Autobiography

I was born in January, 1946, on the leading edge of the post World War II baby boom, a group identification that would follow me the rest of my life. But in my early childhood I was probably more identified with the past than the future. I was the first child of my generation, offspring of my mother's first, unsuccessful, marriage. I have no recollection at all of my biological father, since my mother had divorced him shortly after I was born. My earliest recollections are of the house I grew up in, a small frame structure built to accommodate returning veterans. My parents bought the place for something like $1800 in 1948. I can still remember the original house, with its living room, kitchen, bath, and two bedrooms. It was practically square, but with a slight offset for the larger bedroom, allowing windows on three walls. In my earliest years that large bedroom was mine, and against one wall was a large four by eight table built by my father for my first electric train set. I have always looked back on that small house that I grew up in as my only real home. Every other place has seemed somehow provisional or temporary. Even though I have lived longer in some of them, they have never gained the same purchase on my sense of identity.

As I cast back to my earliest memories, I always seem to think first of the kitchen, which my mother had soon altered by installing a very shiny dark red linoleum and painting the walls a bright red, which contrasted with the white woodwork and cabinets. The counter tops were black and white tile. Since we had no dining room, the kitchen also served in that capacity, with a very modern chrome and vinyl table and chairs. I see myself playing on the floor, most likely with my toy cars and trucks, while my mother prepared meals or cleaned. The radio on the kitchen counter was tuned to my mother's favorite soap operas, which seemed to go on at great length about the troubles of the various characters and their families. The programs had names like, "As the World Turns" and "The Guiding Light," with music that seemed to portend nothing but continuing troubles. Sometimes, though, in the afternoons, I think, there were programs more to my young taste, "Sergeant Preston of the Yukon" and "The Lone Ranger" being my favorites.

The reason I say that my childhood was identified with the past has something to do with some of those early recollections. After World War II the country began to change, but there were still traces of an earlier time reaching back to the first half of the century and sometimes even a bit further. My grandparents had come of age in the era of the automobile. In fact, my grandfather, my mother's father, owned a garage and service station. But my great grandparents, had been dairy farmers, and all had owned farms with livestock. These old family homes and farms were still in existence in my early years, with some remnants of their earlier ways and times. Even in my own house, I can recall deliveries from the iceman, who brought large blocks of ice for our icebox. Soon, this was to be replaced by an electric refrigerator, and by the time I went away to college, the milkman too was displaced by milk bought at the supermarket. He might have been replaced even earlier had I not pleaded with my mother to keep him on. I mention this because it probably indicates something in my nature that has always held onto the past and only reluctantly surrendered to progress and the future.

But that progress was inevitable was something I quickly learned as my mother and father set about enlarging the family and making improvements to the house. Soon I was joined by my brother Randy, whom I had no sooner learned to accept than we were both introduced to Larry, who came along in 1950. Larry's birth had not gone smoothly, and he was left with some scars that would follow him the rest of his life. There was some talk that the doctor had used forceps to deliver him, and had pinched his head. In any case he was troubled by a partial paralysis of his face and eyes that were permanently crossed, his gaze seemingly fixed on his own nose. Randy and I soon learned to accept this as part of the natural order, but I can still remember many trips to specialists and therapists. The paralysis of his face meant some speech difficulties in addition to problems with his vision. On the positive side of the ledger, however, it soon emerged that Larry was perhaps the brightest one of the three of us. And if he felt in any way handicapped, a word that we still used in those days, he gave little evidence of it. Being the youngest and also the smallest of three brothers, Larry soon developed a kind of toughness and resilience that has served him well long after his childhood.

My parents must have begun planning additions to the house soon after the arrival of my brothers. The first modification came with an expansion to the kitchen. My father and grandfather and assorted friends and neighbors, but mostly my father, built an enclosed back porch. At first it was only screened in, but later my mother decided she wanted it closed in completely so that it could serve as an entrance, a sort of mudroom, and storeroom. By this time we had replaced the icebox with a refrigerator, and while we lost a kitchen window to the addition, we had more space for storage. Still, the little house was quite crowded with the five of us sharing a rather small space, and my mother decided that a much larger addition to the back of the house was what was needed.

