{"id":60,"date":"2012-09-15T20:13:39","date_gmt":"2012-09-15T20:13:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/byronwmayo.com\/memoires\/?p=60"},"modified":"2012-12-10T02:12:17","modified_gmt":"2012-12-10T02:12:17","slug":"the-baggage-of-youth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/byronwmayo.com\/memoires\/the-baggage-of-youth\/","title":{"rendered":"The Baggage of Youth"},"content":{"rendered":"

At the hospital on that critical night, the doctors stitched up my left arm\u2014and they rushed. Wentworth into emergency surgery in an attempt to save his bloody life.
\nThe following morning, a police inquiry began sorting out what happened\u2014and why. They questioned my mother, my grandparents and our neighbors on all sides. Later on, I learned they also checked my record at Washington High School and at The Oregon Journal<\/strong><\/em>.<\/p>\n

They talked with me, too, for what seemed like hours. I still remember the bleak interrogation room at the police station: drab walls, lightless windows, gray metal desk and hard, metal chairs. Yet the two interviewers, a woman from the juvenile division and one older detective, turned out to be surprisingly sympathetic and supportive. They patiently pulled the stormy details out of me, including my earliest awareness of Wentworth\u2019s abuse of my mother and everything I could remember about that final, explosive night in our Clay Street living room.<\/p>\n

The police never revealed this to me\u2014but following the initial investigation, they told my mother privately that if Wentworth lived, they planned to drop the case, without filing any charges whatsoever. No juvenile court hearing. No record. On the other hand, they said, if Wentworth should die, the situation “would become much more complicated\u201d and they advised her to get a lawyer.<\/p>\n

Wentworth fought a grim, ongoing battle for his life. Under intensive care, he squirmed on his back in the hospital. I confess I felt no remorse.<\/p>\n

Eventually, he pulled out of it. He survived and we never saw him again. Sometime after the divorce, my mother received word that he had landed a job in Pittsburgh, California.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Three or four of us hung around the Gilmore<\/strong><\/em> truck stop every afternoon, pitching pennies and waiting for the delivery truck to drop off our bundles of papers.<\/p>\n

We chalked a line about five yards out from the station\u2019s back wall. Then we\u2019d take turns tossing a penny in a spinning arc towards the wall. At the end of each round, the kid whose penny landed closest to the wall won all the cash.<\/p>\n

I filled my Log Cabin Syrup<\/strong><\/em> penny bank to the roof with pennies I won in that innocuous paperboy pastime.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

In the 1930s a\u00a0<\/strong><\/em>severe drought that was to last almost seven years ravaged the windy panhandle of Texas and Oklahoma, parts of Kansas arid beyond. Terrifying dust storms swept across the land.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Farmlands crumbled into great dunes of shifting sands. Topsoil blew\u00a0<\/strong><\/em>away. Smothering \u201cblack blizzards” clogged the roads, invaded the houses, choked the livestock, wiped out the harvests, half-buried trees, farm buildings and machinery under mounds of sandy black grit. They called it “The Dust Bowl.” Families were left destitute and suffering. Thousands and thousands of farmers went bankrupt. It was one of the worst environmental disasters in history\u2014adding further to the misery of The Great Depression.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

In 1935-36, refugees of The Dust Bowl fled westward, in ancient family jalopies piled high with their possessions. They streamed into California and Oregon, where they competed for jobs with West Coast migratory \u201cfruit tramps\u201d who followed the harvest from California\u2019s Imperial Valley up through the San Joaquin Valley, the Willamette Valley, and into the valley of Oregon\u2019s Hood River and the Yakima Valley of Washington.<\/p>\n

Locals called the incoming refugees \u201cOakies.\u201d When wave after wave of \u201cOakies\u201d poured into California, where jobs in the fields were already scarce, the farm labor market became glutted.<\/p>\n

The new migrants often met with violence from bands of local vigilantes as well as hostile deputies.<\/p>\n

In Oregon, however, folks received The Dust Bowl families with greater sympathy. I remember vaguely an occasion when my grandmother took part in some kind of canning festival in nearby Gresham for the benefit of drought victims. Both of my grandparents had worked in the fields alongside the migrants. They knew the life.<\/p>\n

I came to know the \u201c0akies” myself, during the time I worked the cherry crop with my grandparents and we stayed in a migrant workers\u2019 camp along the banks of the Clackamas River. I worked alongside the migrants again during my high school fruit picking days in the Willamette Valley and again, later on, up in the Hood River Valley apple country.<\/p>\n

