As noted earlier, my father was an accountant for International Paper Company in Kansas City, Missouri from 1950 thru 1952. The office where he worked was part of an office/warehouse complex. During lunch one day he walked from his office, through the warehouse to smoke outside on a loading dock. He began to tell a joke to several co-workers and accidentally fell off the loading dock while acting out the animated joke he was telling.
When he fell he hit his head on the concrete pavement several feet below and sustained a concussion. The injury also caused seizures, which he described to me later in life as epileptic seizures. His doctor prescribed phenobarbital, a barbituate, and told him the seizures should go away in six months. Dad became paranoid, believing after each seizure that he was going to die and eventually concluding that if he was going to die he wanted to die in his and my mother’s hometown, the small village of Anacoco, Louisiana in Vernon Parish.
My father quickly developed a plan to resign from International Paper Company, giving the firm several weeks notice of his planned departure. His plan was to send my mother, my 2-year old sister Pam and 4 1/2 year old me to Anacoco by train, traveling on the Kansas City Southern (KCS) railroad that ran from Kansas City to Lake Charles, Louisiana. Ironically, Anacoco, Louisiana was a stop or point on the KCS, located about 105 miles south of Shreveport and 75 miles north of Lake Charles. Both he and my mother felt the trip would be difficult for my mother traveling with two small children, so Dad paid for my mother’s sister, Aunt Tincy, to come to Kansas City by train to assist with babysitting chores and make the train ride by to Anacoco with Mom, my sister and I.
The train ride from Kansas City to Anacoco is one of the few memories I have during my fourth year of life and life associated with our time in Kansas City. I will describe the trip based on what few memories I have of it.
I was totally unprepared for what to expect when riding a train, and from what Anacoco would be like. Although I had been there several times between the age of my birth and age 4, I can never recall having memories of Anacoco until we moved there from Kansas City.
I don’t recall Aunt Tincy arriving in Kansas City or how many nights she stayed with us before we made the trip. My memory of the trip starts with getting on the train, walking through the train until we found our sleeping berth, or room, as we had privacy. I next memory has always been retiring for the night, after Mom and Aunt Tincy pulled down two sleeping bunks or cots that sort of folded into the wall during the day, and were pulled down for sleeping at night. Mom told Aunt Tincy to sleep on the top bunk with me, while she would sleep with Pam on the bottom bunk.
To keep me from falling off the upper bunk Aunt Tincy, which was actually her real name and not a nickname, instructed me to sleep on the inside next to the sleeping car’s outer wall and she would sleep on the outside (open edge) of the bunk. After Aunt Tincy and I climbed into the upper bunk Mom tucked Pam in on the bottom bunk, walked over to the sliding entrance door to our compartment and turned off a light switch that controlled an overhead light in the center of our room. Everyone went through our normal routine at bedtime, repeating in unisom:
“Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep,
If I should die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take.”
There are several variations of this prayer, which is a common children’s bedtime prayer that dates back to the 1800’s. This is the version we always repeated. Some versions, for example, add another verse that says,
“If I should live for other days,
I pray the Lord to guide my ways.”
Perhaps if we had added that last verse to our prayer I would have slept more peaceful nights. I can’t tell you how many times I had difficulty sleeping because I would lay in bed wondering whether I was going to “die before I wake.” To this day I still feel that’s a very scary prayer for small children.
Once we said our prayer we would always follow it up by wishing each other a good night. Each of us would say:
“Good night, sleep tight, don’t let the bed bugs bite.”
Bed bugs! Oh my God, just another thing for me to worry about in my youth. If I don’t die before I wake I could still be attacked by creatures I’ve never seen before called “Bed Bugs.” That often led to questions for my Mom like, “How big are bed bugs? What do they look like? What color are they? Do they have big teeth? Do they have sharp teeth? How bad does it hurt when they bite you? ” She would always tell me not to worry about it because, “We’ve never had bed bugs.” Then I would follow up with, “If we’ve never had bed bugs why do we have to talk about them at night, right before we go to bed.” She would respond with something like, “It’s cute, it’s just what we do, don’t worry about it Buddy.” And like the movie Groundhog Day, the following night would always end with with our children’s prayer about dying in our sleep and those horrible biting bed bugs, with a kiss on the cheek or forehead from Mom saying, “Okay, go to sleep.”
I was a worrier throughout my childhood. I would worry about everything. And that nightly ritual caused me to worry and fret countless nights throughout my youth. Oh well, back to the train ride . . .
After we said our prayer and wished for no bed bug bites, I quickly noticed there was a small light about 10 to 12 inches above the upper bunk, located on the wall I was sleeping beside. It had a small switch that could be slid back and forth from the “Off” and “On” position. Even at the early age of four I was already beginning to develop a personality as someone who loved to trick and joke around with others. I was not sleepy, but it was quickly evident that Aunt Tincy was tired and soon started snoring lightly. I reached up, pushed the sliding switch to the “On” position, which turned on what was a small reading light. I waited patiently for the light to hopefully wake up Aunt Tincy or Mom, who was sleeping below. As it turned out, Mom was still awake and shouted out, “Tincy, turn off that light so we can get some sleep.” I closed my eyes quickly and pretended to be asleep. Mom had startled Aunt Tincy, who woke up abruptly, muttered that she didn’t know why it was own, that she had not turned it on.