The back room, as we always referred to it, was designed by my mother. It had all the earmarks of her practicality and common sense. It consisted of a single large room built along the back of the house. Thus the carpenters extended the depth of the house by approximately twelve feet. The resulting room was twenty some feet long with entrances from the kitchen and from the larger bedroom. At one end of the addition my mother asked for a partition that created a large walk-in closet off of the bedroom. The back room became a combination dining room and family room, with the television enshrined at one end and the dining table at the other. Around the television were two large loungers for my parents and a large sofa for us. The dining table at the other end of the room was convenient to the kitchen and could be expanded to a size suitable for the family and a number of guests. And there was sufficient room besides for my train table, my mother's sewing machine, and a desk. Later the train table was removed, but not long afterwards my brother Larry acquired an upright piano that seemed to fit in with no trouble. It was a large room by the standards of that time.

I can remember the construction of this room very well. My parents had hired a contractor who seemed willing to do my mother's bidding, and he in turn had hired two very personable Mexican carpenters to help with the job. I was fascinated by one of these carpenters, who always seemed happy to entertain us with stories and who seemed to respond to everything anyone said to him with a huge grin and the expression "ee zat right!" For some reason I seemed to delight in getting him to say this, and for years after would shake my head and mutter "ee zat right" for no apparent reason other than my own amusement.

In order to accommodate my mother's desires and still come in under her very minimal budget, the contractor introduced a number of design flaws that we eventually adapted to, but which made the back room always appear to be what it was, an afterthought. First, the house was gabled, and the addition was not on a gabled side of the house, such an extension to the house's depth would require an elaborate new roof design, or as an alternative a flat roof. The contractor advised us to use the flat roof option, which was far simpler, but even that would have required some reworking of the original roof unless we built the new room with a lower floor level. This latter option was my mother's choice. That meant that there was a step down from the kitchen or bedroom as you entered the back room. There was also some sort of code that required us to keep the original bathroom window, since the bathroom would now be closed off from the outside and lacked any other means of ventilation.

As a result the back room retained its appearance as somehow separate from the rest of the house, and became the family room and the place where my parents spent nearly all of their time, with my father usually seated in his lounger, eyes glued to the television. We had been among the first on our block to get a television, and I used to joke that once it arrived and was turned on my father never turned it off. I can remember watching test patterns while waiting, hopelessly it often seemed, for some program to appear. One popular offering was professional wrestling, direct from the Wreslethon in downtown San Antonio. At first there were only two stations, WOAI (the NBC affiliate on channel 4) and KENS (the CBS affiliate on channel 5), then a third was eventually added, KONO (the ABC affiliate on Channel 12). That was it for quite a while, until we began receiving UHF channels with Spanish language television and public broadcasting. Television was such a regular feature of family life, especially after we began living in the back room, that we watched it constantly, from early morning until late at night, even during meals. Once in a while my mother would protest, "Can't we at least eat one meal without that damned television?" But soon she gave up and accepted it as part of the family.

Even before the advent of the back room television was a huge part of our lives. In fact, that was one reason my mother wanted the addition. She wanted to get the television and my father, and the rest of us, out of the living room. From the time my father arrived home from work he wanted to sit and watch the TV. Although, frequently we boys would have preceded him. When we got home from school we tuned in to the Mickey Mouse Club and other children's fare. We were also up early on Saturday mornings to watch cartoons, like Mighty Mouse and Winky Dink, and ancient serials, many of which were a part of Andy's Gang, which I think had begun as Buster Brown's Gang, sponsored by Buster Brown Shoes: "I'm Buster Brown, I live in a shoe. That's my dog Tige, he lives in there too." I can still recall my delight in Andy Devine and Midnight the Cat, but especially Froggy the Gremlin and his irreverent comments: "Plunk your magic twanger, Froggy!" But I can also remember staying up late and watching late night comedy shows with characters like Jerry Lester and Morey Amsterdam and Dagmar. My Dad would be asleep in his chair and I would be sitting there watching television long after my proper bedtime. I have no idea what I made of these shows, but I have very clear recollections of watching them late into the night and enjoying them immensely, possibly because I knew I should be in bed asleep. But I also have to admit that my parents were very indulgent of me and my brothers. There were many occasions, after the television was removed to its place of prominence in the back room, when we would go to bed early and be awakened by my mother or father so we could sit up and watch a Marx Brothers film that came on the late night movies.