I thought they \u201ctalked fanny.\u201d But there was a kind of music to their voices. I always found the \u201cOakies\u201d to be good, friendly, hard-working people.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

At the start of my first high school summer, I quit the afternoon paper route. A classmate named Johnny MacDonald and I decided that we\u2019d make some seasonal money picking strawberries. The Innocents Abroad!<\/strong><\/em> We signed up at a federal AAA clearing center for migratory workers, located in the old downtown court house.<\/p>\n

Early the following morning, two hard-faced, field bosses herded about two dozen of us onto a flatbed truck. With bedding rolls in tow, we held on tight as they trucked us down to the sprawling fields around Newberg, Oregon, where they put us to work immediately.<\/p>\n

We soon discovered that picking strawberries was one hot,
\ndusty, miserable, backbreaking job. The sweat ran down in rivers. We squatted or bent over low, picking row after row, hour after hour. Unending.<\/p>\n

One scorching afternoon, after two weeks of excruciating work in the fields, we painfully stood up, looked each other in the eye, asked ourselves what the hell we were doing\u2014and walked out. With tender sunburns, aching backs, filthy, dirty bedrolls and less than twenty bucks earned between us, we hitch-hiked our way back to Portland.<\/p>\n

Today, whenever I drive past a coterie of Mexican fruit pickers at work in a California strawberry field, bending their bodies low to the ground, I feel a strong, commiserating twinge in my lower back.<\/p>\n

Somewhat recovered, Johnny MacDonald and I went back to work. We snagged a job picking string beans for a Japanese truck farmer whose land bordered the Columbia River slough, where Portland’s International Airport is now located. I developed into a fast picker. But not as fast as one, sturdy, bow-legged, Japanese woman who tallied more giant sacks full of beans at the end of the day than anybody else working the fields.<\/p>\n

Most of the bean pickers were Japanese.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

During the tail-end of that sweaty, hard-working summer, I lazed around. Almost daily, I went swimming at a public pool located in Powell Park, far out on the southeast side of Portland. Id bicycle out in the morning, taking along a sandwich, an apple or maybe a Baby Ruth<\/strong><\/em> candy bar. I’d spend the entire day, hanging around with a few guys I knew, swimming, flirting with girls from other high schools and working on my tan, like every other\u00a0callow teenager lying around the pool.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s where I met Bob Ballard, a burly, big-boned, Franklin High sophomore with an uproarious sense of humor. We became good friends. He sold me my first set of golf clubs\u2014a beat-up set with wooden handles. I think I used them twice, maybe three times, before I gave them away. A few years later, Bob entered Naval flight training about the same time I did. Eventually, as Marine Corps pilots in the South Pacific, our paths crossed at Espiritu Santo and Bougainville. He flew in VMTB-134, another Marine torpedo squadron.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Franklin D. Roosevelt ran for a second term in 1936\u2014 the same year I had a secret, unrequited crush on Beverly Welch, the snooty daughter of Portland\u2019s wealthiest undertaker. She was a standout.<\/p>\n

The Republicans nominated Governor Alf Landon, \u201cThe Kansas Sunflower,\u201d to run against FDR. As a campaign button, the Landon camp used Landon\u2019s portrait, centered on a bright, yellow felt, sunflower background. It made an eye-catching, decorative button. That\u2019s what Beverly Welch was wearing, on the day\u00a0that I started teasing and taunting her about her fat-cat, Republican cause.<\/p>\n

As I think back now on my boorish behavior, it was inexpiable\u2014and inexcusable.<\/p>\n

With a couple of FDR buttons pinned on my fraying sweater, I moved in close, pointed at her Landon button and smugly wise-cracked, \u201cSunflowers wilt in November, ya know.\u201d She whirled angrily and walked away, calling me a damned Bolshevik. A Bolshevik?<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Our romance was over before it had even begun.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

In November 1936, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his running mate, \u201cCactus Jack\u201d Garner, rolled up one of the greatest landslides in American political history, carrying every state in the Union, except Maine and Vermont<\/strong><\/em>.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

At Washington High, we seldom saw our haughty principal, Mr. Hugh J. Boyd. He seemed to emerge from his inner sanctum only on special occasions, looking stiff and proper in a tightly vested, blue-serge suit, peering through pince-nez<\/strong><\/em> glasses with a scornful look on his face.<\/p>\n

