A Peaceful Year, except perhaps, the Murder Next Door

Wilmington Trust would regularly do health screenings as a free service to we employees. I don't know if it was because they really cared about our health or to see if we were still alive. Usually these were conducted by the Visiting Nurses Association of Delaware. It was probably through them because John Behringer, a Section Manager and Assistant Vice-President, the man everyone suspected would eventually replace Walt Whittaker as the head o Deposit Services, was on the organization's board. On September 22 they were giving blood pressure screenings

I routinely went to these. It was cheaper than a doctor appointment and in my position I was expected to set an example for the troops. It was no biggie. I knew I had hypertension and was on a medication for it. And the test was simple, no needles involved. The nurse just slapped a cuff about the arm and listened to your pulse while the thing grew tighter around you.

Thus I sat there as the cuff squeezed. I looked at the nurse and her face had turned ashen. She appeared actually about to faint. She told me my blood pressure was somewhere over 200 and my pulse was a mere 20 beats a minute. She also commented my skin was clammy. To see the fright in her eyes I thought maybe I should lie down on the floor; I must be dead.

She told me I needed to see my doctor at once, and Walt my boss, agreed. He told me to call my physician and to go home.

I did both. My doctor told me to come right in. He did a general examination and sent me off for blood work. Now there would be a needle involved. Apparently, I wasn’t going to drop dead right away. I reluctantly obeyed, for I have a phobic fear of needles.  I had studiously avoid as much as possible having any of those things stuck into me.

One night a few days later my doctor called me at home. He had just gotten the results of my blood tests and wanted me to come to his office right away. He sounded as shook up as that Visiting Nurse. Maybe I was getting to such a state myself. It's a scary thing to hear a doctor say drop everything and come see me. So I drove in to see him.

He slapped a copy of my test results in my hand as if those lines and ranges would mean something to me. He pointed to one result.

“See that?” he asked. “It shouldn’t be that high.” He looked at me briefly.” And look at this one.” He pointed down the page to another line with numbers on it. “If that first one is high, this one should be low. But it isn’t. It is too high as well. It doesn’t make sense”

He sat down in his chair behind his desk waving the test results in the air. “None of this make sense,” he said. “I have no idea what’s going on except I can’t make heads or tails of these results.” He calmed down and paused, taking out a card he wrote something down and handed it to me. “I want you to see a kidney specialist,” he said. “Call the number on the card to make an appointment.”
I called the nyber and the next available apointment was in October.

While waiting to see the kidney specialist in October, I went through a seminar at Online

Consulting in Wilmington. This course lasted three days and got me certified on Office Writer Inform. It really fascinates me how many word processing programs I went through until M/S Office’s Word sort of become the standard.

I finally saw the kidney specialist and he did nothing except send me to Christiana Care for further tests, such as un ultra-scan of my kidneys. Oh, and bill me for the visit, of course. The result of these tests was my kidneys were alledgedly loafing on the job; working only 50% of the time. This was scary stuff. I had nightmares I would end up on dialysis spending hours watching my blood going through tubes to be washed.  On October 20 I visited the Kidney Doctor, a Nephrologist, in his office. I went in with a little dread, but he quickly told me my kidneys weren’t the problem. They were fine, but my thyroid wasn’t working, at least, not working hard enough. I had hypothyroidism. The thyroid is like the body’s thermostat. It controls your metabolism among other things. My thyroid was not injecting enough hormone into my system when needed. It was no big deal, he assured me, unless I ignored it. He gave me a prescription. All I need do was take this one little pill every day for the rest of my life.

In the middle of November my dad came down to our house to rake the leaves. He said my mother was driving him crazy and he just had to get away. Both parents came down for Grandparent’s Day at my kids school. We went up to Bucktown for Thanksgiving and this year instead of cooking a big meal, my parents took us all out to the Dinner Bell Restaurant for supper.

On December 3 my mom went out to feed her cat, which lived in the garage/basement, but

she fell down the stone steps hurting her right foot and skinning her leg, arm and head. Dad took her to the Phoenixville Hospital. Her foot wasn’t broken, just badly sprained, but they put a cast on anyway. Of the 15, Misty the dog, fell over her water dish and spilled the water on the floor. My mom slipped on the spillage and fell on her bottom. She was more embarrassed than hurt. The doctor took her cast off on the 19^th.

