theirs.

Mom was beautiful, no question. She had a wonderful face, kept her figure through three kids, and had a personality to match. Her nickname was "Polly" after Pollyanna, the namesake of her attitude, always finding the good. That was one of the best things she gave her children, that and her good looks. Only in her final two years would her attitude change, the consequence of a stroke that took the Pollyanna from us two years before she died. In a way, those final two difficult years for her and my father were a gift; they made her human, tragically, so we would understand her suffering and her gifts. It was a harsh lesson.

But that's the end of the story. There's much before then.

She was the Doctor's wife but not a trophy bride; she was far too intelligent for that.

I never saw Mom and Dad fight. Whatever disagreements they had, they dealt with the issues outside our attention. Whether that was through Dad getting the final word, or through Mom's wise management of the situation and Dad being permitted to think he was getting the final word, I couldn't say. Their relationship was like most other things with them; there was a "public face" to be shown and, I presume, a private one that no one else ever knew.

Mom would shampoo her hair with beer. And she would occasionally drink one, too, but only inthe privacy of our home and never in front of anyone except immediate family. My daughter will have one at about the same frequency as my mother, the grandmother she never really knew. It must be genetic.

"Ted, Anita, Teddy and Mary"

Mom was an art major in college and, after getting her degree, taught art in Detroit schools. I have some of her pottery as well as some illustrations, the latter made for a childrens book that never made it to press. Regardless, her art showed in most things she did.

She had a budget on which to run the household that was pretty frugal. Rarely would she have extra. Furniture was purchased once and only after what I suspect was a long negotiation, saving and waiting. Early pictures of the master bedroom showed a spacious arrangement in the what now seems tiny, 12 feet by 12 feet. They shared a closet for the in-season clothing in the bedroom. Coats and hats were in the hall closet and out of season clothing was stored upstairs in one of the odd-shaped closets off what we called the furnace room. With the milder winters of Memphis, most of the snow gear collected over several decades in Detroit were stored away upstairs and never seen again.

Mom's dressing table in the bedroom was small but functional. It had two drawers on each side with a large mirror in the middle. The backless seat was scooted under the foot area in the center when not in use.

Mom would occasionally take art classes at Brooks once the kids were older. It was her retreat. Some of her works were hung around the house.

Mom was the one who caused church to happen. We went to Idlewild Presbyterian on Union Ave. Think gothic, guilt, hard pews, and a pipe organ that seemed so boring then but which I would only much, much later come to appreciate. There was Sunday school followed by the main service. Not much of Sunday school has stayed with me; I couldn't tell you what we did for the 45 minutes I spent in there on many Sundays. Nor could I tell you what the sermons were about in the main service. I just remember that most of us Protestants were probably going to burn in hell, but that all of the Catholics were for sure so it was good we were Protestant.

The Weona Food Store was was a tiny place by today's standards, proably not much bigger than a truck stop. Regardless, they had a traditional butcher area with sawdust on the floor, a huge wooden chopping block contoured by years of chopping, sawing and daily cleaning, and glass-fronted porcelin-lined cases displaying the various cuts.

To friends, Mom was Helen, not Polly. To the grocer, the cleaner, the men at the gas station and everyone else I can think of, she was always Mrs. Skinner. Well, almost everyone else, that is. To the maids, she was Mrs. Skinner when they needed her attention, but she was Mam when they acknowledged her wishes. Indeed, it was "Yes, Mam" and "No, Mam", never "Yes'm" or "No'm". Each word was carefully pronounced.

And we learned what is referred to as a mid-western accent, never the Memphis mid-southern of our friends or the deep-south we sometimes heard. Mom and Dad instantly corrected any mispronunciation.

Nonetheless, I did learn southern from my friends, kids in school and the other adults we encountered. Cybil Shepard, if you hear her in movies or TV shows, speaks Memphis not southern. I can speak it, and I can understand all but the deepest of southern accents. But Mom and Dad never uttered a word of Memphis or Southern.

I only saw Mom cry once. I was in High School and had transferred the year before to Memphis Technical High School or "Tech" for their electronics classes. My grades had been sliding for eyars and the Electronics intrigued me.

Mr. Franklin Delano Schroer was the teacher. He had jet black thinning hair that he combed straight back. He wore black plastic frame glasses. Today we'd call him a nerd. Back then, he was surely an engineer-type. I don't remember if he wore a plastic pocket protector or if he had several different color pens in his shirt pocket, but it would've fit his persona.

In Mr. Schroer's class, I was resurrected. We wouldn't know it for a year but the reaon I did well was Mr. Schroer, not the Electronics he taught. He gave me the attention lacking elsewhere in my young life. It seemed I found the topics he taught to be utterly fascinating because all my tests came back with A's and 100% marks. And there was a several week segment where we had to do some math that he predicted would be terribly boring. But I solved every problem perfectly and, when that segment was over, was amazed it had gone so fast and easily. No one else found it that way.

But what was really happening was that he was giving me the attention for which I was starved and, once I found that spring, I worked hard at whatever would get more attention. My grades in Mr. Schroer's class were all A's, and my grades in all my other classes similarly came up. The long decline that had delivered me to Tech was reversed by Mr. Schroer.

Such is the effect of a loving individual who happens to be teaching children in school.

After one year with Mr. Schroer, I signed up for the second, advanced year. But Mr. Schroer took a promotion and moved to an administrative position with the Board of Education. Mr. Pascal showed up to teach the electronics class and, in six weeks, my grades in his class had fallen to a low C. Grades in my other classes were worse.

Mom was smart. Not only did she have a high IQ, she also had a very good EQ, her Emotional Quotient. She understood.

With me resisting but in tow behind her, we sent to see Mr. Schroer at his office at the Board of Education. There, Mom asked him to return and teach the advanced class. He said he couldn't, that his administrative job just didn't give him the time. Mem begged. He said no again, that it was impossible.

She cried.

I don't know if Mr. Pascal quit or was fired but, shortly thereafter, Mr. Schroer was back teaching my class. In short order, all my grades came back up again.

Mom knew the same way that mothers always know; that umbilical connection from mother to child is, for most, never completely severed. Even today, many years after her passing, I feel the visceral tug.

We're still connected.