One of those special occasions was the afternoon of December 11, 1936.<\/p>\n

On that day, Mr. Boyd, an ardent Anglophile, called a\u00a0special assembly in the school auditorium so that all of us could listen to the live, trans-Atlantic broadcast of King Edward VHIs abdication.<\/p>\n

For weeks, the drama of a king forced to choose between his kingdom and the woman he loved had been a sensational topic of conversation in our current events class\u2014and in the tabloids across America. They called it \u201cthe century\u2019s No. 1 celebrity love affair.\u201d<\/p>\n

The fact that the king was the popular, former Prince of Wales, now Edward VIII of Great Britain and Ireland and of the British Dominions Beyond the Seas\u2014and the fact that the woman was an American, the elegant divorcee Wallis Warfield Simpson of Baltimore\u2014-further heightened the historical drama.<\/p>\n

All through the summer and fall of 1936, while Roosevelt and Landon had been stumping the U.S., the American press had buzzed over the royal romance.<\/p>\n

On the day that Britain’s Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin reported to the House of Commons on his successful negotiations as the sovereign match-breaker, the afternoon headline on the Oregon Journal<\/strong><\/em> screamed, \u201cTHE KING QUITS.\u201d Millions of Americans, including our entire high school student-body, gathered around radios that afternoon to hear, above the crackle of static, the slow, measured words of Edward, himself.<\/p>\n

We listened intently. Many of the girls sniffled and quietly sobbed, as Edward spoke.<\/p>\n

\u201cAt long last, I am able to say a few words of my own. I never wanted to withhold anything, but until now it has\u00a0not been constitutionally possible for me to speak … (static, faded in and out)<\/em> … I have found it impossible to carry the heavy burden of responsibility and to discharge my duties as King as I should wish to do, without the help and support of the woman I love … (more crackling static)<\/strong><\/em> … and now we all have a new King. I wish him and you, his people, happiness and prosperity with all my heart. God bless you all, God save the King!\u201d<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

In those days, before cheap long distance phone lines, faxes and piles of e-mail, the telegram was the ultimate form for an urgent message\u2014ten words or less, regular rate. Every word counted.<\/p>\n

For most people, a knock on the door from a Western Union messenger, bearing one of those instantly recognizable yellow message forms, brought\u00a0on a tingling moment of anticipation, drama, or sometimes dread.<\/p>\n

Was it 1936? \u201837? I worked one entire Christmas vacation as a Western Union bike messenger in the city\u2019s downtown business district. There were about eight of us operating out of the Western Union office on Salmon Street. It was a seedy, oddball assortment of guys. Five were on the job year-round as full-time messengers. The rest of us were temps, working through the holidays.<\/p>\n

We parked our bikes in a rack outside the front window. Inside, we sat on a long wooden bench jammed against one wall, across from the message counter. When a wire came crackling through and the tape was stripped\u00a0in place and the telegram was stuffed in an envelope, ready to go, the manager would bellow for the next messenger up, by number.<\/p>\n

The job was exhilarating. Perilous fun\u2014as I learned how to wheel madly through heavy, downtown traffic, darting between cars and streetcars, swerving around pedestrians, hell-bent on my mission of delivery.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

My dad had worked on the construction of Bonneville Dam, which crossed the spectacular Columbia River gorge between Oregon and Washington. Famed industrialist Henry J. Kaiser\u2019s company handled the planning and construction. Started in 1933 as a mighty hydro-electric project, the job reached its 1937 completion date on time and within budget. President Franklin D. Roosevelt came out for the dedication ceremonies.<\/p>\n

During one of those infrequent days when I was able to spend some time with my dad, he took me with him to view FDR\u2019s arrival in Portland. We were a part of the enthusiastic mob in front of Union Station.<\/p>\n

In an open limousine, FDR and his son Elliot were slowly driven from the station. My dad and I were standing in the crush, about fifty feet away. Smiling, always smiling, with his trademark cigarette holder in hand, FDR\u00a0waved at the cheering crowd in front of the historic station. It was a skillful performance.<\/p>\n

Like most Americans, I did not learn until after his death, some eight years later, that the man had been stricken with polio in 1921 and had never walked again without the aid of braces and a cane.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Do you remember Kay Francis? She was a stylish and worldly actress of the 1930s. A glamorous brunette.<\/p>\n

My literature\u00a0teacher at Washington High School was a Kay Francis look-alike. Her name was Miss Kohns. Miss Gwendolyn Kohns. She deepened my interest in the world of books\u2014classics and contemporary.<\/p>\n