We had Christmas at our place.

I went to my doctor in the middle of January 1989 and my blood pressure was good. The daily thyroid pill was doing the job. I was feeling well, except on February 18 when I came down with the flu. Everybody in our house was sick. I was still in bed on the 23^rd. Other than that hiccup both Lois and I were getting along without incident. So it went pacefully and normally through spring.

In June I went to Washington DC for a seminar at the AMA called, “Measuring and Managing Products Profitability. My mom came and stayed with the kids while Lois joined me in Washington.

On July 4 we went to the Fireworks Picnic in Rockford Park. Rockford, not to be confused with Rockwood, is located in Wilmington, not far from Immanuel Highlands where we were still attending church. It was quite an event, including food naturally, and a concert  before the fireworks display that featured the singer Mel Torme, (left) the Velvet Fog as he was called.

We had spread a blanket on the ground like most around us. Pictured are Darryl, myself and Noelle before Hell broke loose. We got a good close up view of

the fireworks. Oh did we ever, too close a view. It was like finding yourself in the middle of an arial war raid. Little fires fell from the sky around us as the bombs burst in air. My kids were terrified, and I was, too. I was very relieved to escape the park in one piece, even though we had the fear of the car overheating as we poked through city street with the rest of the exiting crowd.

Wilmington Trust decided to photograph all their employees for the 1989 Annual Report. We were ordered to report to the Delaware Stadium for the picture taking. (Delaware Stadium did not become Tubby Raymond Field until 2002.) This was scheduled for late afternoon on a sun-blistering mid-July day. The temperature was blazing and they had to line up around 2,000 plus people with no shade or shelter from the sun, which was in our face. The photographer was in the press box on the opposite side of the football field and needed the sun at his back for the light. It took over an hour to get everyone situated. By some miracle no one passed out.

After several takes they got the picture they wanted and we were dismissed. Food had been catered and was being served beneath the stands. It was the usual picnic style dishes, hamburgers and hot dogs, but there was also potato and macaroni salad and other things. Some of these items were not the best to have standing about in 90 plus degree heat for a couple hours. A number of the partakers ended up with food poisoning.

The photograph wrapped around the cover of the annual report. Somehow I ended up on the front not too far left of the logo. I called this my “Where’s Waldo” moment. 
So, where is Larry? Can you find me?

Okay, if you look left of the bottom curve of the logo I am about four people over. I’m the one in gray hair.

My moment of fame!

On August 17, we went to my mom’s and then she drove us all up to the Land of Little

Horses Miniature Horse Farm in Gettysburg. It is an interesting attraction. They have a lot of miniature animals beside the horses. There is a tent show with a parade and different acts, kind of like a circus. There was a sulky race. We all took a carriage ride, then Laurel and Darryl took pony rides. Afterwards, we drove through some of the Battlefield. We had dinner at the Family Time Restaurant in York.

On the 27^th we went to the Wilson family Reunion, held now at my cousin Horace’s farm

near Phoenixville instead of Bob Wilson’s place. Bob and his family had moved to Maryland where he started a horse farm. There was no pool at Cousin Horace’s and it was still hot even late in August. Horace was one of my Grand Uncle Heber’s sons; the other was Everett. My cousin Bob had been Heber’s brother Evans' son. We explored the barn and a little museum Horace kept, played the games, but all of us were very wore out and I think we left early. Our weariness shows in the photo. We went home, but Laurel stayed behind and went to her grandparents for a couple days.

Darryl’s birthday was August 24, but like many of our family events, we didn’t celebrate it on the actual day. We were celebrating it on August 30. My mother came down and Lois had baked a cake that was waiting on the dining room table.  Mom and Laurel arrived around 3:30 and I got home from work at 4:30. Darryl searched for his presents, which were hidden about the house and then opened them. I then went back to the bedroom to change from my suit to something cooler. Lois went to the kitchen to prepare our dinner.

It was a little after 5:00 by then. There was a knock on the front door and Noelle answered it. Standing there was a policeman. He asked her if her mother was there, but didn’t wait for an answer. He simply walked in, up the steps to the living area and then down the hall toward the bedrooms. Just then I stepped out of the bedroom and here was this cop standing in my hallway where he had no business being. The only thing he said was, “Sir, I want you to take your family immediately, leave the house and go up to the top of the street.” We hurriedly filed out. My fear was a gas leak. Once outside I asked the officer what was wrong. He said, “We’re having a little trouble with a neighbor.” That was all he told us. We followed orders and went up the block to the next intersection at Wentworth, the street behind our home that intersected with our street where it curved higher up the hill.