I lay patiently for several minutes until I could hear Aunt Tincy snoring again and quietly turned on the light back on again. As soon as it went on Mom shouted out to Aunt Tincy to quit turning on the light. Again Aunt Tincy protested she had not turned it on and reached over to turn it off again. They discussed the matter and concluded there had to be short in the switch. I was able to pull this little prank off without getting caught two or three more times before I finally fell asleep. It was many years later, when I was probably 10 or 11 years old that I finally confessed to Mom and Aunt Tincy that I was the culprit that prevented them from having a restful night’s sleep on the long train ride to Anacoco.
Once we all fell asleep for good, we didn’t awake until the conductor came to our compartment and told us we would be arriving in Anacoco very soon. Aunt Tincy woke me up and Mom woke Pam up. We got dressed quickly. We were only traveling with suitcases, as Dad was going to take care of moving all our larger household items and remaining clothes when he completed his final work day and moved everything we owned from Kansas City to Anacoco.
Anacoco, Louisiana had a depot with an agent, but for some reason the train overshot the depot and came to a final stop about several car lengths beyond the second of two street crossings that crossed the tracks in the sparse downtown of Anacoco. It was still dark and there were no street lights. Pam was probably too young to have any thoughts about what we were doing or where we were going, but I had stepped off the train into a whole new world, one far away from the hustle-and-bustle of the city in Kansas City, to barren land, sprinkled with a few trees and less than a handful of buildings that were dark silhouettes underneath a moonlit sky.
We were handed our luggage and stood rather motionless as the train began to pull away. I asked, “Where are we Mom?” in a weak and somewhat frightened voice, being left alone in the middle of nowhere. Almost in unison, Mom and Aunt Tincy exclaimed, “We’re home buddy. This is Anacoco!” One of them said, “We’re going to Papa Brown’s house.” Papa Brown was my maternal grandfather, and what I didn’t realize was that we were permanently moving into Papa Brown’s farmhouse, located on a small 32-acre farm that was about a quarter mile away from where we were standing.
I responded with, “Who’s going to pick us up?” Mom said, “My Daddy, your Papa Brown, is coming to get us.” “Well where is he?” “He’s on the opposite side of the train, you’ll see.”
Finally the slow moving train passes by and low and behold, parked on the opposite side of the track was Papa Brown, holding up a gas lantern while sitting on the seat of a wagon — a wagon pulled by a mule!!! “A wagon, and a mule? Where’s Papa’s car?” I asked. Aunt Tincy explains, “Papa hasn’t driven a car since he had a car wreck in his early 20’s. He doesn’t need one. Jake (the mule) takes him everywhere he needs to go.” Boy had my life changed instantly!
Papa Brown got down from the wagon, hugged his two daughters, then bent down to give me and Pam a kiss on our cheeks. My memory of this event is vivid because he had not shaven for 2 or 3 days and he had some dark brown running from one corner of his mouth down his chin. As it turned out, Papa Brown and two of his daughters, Aunt Tincy and Aunt Oza, all dipped snuff. And even though Aunt Tincy dipped snuff, I have not recollection of her dipping snuff during this trip. Thus, my first vivid memory of snuff was seeing this old man coming at me, pressing his lips against my cheek, feeling his prickly beard and then feeling something wet rolling off my cheek as he pulled away. I rubbed my cheek with my fingertips, looked down and saw this nasty combination of saliva and snuff. Yuk! Mom wiped it off while laughing her butt off as I whined and complained.
Let me get you and Pam in this wagon.” Aunt Tincy said. She and Mom put me and Pam in the wagon along with the luggage, then the two of them climbed the spokes on one of wagon’s front wheels and sat on the wooden seat or bench, along Papa’s side as we rode off, down a graveled road, to a farm and home I would live in and not leave permanently until I graduated from college in 1970.
Dad moved to Anacoco several weeks later and continued to take the phenobarbital for his seizures. And, just like his doctor had predicted, the seizures lasted about six months and went away permanently. He quite taking his medicine and lived seizure-free for the rest of his life.
As we all look back on our own lives most of us can identify one or more key decisions or incidents in our lives that changed our lives forever, yet at the time we made the decision or at the time that key incidents in our lives took place, we never realized how just that one decision or incident was going to change our life story forever — sometimes for the better, and sometimes for the worst. I’m now 71, and can look back at my own life and easily identify decisions I’ve made in my life that fundamentally impacted my life forever, yet didn’t realize at the time I made those decisions they were going to be such big deal in my life. I think we all can if we take the time to put our life under a microscope for a few minutes.
In many ways our move to Anacoco changed our lives for the better, because growing up on a farm and living in a small town gave Pam and I so much character, a fantastic moral compass, a great value system so many wonderful experiences that we never would have known living in the city.
But for my Dad, who was very smart and on sort of a fast track with International Paper Company, his fall from a loading dock, and subsequent brain seizures triggered a decision that would prevent him from ever experiencing the success he tasted and accolades he received during his early career at International Paper Company. Instead, he had the challenge of trying to raise a family and carve out a living working in Vernon Parish, Louisiana, a poor area of Louisiana whose economy is very dependent on a local U.S. Army base (Fort Polk).
Shortly before his fall, Daddy had received his fourth promotion in four years with International Paper Company. His promotion meant a higher job position that would require us to move to Kalamazoo, Michigan in two or three months. I’ve often wondered if, at the age of 25, he was really homesick, worried that if he moved the family to Kalamazoo it might be years before they would see home again, or if it truly was his fear of death that drove him to make such a monumental decision — one that would haunt him for the rest of his life. He was always too proud to ever admit fear related to his work, and insisted throughout his life that he made the decision because he thought he would eventually die from the seizures. Maybe that truly was the case, but I still think about that pivotal point in his life from time to time and continue to wonder to myself if that really was the case, or were their other factors in his life that led to such a life-changing decision. I guess I’ll never know.