One of her recommendations that kept me up past midnight was The Time Machine<\/strong><\/em>.<\/p>\n

That 1895 British thriller served as my introduction to H.\u00a0G. Wells, the first great writer of science fiction and a\u00a0provocative and prolific philosopher still worth perusing.<\/p>\n

When I finished the hook, I burrowed into his poignant story of The Invisible Man, which also enthralled me.<\/p>\n

There were times, however, when Miss Kohns drifted over my head. Once she spent two successive days trying to interpret for us the complex philosophy of good and evil, represented by Herman Melville\u2019s American masterpiece, Moby Dick<\/strong><\/em>. I listened to her and stared into her radiant eyes and picked up what I could\u2014by osmosis.<\/p>\n

During the night, about this time, I experienced a frustrating and reoccurring, adolescent dream. As I recall the fragments now, I dreamt that I was sitting cross- legged on the rolling deck of a massive square-rigger under full sail. It might have been Captain Ahab\u2019s whaler, the Pequod<\/em>. I was sitting on the deck with a book on my lap, trying to study for an exam, while Miss Kohns strode back and forth in front of me\u2014buck naked.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

It was 1937, winter.<\/p>\n

A pop version of an obscure, minor-key, Yiddish folk song called Bei mir bist du schon<\/strong><\/em> confounded the music world by winning worldwide popular appeal. It became the Number One song of the year.<\/p>\n

My mother had a new job that cold, rainy winter, working the front counter in a deliciously warm and fragrant Jewish bakery. It was located inside Portland\u2019s faux art deco, Public Market building, which dominated the central, west side waterfront. My mother worked with a friendly, big-bosomed, Jewish woman who liked to sing while she worked. Nobody seemed to mind.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t remember the woman\u2019s name, but I d.o remember that she rendered the Bei mir<\/strong><\/em> song and everything else she sang in an offbeat, nasal tone:<\/p>\n

Bei mir
\nbist du
\nschon
\nPlease let
\nme explain,
\nBei mir bist du
\nschon Means
\nthat you’re
\ngrand …<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

My own personal\u00a0favorite that year was the saucy Rodgers and Hart tune, The Lady is a Tram<\/strong><\/em>p.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

They converted Portland\u2019s giant Public Market building into the Oregon Journal\u2019s printing plant in later years. I toured the operation. Eventually, the city tore down the ugly behemoth. Today, the land is part of a beautiful, two-mile promenade and park along the Willamette River.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Jack Devlin was a big, tough, craggy-faced cop with a problem. He was an alcoholic. He\u2019d been suspended from the Portland Police Department for drinking while on duty, one too many times.<\/p>\n

When my mother started going around with Jack, however, he was in the middle of a come-back. He\u2019d gone on the wagon. He\u2019d joined AA. He\u2019d won another chance to make it on the force, albeit part-time. They brought bim back on special assignments: crowd control, VIP visits, directing parade traffic, that sort of thing.<\/p>\n

My grandfather never quite approved of him because Jack was hard-line, anti-union, while Jim Dewey remained a determined, craft union man all of his life. Labor politics made no difference to me, however. I liked Jack Devlin. He laughed loud and gloriously.<\/p>\n

Of all the lovers my mother had over the years, he was the only one who happily bonded with the family. We became good pals during the all too brief time in which he was a part of our lives.<\/p>\n

Once, he came along with us when my mother and grandparents and I had a wet, comical day, scooping buckets of smelt during the annual Sandy River smelt run. Another time, he took my mother and me on a picnic alongside a small creek in the woods, where he set a gunny sack trap and we landed about a dozen crawfish.<\/p>\n

Jack and I sometimes played handball at the park on Sundays. We pitched pennies. We arm-wrestled-\u2014-sort of. He bought me an illustrated edition of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle\u2019s \u201cAdventures of Sherlock Holmes\u201d to add to my growing book collection. He taught me the beginnings of chess. And he was good-with my mother, too. They had playful times together.<\/p>\n

While he lived with us, Jack pushed me to do my best. He\u2019d tell me, \u201cGive it all you got, Byron\u2014-then a little more on top of that.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

One night, while checking out his equipment lock-box, he presented me with a fearsome-looking,\u00a024-inch riot stick that I’d been warily admiring. He said it was a well used, old-timer and he wanted me to have it. The club’s mellow luster came from hand-rubbing with linseed oil. He “warned me that I\u2019d better take care of it the same way. I promised.<\/p>\n