There were a number of people milling about the intersection, rousted from their homes along both Olympia and Wentworth. There  were a group of cops huddled about halfway down Wentworth, about opposite where a home there bordered on my backyard. Suddenly a young black man came from where the crowd had gathered and began running down the middle of Wentworth. Police yelled at him to stop, but he ignored them until one cop grabbed him. It took three police to finally halt his progress and they slammed him down to the ground. They handcuffed him and took him away down the street.

“That’s the son,” somebody said and we finally heard what had happened from some of the bystanders. The people who lived behind me were named Newell. They had moved in less than a year ago and had two small children who lived there. The children had sometimes played with my own. The youngBlack the cops had tackled was also a son, but he was in his late teens or early twenties and didn’t live in the same house. Mrs. Newell had a restraining order against her husband. He wasn’t supposed to come anywhere near her, but those restraining orders are only paper and little protection. Newell had showed up at the house and pushed his way in.

The cops weren’t certain of the situation. They knew he and his wife were in the house and they knew he had a gun. They were treating this as a hostage situation and trying to coax Newell out without any harm to anyone. At this point they didn’t realize his wife lay in the garage already dead.

It was getting late in the evening. This may have been a hot August day, but with darkness came a chill. Other people drifted off to stay with relatives or to book a motel room. We were stuck. When the cop told us to leave immediately I did just that. I didn’t grab my wallet, only my keys. My mother had left her pocketbook in the house. Neither of us was being allowed to go down the street and get our cars. We had no transportation nor any money. We were stuck.

It was getting later and colder. I was only dressed in a thin pair of shorts and a T-shirt. The kids were no better dressed. I looked down and saw Darryl had left without his shoes. Then a man I didn’t know came up to us. He identified himself as fire police and said he would take us to the firehouse to spend the night.

Several firemen greeted us when he dropped us at the firehouse in Claymont. They led us

upstairs to their lounge. Some of them went out and came back with pizza and sodas for us. They gave us blankets and we bunked down best we could right there. None of us slept very well. Police and fire calls kept coming in over the radio all night. The fire whistle blew at 3:00 AM.

In the morning the firemen brought us donuts and coffee, milk and juice for the kids. I called into work and told them I wouldn’t be in today. They had heard reports on the news. Afterward, I walked back to our street, going to the lower end. I had hoped I could go up and into my house, pick up my wallet and get Darryl’s shoes. When I got there I found a patrol car blocking the street. I asked the officer if I go to my house, but he said I couldn’t. “It’s right in the line of fire,” he said. Newell was still holed up. He had an automatic weapon and had threatened to blow the house up.

I walked down Glenrock between my street and Wentworth. I could see up to my back yard and there was a swat team on my back porch with rifles aimed toward Newell’s. Wentworth had a barrier across it, but you could see the action up the street. A crowd of people were already there watching. I counted 21 cop cars along the street. Police were up in the trees. A negotiator was on a bullhorn. They had fetched Newell’s mother to the scene and she was pleading with him to come out. He wouldn’t budge.

They whisked his mother away and I heard a couple pops from the backyard and glass breaking. They had begun lobbing teargas into the house. Suddenly there was a pop nearby followed by a loud explosion and I could see a large hole had been blasted through the garage door. Still he wouldn’t come out.

I walked back to the firehouse. The firemen brought us subs for lunch. Newell finally surrendered at 3:00 PM. They rushed in and found his wife’s body in the garage. Their two young children had been away with someone so no harm came to them.

The firemen drove us home at 4:45. There were paw prints from a cat across Darryl’s birthday cake. My mother finally left at 10:30 that night. She took Darryl and Noelle with her, even though Noelle protested about going with her.

Noelle protested all of September 1. On the second my parents took them to Rax for lunch. Darryl’s was free because it was his birthday. Then they took the kids to an antique car museum in Boyertown. My mom made supper, but both kids really wanted to come home by then. Lois, Laurel and I came to dinner and then took them home.

