Reminiscences 2: I become a kindergarten dropout, 1941-1943

After Pearl Harbor, the United States declared war on Japan; Germany declared war on the United States; and the United States responded by declaring war on the remaining Axis powers. War fervor gripped America.

Three of my mother’s brothers—Wilbur X. Derus, Harvey Derus, and Roy Derus—enlisted in the U.S. Army. The three enlisted brothers all became tankers—involved with the armored service of the U.S. Army. All, I believe, served with General George S. Patton in Europe. They all came home, although Harvey suffered a brain injury resulting in Parkinson’s Disease from having his head battered around inside a tank. Wilbur became an officer—much later in life, after I was commissioned, he gave me the briefcase he was given at Officer Candidate School. The two remaining brothers of my mother, Harold “Butch” Derus and Lloyd Derus, were exempt from the draft, if I recall correctly. So was my father.

War propaganda was everywhere. Posters warned people to keep quiet about war efforts lest enemy spies overhear. People were encouraged to buy war bonds. The film industry turned out an abundance of patriotic films in support of the war effort. At movie theaters, the newsreel was generally followed by a passing of the hat for contributions to the war effort. Many people bought savings or “war” bonds by making small purchases of stamps that went into a book until it was full and could be redeemed for a bond.

Rationing of gasoline, tires, and many food staples was a challenge. Many vital commodities were in short supply. Sugar was particularly hard to get, and there was a thriving black market in some rationed commodities. Families were issued coupon books and had to redeem coupons when any of the items critical to the war effort were purchased. Boy Scouts in Kimberly got involved in campaigns to collect old pots and pans and other metals to be melted down for the war effort. Old newspapers were also collected and repulped at a paper plant in nearby Combined Locks, Wisconsin.

I became fascinated with aircraft, particularly fighter planes. We bought cereal in those days that came in cardboard boxes that were printed with fighter plane cutouts. You cut out the various parts with scissors and then assembled a cardboard plane that, if you were careful, was capable of gliding quite a distance, particularly if launched from a high vantage point such as the front porch or an upstairs window. Today’s cereal boxes leave much to be desired compared to the cereal boxes of the 1940s.

The front windows of the houses on our block on Birch Street blossomed with banners. Where once the most prominent window facing the street was used to display a placard indicating how big a block of ice the house wanted delivered to its icebox (25, 50, or 100 pounds), now a banner emblazoned with gold stars representing the number of men and women from that household who were serving in the armed forces appeared. I remember several gold stars on the banner in the front window of the Kneepkens home.

My uncle Harold and his wife Helen had one child, a daughter, Diane. Harold was in the publicity business in Chicago. His family had homes both in Evanston, Illinois, in the Chicago suburbs, and in Kaukauna, Wisconsin. He drove a Packard, an expensive car in those days, and took me on several trips to Evanston. He loved to stop in taverns along the route from Kaukauna to Chicago for a drink and to tell jokes, and whenever he made a stop for a drink, I had to get something. By the time we got to Evanston, I’d have a paper grocery sack full of candy bars, popcorn and other snacks. I have a lot of colorful memories of Harold, who was a great practical joker. I particularly remember one about the time he convinced Sherman Billingsly at the Stork Club in New York that he was King Farouk, who he resembled in stature, appearance, and girth. He was a big, jolly man!

I also got to spend some weekends with my mother’s sister, Elizabeth “Aunt Bess” Winkler,” and her three children, Donna, Ronnie, and Shari. The Winkler family lived on a 40-acre farm in Askeaton, Wisconsin, not far from Kaukauna. “Pa” Winkler, the father of Bess’ husband Roy, was the owner of a gravel pit and road contracting company that operated near the farm.

When I wasn’t visiting relatives—which was most of the time—the Birch Street house was a particularly good place for a child. In the spring, lilac bushes in the back yard bloomed profusely. Aside from their perfume, you could pick single blossoms from a full bloom, put the end of the blossom in your mouth, and suck out the blossom’s nectar. In the winter, sledding and skating were nearby. I remember the fun we had with snow forts constructed from blocks of snow. The neighborhood children would divide into two facing forts and have snowball fights, standing up to throw, ducking down behind the fort walls to avoid being hit.

My favorite place in the house was my own bedroom. Occasionally I had to give it up to a visiting uncle, but most of the time, the bedroom was my place. I had a record player in the room, and a collection of children’s songs on records. Because I knew what song was on every record, my mother thought I could read the labels. More likely, I identified something on the label with the song.

For as early as I can remember, I wanted to be able to read my favorite book, Number 9: The Little Fire Engine, the story of a small fire engine that saved the day when a fire broke out in a tenement on an icy day. But what I really wanted to read above all else were comic books—Superman, Captain Marvel, Batman, Captain America, the Blackhawks—which were popular with the grade school set in my day.

