Celebrating My Big 0-7

 Me and My Crew at My 7th Birthday

Well, mostly crew.  I’ll let you figure out which two didn’t qualify as “Crew” but who my Mom made me invite.  If you haven’t figured it out, I’ll just say that they are the only guys in the photo who were shorter than me and I’m the guy in the middle doing the Gangster Lean.  I bet that right now they are still wearing the same outfits while playing Bingo in a Florida retirement community, but I digress.

Little did I know at the time that a health crisis was unfolding in one of their homes and that my birthday party was providing a much-needed respite from worry.  You see, the non-crew attendee’s older brother was suffering from an affliction and the ultimate outcome was in the balance. 

In earlier times the suffering older sibling would have been undergoing bloodletting which had been practiced for thousands of years but officially discontinued decades prior to my 7^th birthday.  With bloodletting off the table, medical professionals had cast about for a replacement S.O.P. where an iron lung, stitches or amputations were inappropriate.  As a holding strategy they prescribed the dark room / zero activity regimen which was basically a do-no-harm procedure while they struggled for a cure.  As you know, inactivity in a dark room will cure all and is so well accepted and normal behavior for all young people of any era. 

So, it was that at a time when the population was wracked by Tuberculosis and Polio this neighbor came to my 7^th birthday party dressed as a 70-year old man and got to be a kid for a while as his family worried and his older brother suffered another sedentary hour in his darkened bedroom.  While the clueless do-no-harm medical procedure didn’t help, at least it didn’t subject him to bloodletting by lancet and leeches or amputation and stitches for the painful swelling caused by a mosquito bite on his penis. 

“Nuff said………

So, was it optimism or economics that encouraged our Moms to buy us pants that were way too big so that we would “grow into them”?  I’m pretty sure it was mostly economics in our neighborhood.  If you zoom in you will see that most of us were wearing jeans with reinforced knees.  Do you remember those?  Thrifty Moms often chose to use the iron-on patches once we wore through the reinforcements but hadn't yet outgrown the pants.  Double jeopardy for slow growers.

A few of us wore boots that we could tuck our pant legs into. Check out Mark on the far left.  Tall and hardy but his pant legs have slipped out and revealed his secret.

Next to him is poor Danny.  He was taller than me and wearing his older brother’s hand-me-downs.  I doubt that he ever outgrew those while attending Jesse Chisholm Elementary School and might have worn them on his first day at Mead Intermediate School.  While the rest of us were playing Davey Crockett, Danny was playing Jim Bowie as evidenced by the butt of his hunting knife that protruded from his pants pocket.  Notice how he was tickling it gently with the fingers of his left hand?

That tall kid? That’s Billy Jarboe and I’ll get back to him in a minute but I will say that the “buying-them-too-long-so-they-can-grow-into-them” strategy was working better in the Jarboe household than elsewhere in the neighborhood.

The guy in the Billy’s shadow is Donnie.  I don’t recall him ever smiling or expressing joy.  He was a crew member but always mysterious and in the background.  Not surprising that he chose to stand in the shadows.  He was going through a growth spurt when the photo was taken and I bet those pants fit him well before the end of the school year.

The tall kid to my left beat the crap out of me once.  Seemed like that beating went on for much longer than a young kid should have been able to maintain such fury.  Thinking back, I should have probably just played dead but I kept getting up waiting for cooler heads to prevail.  That never happened and I don’t recall why he stopped beating me.  He probably got bored.  As I look at this photo, I have to admit to NOT wishing him the best for many years but now have to admire the way he stood there among us with apparent comfort in all aspects of his elementary school life.  I can say for certain that he was comfortable in his ability to kick my ass.

The guy at the far right is my baseball buddy, Mike.  We were both as serious about the sport as kids our age could be.  Certainly, more so than the rest of the Crew and we worked on our skills constantly.  He wore his “grow-to-fit” pants with the confidence of a born athlete who simply didn’t give a shit about such trivial stuff.

To my right is Woody.  He was a super-nice guy, a sharp dresser and probably the coolest dude I had come to know in my 7 years.  His pants were always the right length and all of his clothes fit him well.  You can see that Billy, Donny and Woody all wore really cool cowboy shirts and that Woody’s was the best of all.  It had fringe, angled chest pockets and embroidery.  Clearly too sophisticated for his Mom to have sewn unlike at least half of the rest of us.  His hat was a wild card from a fashion standpoint and certainly didn’t fit the cowboy motif.  With fur ear flaps worn upright they gave him a bit of a teddy bear look but the jaunty angle that he set the cap to announced clearly to all that Woody was a leader and not a follower.

His fashion leadership encouraged me to talk my parents into buying me a furry-eared cap but my Dad was too practical for that and he bought me a blue "Genuine Steerhide Front Quarter" leather cap with small quilted ear flaps that didn't stand up at all.  They were tiny and presented like a thin stripe around the back half of my head.  Looked nothing like Woody's hat.  The leather material was probably chosen because it could be treated with the saddle soap that we had in abundance for treating baseball gloves.  I had to wear that damn thing until my head outgrew it because just as I was expected to eat whatever food was on my plate I had to wear whatever hat I had talked my folks into buying me.  Suffice to say that I was never able to carry it off like Woody.

Me?  I hid my secret by wearing combat boots and tucking my pant legs into them.  An early survival mechanism that I adopted to camouflage my diminutive stature.

Something else, though, that I hadn’t noticed before.  I realize now that my cocky posture was due, in part, to my right leg being longer than my left.  No wonder that I always felt better about dropping into a serious descent with a left turn when my first turn would have consequences.

Now back to Billy.  I always felt that he must have been rich because he had a store-bought swing set in the back yard and a small wooden box trailer that just screamed “money” to me.  He also had an electric train in the basement and took swimming lessons at Joyland.  Clearly, he must have been the wealthiest kid at Jesse Chisholm Elementary.

One day his Mom called all of his friends over and told us she had something important to show us.  She took us to the basement where Billy sat whimpering, wet and shivering wrapped in a towel.  He held the towel over his face until she forced him to lower it so we could all see what he had done.  A giant and angry red welt stretched from the corner of his mouth towards the middle of his cheek.  She told us that he had come home from swimming lessons and unplugged his electric train while standing on the concrete floor dripping wet.  He wasn’t able to unplug the transformer from the extension cord with his hands so he held one end in his mouth between tightly clenched teeth and pulled on the other with both hands.  It arced and lit him up.  We all just stood there and watched him cry.

I guess she thought she was being a good Mom by making him Exhibit A in what God’s special plan was for dumb-asses.  He was just shivering and crying from pain or shame, I couldn’t say for sure which, but I have to tell you that her lesson has stuck with me to this day and whenever I feel compelled to stand wet and naked in the basement, I don’t have to think twice about whether or not I should stick an electrical cord in my mouth.

Billy’s electro-therapy ordeal did have an apparent influence on his fashion sense as he was the only member of the crew who took to wearing a large padlock on his belt loop, a ring and a US Cavalry belt buckle.