In October we attended the 30^th Reunion of Owen J. Roberts Class of 1959. It was here I learned my close high school friend, Richard Ray Miller was dead. He was only 47 when he passed, but when we try and drown our disappointments in alcohol, it sometimes removes us from the scene early.

Richard Ray Miller and Ray Ayres and I had written some little plays for our high school. We were constantly together in those days.

(Right, Richard Ray held over the edge by Ray Ayres. Miller and Ayres were my closest friends at Owen J. Both are deceased.)

We had Thanksgiving dinner at our place and also Christmas. The year sort of quietly ended with a visit to my parents and another dinner on New Year’s Eve. 1989 ended rather peacefully, perhaps a good sign as we entered the 1990s.

Or maybe not.

So Walk Me Through, Back Through the Fields

After high school most of my classmates went their way and I went mine.
Ray Ayres disappeared from my life and the next I heard anything of him, he was in Seattle. From what I can piece together he was probably serving in the U. S. Navy. Five years later I learned he was a student at West Chester State Teachers College and married.
He had not seemed to have settled down to anything study over these first fifteen years out of school, certainly there was nothing that represented what expectations for him may have been.  His address changed at every reunion (but then so did mine). By 1974 he was a father of a daughter.

Around that same year, one of Ray's sisters became the wife of a man named Coffee. The Coffee family were restauranteurs and that year they purchased the Black Angus.
In the obituary of Mary DeAngelo, who with her husband owned the Black Angus, it says the DeAngelos owned the Inn from 1960 to 1974.  I first ate there with my parents well before 1960.  The Inn was a landmark restaurant most of my life and before me. It began long ago as Mosteler's General Store, then evolved into the Ludwig's Corner Inn and eventually The Black Angus Inn and then perhaps most famously as DeAngelo's Black Angus Inn. Now in 1974 it turned another page as it fell into the hands of the Coffees. 
Ray went there to work for a while and then shortly thereafter the Coffees opened a new restaurant in Birdsboro, The Angus Pub, and Ray was co-owner and manager. The Angus Pub did not stay in business long and when it closed Ray Ayres basically disappeared for a number of years.

Richard Ray Miller contacted me in the fall to go to Philadelphia with him on a job interview. He didn’t get that job and soon after he also disappeared (Photo, l to r: Ray Ayres & Richard Ray Miller).

I was spending a lot of evenings typing away on stories and poems, but I no longer had an outlet. I had written and performed at school, but I was out of school now. There were no more venues taking on my stand-up routine and no dances looking for Gravely & Hearse. There were no mentors about anymore either. Anyone I shared my writing with told me it was nice I liked to write, but I would need a real job if I wanted to make a living.

I was left with a social life that revolved around Ronald Tipton and Richard Wilson. Richard and I were still taking our pleasures in cruising around that summer, looking for girls and dragging the Pottstown strip, but these things were being to pale. Richard was still in high school and would be entering eleventh grade that autumn. I was losing interest in living this teenage lifestyle.

Richard, Tommy Wilson and I were on our way to Reading one afternoon. I wanted to stop at a drugstore in Stowe for something, I forget what. I found my purchase and went to the counter to pay. Richard was waiting in the car. Tommy had come in with me, but went off in his own direction. We got back in the car and on our way. Tommy is pulling items from his shirt, bragging about how he stole this and stole that. I was furious. I told him he ever did something like that again I’d ban him from my car. The darn fool, if he had been caught I would have been suspected of being his shill, distracting the clerk so he could pocket what he wanted. I didn’t like Tommy; he was too sneaky.

Not that Richard couldn’t be as sneaky. One time we, along with his parents, visited his grandparents in Pottstown. During the visit, Richard excused himself and went out for “a walk”. When he came back he was all smiles. Later on the way home he gave me a wink and pointed to the floor. He had stolen a set of hubcaps off of a parked car.

Richard got a revolver somewhere and he hid it in my glove compartment. He didn’t tell me. My father borrowed my car for some reason and he found the gun. That was the angriest my father ever got with me. I thought this time he might hit me. He went on and on about how serious this was. He said if a cop had pulled me over I would have been arrested.  I didn’t know anything about the gun. I was in turn furious at Richard, but he kind of laughed it off. It was all beginning to wear thin.