What got me started on wanting to read comic books, I think, was my childhood exposure to newspaper comic strips. A special section of the Sunday Milwaukee Journal was devoted to such comics. My grandfather Carl and uncle Courtney usually read the comic strips to me. I fondly remember “Jiggs and Maggie,” “Terry and the Pirates,” “Dick Tracy,” “Dagwood and Blondie” and “Nancy and Sluggo.” One of my father’s nicknames for my mother was “Slug,” which he picked up from Nancy’s playmate, the combative Sluggo. My favorite comic strip was one heavy with text about some tiny people called “The Teenie Weenies.” The strip, created by William Donahey, originated in 1914 at the Chicago Tribune, and lasted for 50 years. It was running strong in national syndication by the 1940s, when it was being read to me on Sundays.

The basement of the house on Birch Street was especially interesting to me. There was a coal-fired furnace down there that my father fed regularly from a coal bin. Deliveries of coal were always fascinating. A truck would pull up to an open basement window, stick a chute into the window, and then elevate the truck bed so the coal would slide down the chute into the coal cellar.

The house had a cistern in the basement that caught rainwater from the eaves. It was like having a swimming pool in the basement. I didn’t yet know how to swim when we lived there, so the cistern was not an “attractive nuisance” safety problem for me. I enjoyed looking into the cistern to see how full it was.

My favorite story about the basement involved my father’s home-brewing effort. Due to World War II, beer was one of the commodities in short supply, so my father decided to brew some of his own. He had a supply of empty bottles, and a recipe for making the beer. His home brew went into the bottles via a funnel, and the bottles were corked and placed near the furnace to ferment. Probably because of the extra warmth from the furnace, the brew fermented quickly. One night, we began to hear the corks explode from the bottles. The corks would hit the metal heating ducts overhead, and the noise would reverberate from all the heating vents in the house. My mother was not amused at being awakened frequently by the serenade. My poor father was stuck with cleaning up the mess from the bottles that exploded, although he likely got to drink a fair amount of the leftovers.

I remember getting the measles in the Birch Street house, and being quarantined. In those days, to avoid the spread of contagious diseases, the town doctor put a quarantine sign out front of the house to warn away anyone that might be calling. I was particularly disappointed because the measles occurred over Halloween, and kept me from going out in costume to trick or treat.

I started kindergarten while our family was still living in the Birch Street house in Kimberly, but I wasn’t there for very long. I soon became a kindergarten dropout. Here’s how it happened.

I started kindergarten in the fall of 1943. The class was held a few blocks from the house on Birch Street, at the building that held the public grade school and the public high school. The teacher was Miss Calvey. I already knew many of the children in the class. Marlene DuPont and Bob Gossens were among them.

The classes were actually fun. Much of the activity consisted of play. Art—the usual finger-painting, leaving your hand-print in wet putty, that sort of thing—was part of the curriculum. And there was always nap time.

The trouble started in one of the play periods. There was a playhouse in the classroom that had a child-sized kitchen. Bob Gossens sat in the toy sink, and I said something to the effect that Bob had wet his pants. Somehow the story got to Miss Calvey that I had said something impermissible, and she sentenced me to stand in a corner facing the wall. I told her that I had done nothing wrong, and if she made me do that, I would not be coming back to kindergarten.

I stood in the corner, but had already decided that I was not going back. It was winter when this happened, and I worked out a plan. The next day, I left the house on Birch Street towing the red and blue sled. I walked past the school, and on out to Sunset Point, a park where I could slide down the snow-covered hills on the sled. The sled, by the way, had a defect. One of its runners had become cracked, so it could only be steered to the left, never to the right. Nevertheless, I had a good time. About the time the kindergarten class was dismissed, I would make my way back home as though I’d been at kindergarten.

This ploy went on for several weeks. Then my mother ran into Miss Calvey on the streets of Kimberly one day. Miss Calvey was of the opinion that I was ill, and asked my mother when I would be coming back to her kindergarten class. When my mother got home, and I came back home from my day’s wandering, she asked me about my absences from kindergarten. My explanation was that kindergarten wasn’t teaching me to read and was a waste of time. My mother and father discussed it, and the upshot was, since kindergarten was not mandatory, that I could wait until I started first grade at Holy Name Grade School in the fall of 1944, without going back to kindergarten.

A short time later, Art Hopfensberger decided to sell the house on Birch Street my father and mother were renting. He gave them very little warning, and they needed to find another rental place. The only thing they could find quickly was an abandoned store on Main Street in Kimberly next door to a drug store owned by pharmacist Walt Schomisch and a grocery store run by Joe Mazanetz. More about life on Main Street in my next reminiscence.