Growing up wasn't all television, though. My brothers and I were kept busy by a pretty full schedule of after school and weekend activities. Being the oldest, I led the way, and my brothers each began at an earlier age. One of the first was the Cub Scouts, for which my mother served as a Den Mother and my father got involved as a Pack leader. My recollection is that the Den meetings were every week, with Pack meetings less often. My first great success in life came when I enlisted the aid of my entire family in selling Christmas Cards for the Cub Scout Pack so that I could win a very impressive Rawlings fielder's mitt. I succeeded, probably at greater expense than simply purchasing the glove, but the thrill of winning such a wonderful prize has stayed with me the rest of my life. As time went by it was also a valuable reminder that such success usually comes very rarely into any one life.

Having succeeded in winning the baseball glove, I needed an opportunity to use it. My parents were very disappointed in what they felt was an unnecessary emphasis on winning in the local Little League program, for which I was probably a little too young at that time anyway. Their solution was the YMCA, which sponsored several baseball leagues that played at my local elementary school. I can't remember what all the leagues were called, but I think I began with one called the Peewees. We had several teams, all sponsored by local businesses, but unlike the Little League, where they wore full uniforms, we were only issued t-shirts in bright primary colors with the names and sometimes the logos of our sponsors emblazoned on the fronts. My father, who I now realize was perhaps one of the greatest Dads a kid could ever have, volunteered to coach. My brothers and I were so accustomed to our parents entering into our adventures that this seemed a perfectly natural thing. My first team was The San Antonio Fence Company. I thought it was a pretty clunky name for a baseball team, which I thought should be called something like the Tigers or the Braves or the Orioles. But we did pretty well and went to the playoffs a couple of times, although we never won the city championship. Both of my brothers eventually followed along in my footsteps, and before he was old enough to play, Larry was performing the duties of batboy. Poor Larry, being the youngest, had to endure all of these childhood activities much longer than either I or Randy. One year I think we were all playing ball and my Dad was coaching. By then I was playing with the older boys for a very successful team called The Earlybird Pioneers. Now that seemed a much more appropriate name for a ball team. We were sponsored by the Pioneer Flour Company. With all the games to play I think our family must have spent whole summers at the ball park. I know that I used to work on the grounds crew in the afternoons putting down the base lines and then later bringing in the bases and home plate after the games. One year I also announced games and kept the official scorebook. It was great to be a kid in the fifties.

But scouting and baseball were only part of it. There was also church and music. Music lessons seemed to begin almost accidentally when some door to door salesman induced my mother to sign me up for lessons on the Hawaiian guitar. I only went for a few sessions, since I could quickly see that the outfit was not very serious about teaching music. I found myself in a large room filled with dozens of other kids seated with our guitars on our laps in concentric circles around a teacher who spent most of our lesson time trying to get us all in tune. I could see this was going nowhere, but by then I had been bitten by the steel guitar bug, so my mother found a very fine teacher who gave me individual lessons for some years. His name was Ted Swenson, and he played in a real western band. I got pretty good on the guitar, but I never really took to the western music. Later on my brothers and I began accordion lessons with Tony Rozantz and his wife Trudy. I can't recall exactly how this came about, but I think it began as one of my brother Randy's fads. You haven't experienced accordion music until you've heard it played in recital by an accordion band of twenty or thirty school children. None of us continued with the old squeezebox, but later on my brother Larry and I both turned to the acoustic and electric guitar, and Larry eventually took up the drums in a fairly serious way. Only Larry ever played professionally with a band, but music was a great part of our childhoods.

The whole family also went to church almost every Sunday. I think it began as a sort of parental duty. When the time came I was enrolled in Sunday school, at the Los Angeles Heights Presbyterian Church, and eventually Randy and then Larry and soon the entire family was going. At first only my mother would go, while my father stayed home. But as we got a little older we all seemed to be drawn more and more into the activities of the church. We would wake up early and get ourselves ready, dressed up in our Sunday best, and dash off for Sunday school followed by regular services at 11:00 AM. As the church grew and attendance increased, we began going to early services, which began at 8:00 AM in order to be done before Sunday school started at 9:30. As time went on, however, and we followed our usual family practice of getting involved in every aspect of everything we did, we seemed to be spending the entire morning at church. My mother would work in the nursery, my father sang in the choir and attended meetings of the elders and the church session, and I was serving as acolyte at the regular services. Some of our best friends were those we knew from the church, and we also pressured some of our friends to join our church so that they could share our good times.

© 2005 by Michael L. Hall