Ronald and I were looking for jobs. School days were over for us. Our parents told both of us to forget college. I was a nowhere man after graduation. I wasn’t going to college and I didn’t have many resources or skills.What kind of work was I going to find? Jobs had become scarce. The year before the Stock Market dropped into a Bear market. The economy was down. It had begun falling in 1957 and hit its low point in 1958. The Eisenhower Administration did little to boost the economy because of inflation fears and unemployment remained high. For men Ronald and my ages it was at 15.3 percent. For men in their early twenties it was 8.7 percent. 

Jobs were not easy to come by.

I went back to the farms with help from dad.

My father owned his own rig now. The tractor was a Brockway. There was a sign on the front bumper, “A hour late and a dollar short”. The trailer was a flatbed.

In early summer he constructed wood rail sides for the trailer and began hauling tomatoes. He built it sturdy. He didn’t want to repeat what happened to a friend of his. This trucker was hauling tomatoes up a steep hill near Parkesburg when the side gave way and spilled tomatoes across the road, premature ketchup.

Dad was hauling now as a gypsy. A Gypsy Trucker didn't have the same connotation as that  term apparently has today. It didn't mean he was an illegal trucker. It meant he was a freelancer not contacted out to any one trucking firm. He was basically in business for himself. Perhaps the only negative put on the Gypsy drivers was a lot of them weren't card carrying members of the Teamsters. As far as I know my dad was a dues paying Teamster his whole hauling life, although when all was said and done the Teamsters did nothing for him.

Anyway, dad took me up to some independent dispatcher’s office in Lancaster County and I got a job as a truck loader.

It wasn't a complicated job. Took more muscle than brains. You rode with a trucker to a Lancaster County Amish farm. The farmer came up to the truck with a horse drawn wagon stacked with bushel baskets of tomatoes. You, that meaning the trucker and I,  transferred the baskets from wagon to truck, stacking them seven to eight feet high down the thirty-foot length of trailer. It is not hard on the brain, but can be a killer to the back. I was making ten dollars a day.

It was kind of funny when you got to a field, and it was the same at every field you would pull into. You’d no sooner park when the Amish girls would gather nearby and watch you work. There was a similarity about them. Not just their clothing, but in their faces. They seemed happy enough as they watched you labor there in the sun, shirtless with sweat running down you in rivulets. They would look you up and down, shyly smiling and sometimes whispering to each other. Most of them were pretty. Their faces glowed with red cheeks.

My employee only lasted a couple of weeks. Near the end I helped load dad’s truck, my last  load, and rode with him on his run to a Heinz factory. Dad always got Heinz Ketchup. He said he had delivered to several companies and Heinz always got the best tomatoes. I don’t know where this plant was located. I think it was in Pennsylvania, but can’t swear to it. (Photo on right is the old Heinz Ketchup factory in Pittsburgh. This may be where we went.) We could have gone into Ohio. We loaded up in the morning and we arrived at the plant well after dark. He parked behind a few trucks that had beat him there and we slept in the cab. He said if we had not driven to the plant before sleeping we would have found a much longer line in the morning. Getting offloaded would have kept us waiting for hours.

They allowed me to wait in the plant during offloading. I asked where the restroom was. I found it and went in. I never saw a restroom like it before. It was very large. In the center was this large circular fountain. That is what it looked like anyway, but it wasn’t a fountain. It was a wide metal bowl perhaps twelve feet in diameter. (Much like the picture on the left, but many times larger.) In the center was a slender pyramid with water flowing down its sides. Some men were standing around its sides and I realized this was a giant urinal. I walked out determined I could hold it in until our next stop. Nothing had changed on my shy bladder front.

We returned home and dad contracted to haul steel again for some company. Tomato loading season had ended and I was Nowhere Man again. I went back to searching the want ads for work and Ratso Rizzo's Farmer's Market stand for fresh flesh. I think I finally bought my first "Playboy Magazines" that summer.

It was late June and the weather turned warm. I thought about that girl I met after graduation and decided to call her after all. She answered the phone and sounded pleased to hear from me. She told me how to get to her house, which was near Spring City. She lived down a long winding lane off of Stony Run Road. The area was country fifty years ago. It is a continuous line of homes today. I don’t even know if her house still exists. I looked for it in 2012 and could not find it.

She said wear my bathing suit.