Reminiscences 1: Pre-school childhood 1937-1941

For any of the children or grandchildren interested in my remembrances of childhood before kindergarten, here are a few of my memories.

 

I was born on December 19, 1937, at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Appleton, Wisconsin. I weighed nine pounds one ounce at birth, leading my father to refer to me occasionally in later years as “the big-headed little S.O.B.” 

I was baptized a few days later—perhaps on Christmas Eve. My mother wanted me to be baptized Noel in honor of my birth so close to Christmas, but the parish pastor where I was baptized believed every child should be baptized with a saint’s name, and he didn’t think there was a saint Noel. So I was baptized Peter Noel Lee Griese. The pastor was wrong about Noel not being a saint’s name, by the way. Saint Noel Chabanel, a Canadian Jesuit martyred by a renegade Huron in 1649, was canonized in 1930.

My earliest memory is of our moving into a rental house on Birch Street in Kimberly, Wisconsin, directly across from the DuPont and Kneepkens homes. My father and mother rented the house from Art Hopfensberger, a local butcher and grocer, shortly before my sister Carol was born. I remember visiting the house with my mother Thelma and father Orville when workmen were still sanding down a landing for the stairs to the upper story. I would have been about one and a half years old then.

Marlene DuPont, who lived across the street, became my favorite playmate. 

Bernadette “Birdie” Kneepkens from across the street was my favorite babysitter. I remember only one disappointment with Birdie, who I dearly loved. When I was five or so years old, she was going to take me to Appleton, three miles away, to see the movie “God Is My Co-Pilot,” about a Flying Tigers fighter pilot  in China. At the last minute, she decided war movies might give a child nightmares and took me to something else. But I’ve gotten to see that movie several times since. There's a picture of Birdie taken in 1949 when she was a cheerleader for the Kimberly High School basketball team that went to the state tournament in Madison at http://tinyurl.com/3fx7nhe .    

Soon after our small family moved into the house on Birch Street, my sister Carol was born. I can remember wheeling her about the house in a baby carriage.

Carol probably remembers better than me an incident with a candle under the back porch of the house on Birch Street. I think it was Donnie Kneepkens from across the street who brought the candle over along with a Halloween pumpkin and matches to light it. It was dark enough under the porch to see a carved pumpkin face illuminated from within by a candle. Somehow, some of Carol’s hair got burned, and my mother discovered us. We all got a long talking-to about playing with fire.

We had currant bushes in the back yard, and a plum tree. I can remember my mother picking currants to use in making and canning currant jelly. I also had a little garden near the back porch, perhaps four feet by four feet. I randomly threw seeds into the ground that my father had spaded, and my mother was amazed when sweet corn and other vegetables emerged and thrived.

My favorite food among those my mother would make was hot waffles with a slab of vanilla ice cream melting on top. Another favorite for both me and my sister Carol was bread dipped in a mixture of fresh crushed strawberries and melted vanilla ice cream.

One of the things in the neighborhood that fascinated me was a car repair shop at the corner of Birch Street and Kimberly Avenue run by Joe Krautkramer. There were always puddles of water between the repair shop, and gasoline and oil would get into the puddles. The sheens would irridesce, and I enjoyed watching all the colors of the rainbow appear when the puddles were stirred up. A huge oak tree that grew beside the repair shop provided an abundance of acorns in the autumn for use in play and for fashioning toy smoking pipes when a straw was inserted into a hollowed-out acorn bowl.

The village ice rink was only a block away from the Birch Street house. My father Orville, who had been a high school track champion who held the Wisconsin state record in the 100-yard dash for many years, liked to ice skate in the winter. We had an old sled painted red and blue that he modified with a child’s seat that I could sit in. He’d tow that sled with me bundled up on it to the ice rink, and then skate towing me. The sled would swerve this way and that on the ice from the whiplash. Occasionally the sled would overturn, with no particular damage to me that I remember. However, I remember my mother witnessing such an overturn on one occasion, and some sharp words being exchanged about babies and safety.

Also a block away from the Birch Street house was the house of my father’s parents, my Grandmother Ida and Grandfather Carl Griese. Also living in the house were two of their children, my Aunt Arna and Uncle Courtney. Courtney had epilepsy, and Arna had back problems. I often had lunch there, and slept over many times in a front bedroom.

The grandparents had a big garden out back where they grew both vegetables and flowers. I remember the huge rhubarb stalks, the lettuce and the radishes, and flowers like bachelor buttons and bleeding hearts. In the spring, there were tulips, and in the fall, a plant that we called Chinese lanterns because its orange bulbous fruit resembled small lanterns.  