Woven around the handle was a leather thong that enabled me to hang it proudly on my wall with my other memorabilia. I have no idea whatever happened to that illustrious weapon. I wish I still had it. Along with my Alaskan Oosik<\/strong><\/em>.<\/p>\n

During the celebrated, Portland Rose Festival parade that year, Jack was able to get me a job as a street peddler. With a wide strap around my neck and another around my waist, holding the metal case out in front of me, I worked my way up and down the street in front of the crowded curbs. I loudly hawked chocolate-covered ice cream bars and Popsicles.<\/p>\n

My territory was a two-block stretch along one side of Grand Avenue, ending at the intersection where Jack directed traffic. He waved at me as I worked the crowd.<\/p>\n

Including a few good tips, I came away from the parade that year with a fistful of dollars.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Jack and my mother came close to making a go of it. I think they could have been happy together.<\/span><\/p>\n

Any such dream shattered on the afternoon that Jack Devlin suffered a massive heart attack and collapsed on the handball courts of the Portland YMCA. They told me he died on the way to the emergency hospital. That night, I locked myself in my room. And I sobbed bitterly.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

My mother strongly admired Amelia Earhart. The slender, female pilot with the engaging smile symbolized for my mother the new American woman, who could do anything a man could do, oftentimes better.<\/p>\n

The legendary pilot captured my imagination, too. I pictured her as a gutsy, American woman who thrilled to the sheer adventure of flying. As much as I could, I tried to keep track of her exploits. I knew that during the year\u00a0I was born, she had set a woman\u2019s altitude record of 14,000 feet. I also knew that in 1928 she had been the first woman to fly the Atlantic. It wasn\u2019t until later that I learned she did this as a passenger, with an alcoholic pilot and an ex-Army mechanic. The strange trio made the flight in a tri-motor Fokker flying boat.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

In 1932, when I was eleven years old, she did it on her own. She duplicated Lindbergh\u2019s feat by flying the Atlantic alone\u2014a first for a woman. She set a string of other records, too, including the woman\u2019s cross-country speed record, before she set out to realize her most challenging dream. In May 1937, she took off from Oakland, California, on a daring attempt to be the first woman to fly around the world.<\/p>\n

Four weeks later, when she and her navigator, Fred Noonan, disappeared somewhere in the South Pacific, my mother andI were dumfounded. We could scarcely believe the news.<\/p>\n

An unprecedented search by U.S. Navy planes and ships failed to discover any “trace of Amelia Earhart or Fred Noonan or their twin-engine Lockheed Electra<\/strong><\/em>.<\/p>\n

Over the years, many intriguing theories have surfaced around the disappearance of Amelia Earhart. The most probable story’. In a severe squall, they lost their way and crashed.<\/p>\n

Still, her tragic disappearance remains a mystery.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

After several practice runs around the neighborhood, I really learned to drive during a weekend outing at the ocean with my mother and my Aunt Phoebe. The inaugural took place on a remote, ten-mile stretch of hard-packed beach, north of Allwaco, Washington, near the turbulent mouth of the Columbia River.<\/p>\n

When I first slipped behind the wheel, slammed the stick shift into gear and let go of the clutch … whoa<\/strong><\/em> … my head snapped back and the Hudson-Terraplane<\/strong><\/em> jerked and bucked like a wild, roundup bronco.<\/p>\n

By the end of the day, however, I had developed a good enough feel for shifting the stick. And the next day, we went all-out. My mother and I took turns behind the wheel, roaring up and down miles of flat, empty beach, just for the hell of it.<\/p>\n

Back in the city, I refined my driving techniques during more practice runs at dawn on empty streets around the neighborhood. Sometimes I drove Aunt Phoebe\u2019s old Dodge. Other times, I drove with my mother in her yellow Hudson-Terraplane<\/strong><\/em>.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

My mother\u2019s influence on my character was deep and lasting. We enjoyed a loving relationship. However, I admit to jarring outbursts of discord occasionally, during my adolescent years. Not unexpectedly, I was\u00a0feeling independent, rebellious. Occasionally, we argued and argued. What about exactly\u2014I have long since forgotten. But she let me know in no uncertain terms that she wouldn\u2019t take any “back-talk.\u201d She told me I needed more discipline in my impertinent, young life.<\/p>\n

She got her wish. When I enlisted in the CMTC, I experienced army, boot camp discipline for the first time.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

