The Counterfeiter

 

     After the war Dad worked at several jobs before he found his calling. He worked on the ore ships that sailed the Great Lakes until Mom made him come home. Once he was back home he drove a cab in Gallatin and at some point he became an apprentice butcher. Being a butcher turned out to be his calling and he became very good at the trade so much so that as the years passed he developed a reputation and was in demand. He trained under several older butchers and worked for a local chain called Logans.

     By the late 1950's Dad was the butcher / meat manager for a small independently owned  grocery store called C&S Foods, the store was located in an older group of buildings along Lebanon Rd. in Donelson. I don't know how old the building was but it was small with wooden floors, the stock room and butcher shop were located in the basement and a conveyor was used to get products upstairs. The store was part of a long group of store fronts connected by common walls. 

     All of the stores had basements but not all of them utilized them for product storage so there were businesses located in a couple of the basements that were accessible from the rear. As best I remember there was a repair shop of some sort and a print shop. The print shop produced fliers / handbills and odd sized signage for local businesses. Dad would see the workers now and again when off loading trucks but he didn't know them enough to call them friends, they sort of kept to themselves. 

     One day there was quite a commotion at the print shop, police cars were every where along with a few unmarked cars which turned out to be from the FBI. The print shop workers were handcuffed and put in the back seats of the patrol cars and a truck was being loaded up with boxes from the shop. Dad found out later that the print shop had been raided because they were printing counterfeit money.

     I wasn't a teenager yet but I heard Dad tell this story several times, he always ended it with "there I was working a hard forty hours a week for a few dollars and these guys were right next door printing two months salary with every turn of the handle". I sometimes wondered if maybe he wasn't just a bit jealous.

Hand Me Downs

 

     By todays standards we might have been considered low income or even poor, we were a family of seven living on one income in the 1950's but we kids had no idea of our financial status and we really didn't care. We had food on the table, a roof over our heads and clothes on our backs and we have good memories of those times. 

     Being the oldest boy on either side of the cousins there was no one to hand their used clothes down to me so I got the new jeans, shoes and shirts. Being the tallest of the family my clothes were handed down to brother Pat if they were still in serviceable condition.

     Here now is the theme of this story with the key words being "serviceable condition". Unlike todays kids who seem to get everything their little hearts desire, back in the fifties folks were a little more thrifty and had millions of ways to extend the life of just about anything, in this case clothing.

     Kids, especially boys are hard on clothes, what they don't outgrow they rip, tear, poke, and generally wear thin any material known to man or mothers. My mom was a master at repairing jeans. She started out by buying them extra long, back then you could buy jeans about six inches longer than you would ever need. There are many pictures of me in new jeans with a 4 - 5 inch cuff, as it turns out deep cuffs were a fashion statement and then again they were havens for for mud, dirt, leaves anything that might be looking for a home.

     Then comes wear and tear issues. These are issues that occur normally in a day of a boys life as we are always in some sort of scuffle, crawling into some place we should not have been or it was just a matter of accidents happen. Usually it was the legs that incurred the most damage especially the knees. The knees got ripped, torn and worn thin before any other part other than the seat, but mom had a fix for that too. At first the fix involved a needle and thread but it was not long lasting but then mom found the "iron on" patch which came in various sizes and was suitable for adjusting to smaller sizes with a pair of scissors. It was really easy, just cut a piece to overlap the offending area then heat up the iron and slide it across the patch, the attached glue would bind the two pieces together and add at least another season to the jeans. Some of the more inventive moms would even put a matching patch on the other leg just for appearance sake.

     Shoes were the next big thing that kids tore up or outgrew on a regular basis. I think it is a well know fact that a kids feet grow at the same rate and possibly faster than the rest of their body, either out or up. In our case it didn't matter as mom's dad was a manager for General Shoe (cowboy boot division), at least twice a year we would go to their house and grandpa would bring out a grocery bag of boots that he just turned up in the floor, whatever fit was ours. I think I was about 15 before I bought my first pair of shoes.

      It would have been nice to have grandpa around when Danny was a young boy, Linda looked up one day and saw that a brand new pair of tennis shoes had the toe worn out on both shoes. Turns out Danny had a skateboard that he would get down on one knee to ride, the only means to stop it were to drag his feet.

     The other thing was that mom was a master with a needle and thread, she was always sewing shirts for us boys and dresses for sister Vicky, one year the whole family matched at Christmas. Another time I needed a new jacket for school so she pulled out dad's Navy dress blues uniform which I wore for Halloween (it was a tight fit and I was about 15) afterwards she turned the "blouse" into a jacket for me, unfortunately it was only good for one year then I outgrew it.

     Money may have been tight for us, I don't know, we often ran around in old clothes that had patches or hand me downs from a neighbor who had older kids but so did a lot of other kids. You have to understand that our parents grew up in the "Great Depression", they learned to make do with what they had. A lot of parents today want their kids to have the things they never had so they shower them with the latest toys, games, clothes, cars what ever their little hearts desire and that is never a good thing.

The Heartbreak

 

     For two years we dreamed of a future where things would be better, for two years we lived on the hope of a life free of Drs. and hospitals. We made plans for next month and next year all the while in our hearts we knew it was futile but we had hope. Over the forty seven years we were married I had seen Linda happy, thrilled, upset and mad and now I was going to see another emotion, one that I never knew existed in her.

     When I brought her home from the hospital, in July of 2014, it was to be the last time, we both knew this but the Dr. had said months but never how many, he said this as he always said it - with an air of hope. Linda's outlook immediately grabbed hold of this hope and ran with it, she was always happy and upbeat with whoever came to see her. She craved laughter and gaiety, tears and sorrowful talk were not allowed. Friends and family came to see her, they talked of old times, they thanked her for all she had done for them - they said their goodbye's in different ways. She knew her fate but she denied it, she never gave up hope, she held her head high as she had always done. They said she was brave.

     Not long before she passed I returned from an errand one day, Linda was sitting in a chair while her friend made the bed for her. Linda was upset, she had overheard a conversation on the back deck, a statement was made " All I know is Mike said that if I wanted to say goodbye I better come soon". I had never seen Linda scared of anything but now I saw fear in her eyes. All of a sudden I was faced with the most difficult task of my life.

     I bent over and put my arms around Linda and pulled her up to me holding her close as her friend told me what had happened, her eyes were looking at me with a longing for me to make things better. Sometimes Linda had problems with depression and during those dark times I was able to pull her through but this time I just didn't know if I could. With her face buried in my shoulder, I held her tight, ran my fingers through her hair and kissed the top of her head, I told her that I didn't know how much time she had left but however much there was I was going to do my best to make that time the best that I could. Her arms squeezed me and she cried with her face on my shoulder. We stood there for a while holding each other as we had done on many occasions, I kissed her many times, told her I loved her and held her tight. I wanted to cry with her but I had decided I would not cry in front of her, she had been my rock for many years it was my turn to be her rock and I was determined not to let her down.

     By this time even I could see the end was near, the words of the Drs. and hospice nurses no longer carried an air of hope but every day we hoped for another tomorrow. 

     It wasn't long after this day that Linda passed, I have not forgotten this day and doubt I ever will. I have held off writing about this episode because it involved someone close to her, that someone passed away sometime back so they can no longer be hurt by reading this. This is a part of my memories of Linda that I can't escape from even if I wanted to, it is another memory I want to share with my children, grandchildren and future generations.