The Van Drunens lived directly behind my grandparents. Ricky, one of the Van Drunen sons, was my age. His father had built him a playhouse, where Rick had a collection of glass canning jars. He would fill the jars with water, then color the water by putting various colors of crepe paper in it. The dye used to color the crepe paper was water soluble, so Rick soon had a fantastic collection of colored water.

My other grandmother, Mary Derus, lived first in nearby Kaukauna, Wisconsin, and then in Appleton, the county seat of Outagamie County, where she was the matron at the Outagamie County Jail on the top floor of the courthouse. I often visited her there, staying overnight. She was a loving woman who had raised a large family. Her husband Joseph committed suicide, hanging himself during the Great Depression when he was unable to find work. 

My father worked in the Kimberly-Clark paper mill in Kimberly, a massive plant that produced coated paper for magazines, books and advertising broadsides. The first major purchase he made for our fledgling family was our first car, an Essex of 1920s vintage, faded green with black trim. If I recall correctly, it had to be hand-cranked to start it, which kept my mother from driving until we could afford a more recent model with battery-assisted starter. The Essex, in the meantime, got us out of town to Appleton and Green Bay.

Bill DuPont, a paper chemist with Kimberly-Clark, had a much more modern car, a late 1930s tan turtle-top Plymouth, if I recall correctly. Marlene and I sometimes played in it, pretending it was an airplane or a ship. 

Speaking of mobility, I had two favorite toys in this period. One was a little station wagon that I could sit in and use the pedals to make it go. It had a steering wheel, of course, and I rode it inside the house and out. I suspect my parents had to save for some time to afford such a luxury toy for me. My other favorite toy was a red tricycle that I inherited from my cousin Diane, the only daughter of my mother’s brother Harold “Butch” Derus and his wife Helen. I could barely reach the pedals at first, but it was my main vehicle for riding to Grandmother and Grandfather Griese’s house a block or two away.

One of the funniest things I remember from this period is a 4th of July where Dad and Bill DuPont chipped in to buy fireworks to entertain us children (and themselves). That evening, there was the usual assortment of Roman candles, sparklers, small firecrackers, whistling devils and fountains of sparks. But it was a big rocket that was to be the piece de resistance, the grand finale. My Dad had nailed together two boards into a V-configuration to serve as the launch cradle for the rocket, which was to shoot up into the night sky and then explode in a burst of reports. Now, Birch Street looking north terminated in a dead end at Kimberly Avenue. At the intersection, on the far side of Kimberly Avenue, was DeLeeuw’s Tavern, the site of the best Saturday night roast chicken dinners in Kimberly. Bill and my Dad carefully placed the rocket in the launch cradle, pointed it straight up in the air, and lit the fuse. The fuse sputtered, then seemed to die. Disappointed, my Dad and Bill lowered the rocket and cradle until the rocket was pointed directly at the tavern. That’s when it came to life and roared down the street. I can’t remember if it exploded on the porch of the tavern or went straight through the screen door and exploded inside. That’s because we were all running to our respective homes, so I didn’t get to see exactly what happened when the rocket hit the tavern. To this day, I have visions of the reactions  of the people sitting at the bar when the rocket exploded.

As I remember it, Bill DuPont and my father were sitting on the front steps of our rental home on Birch Street talking on the late afternoon of Sunday, December 7, 1941, when they noticed a newsboy up on the corner of Birch Street and Kimberly Avenue hawking a special edition of the Appleton Post-Crescent. It was extremely unusual for the Post-Crescent to publish a special or extra edition. The paper was an afternoon daily except for Sundays, when it was home-delivered by paper route boys in the morning. I was given a coin to go buy a copy so Bill and Dad could find out what was going on. 

The special edition was, of course, devoted to an announcement of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Only the most cursory of information was available that Sunday afternoon. The first Japanese bombs had fallen on Pearl Harbor at 7:43 a.m. Hawaii time, or 12:43 p.m. Wisconsin time. Presidential Press Secretary Steve Early in a terse statement from his home in Washington had told a three-way hookup of the Associated Press, United Press, and International News Service at 1:22 p.m. Wisconsin time on December 7 of the attack. At 1:31 p.m. Wisconsin time on December 7, the CBS radio network aired its regularly scheduled news program “The World Today,” leading with the attack on Pearl Harbor. By that time, wire services such as the Associated Press would have spread the word to newspapers such as the Post-Crescent.

Although both my family and the DuPonts had radios, the Post-Crescent special edition of the late afternoon of December 7 was probably the first notice both of our families got of the event that would shape the next four years of our national history. The next day, the Post-Crescent carried a much more extensive front page announcing, among other things, the U.S. Declaration of War on Japan in response to the attack on Pearl Harbor. The front page of that special edition is online at the Post-Crescent Web site.