The Citizens Military Training Camp, or CMTC, was a depression-era, U.S. Army training program for youths 16-20-years-old. It was a volunteer, four-year infantry reserve curriculum, similar to the ROTC, built around 12 weeks of active duty during the summers.<\/p>\n

Emma Lindquist\u2019s latest boyfriend was a master sergeant in the regular Army, assigned to the headquarters unit of the CMTC at Vancouver Barracks in Vancouver, Washington. His name was Henry Karle. Emma called him “Hank.\u201d What a piece of work he was\u2014 piercing blue-gray eyes, neatly trimmed, sandy hair and a muscular, six-foot, two-inch frame, poured into a starched, sharply pressed Army uniform with ribbons on his chest and service stripes stacked up his sleeve. Wow!<\/strong><\/em> As a wide-eyed 15-year-old with a nose for adventure, I was duly impressed.<\/p>\n

On the night when Emma brought the resplendent sergeant over to our fiat for dinner, along with Agnes and Eddie Daniels, he regaled the table with stories of army life. Later on, he beguiled me with the promise of a well- paid summer adventure and a toughening challenge.<\/p>\n

But I was only 15? No problem, he promised. He could take care of that at headquarters. And he did.<\/p>\n

By the end. of the evening, Sergeant Karle had recruited me into the CMTC. My mother, with a knowing gleam in her eye, said if I wanted to do it, go right ahead.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

That\u2019s how it came about that at the end of my sophomore year in high school, I signed in as a raw recruit at Vancouver Barracks. Fort Vancouver was headquarters of the U.S. Seventh Infantry and site of the Army\u2019s CMTC for the Pacific Northwest.<\/p>\n

The Seventh Infantry commander at Vancouver was Brigadier General George C. Marshall, who went on to become U.S. Army chief of staff during World War II, our country\u2019s first five-star general, a distinguished secretary of state under President Truman, and winner of the 1953\u00a0<\/strong><\/em>Nobel Peace Prize for his \u2018Marshall Plan\u201d contribution to European recovery.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

First year, basic training in the CMTC was boot camp, no more, no less. My grandmother clipped and saved for me an Oregonian<\/strong><\/em> newspaper feature in which the writer called CMTC basic training \u201ca deliberately harsh introduction to military life, designed to mortify and motivate trainees.\u201d He claimed, \u201cIt fosters cohesion and discipline.\u201d Probably what my mother had in mind:<\/p>\n

As a 15-year-old surrounded by guys 16-20-years-old, I soon discovered that I was the Company runt. But I was a determined runt. And I muddled through. Trying to recall basic training now, it\u2019s a jumbled blur of \u201cphysical hardening,\u201d marching, barked orders, standing at attention, close order drill, the manual of arms, early a.m. bugle calls, squared-off bed-making, obstacle courses, advanced drill, parades, tactical formations, field hikes and time on the rifle range.<\/p>\n

I think we spent several days of \u201csnapping in\u201d work, practicing the various shooting positions, none of them comfortable. Then came the actual firing practice. No Daisy<\/strong><\/em> BB guns. We manhandled the Army\u2019s standard- issue Springfield rifle. I earned raw elbows and sore muscles on the firing range. In the end, I also earned\u00a0a Marksmanship badge.<\/p>\n

Basic ‘training ended that summer with an overnight bivouac far out in the boondocks, including a grueling ten- mile hike under full backpack and equipment.<\/p>\n

By this time, several of the older guys were vying to see who was the toughest. I was vying to see if I could stay on my feet, as I trudged into camp at the finish.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not that I knew I was going to make it. But I knew I wasn’t going to give up until I did.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Chapter Ten :\u00a0The Adolescents<\/a><\/center><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At the hospital on that critical night, the doctors stitched up my left arm\u2014and they rushed. Wentworth into emergency surgery in an attempt to save his bloody life. The following morning, a police inquiry began sorting out what happened\u2014and why. They questioned my mother, my grandparents and our neighbors on all sides. Later on, I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_disable_autopaging":false},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-60","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-baggage-of-youth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/byronwmayo.com\/memoires\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/byronwmayo.com\/memoires\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/byronwmayo.com\/memoires\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/byronwmayo.com\/memoires\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/byronwmayo.com\/memoires\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=60"}],"version-history":[{"count":39,"href":"https:\/\/byronwmayo.com\/memoires\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1132,"href":"https:\/\/byronwmayo.com\/memoires\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60\/revisions\/1132"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/byronwmayo.com\/memoires\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/byronwmayo.com\/memoires\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/byronwmayo.com\/memoires\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}