WAPAKONETA ON THE WARPATH

Shawnee Chief 
Catahecassa, or Black Hoof, 1740-1831

The decision by the Washington Redskins to—finally—get on the right side of history and state their intention to change their name and logo has had long-tailed consequences in what should be the front line against racism throughout the United States—public high schools. And nowhere has the hornets’ nest been poked more savagely than in my hometown of Wapakoneta, Ohio, where the School Board has stubbornly resisted reiterated attempts to foster a change in its team name and mascot. For, as we were drilled throughout the school-days of our youth, “We are the Redskins, the mighty, mighty Redskins!”

Alas, we are not. In fact, ours is a blindingly, nearly homogeneously white community. And therein lies the rub, which has caused a direct clash between the Wapakoneta Superintendent of Schools and the Chief of the Shawnee Nation. As a result, the controversy about the team name and mascot has gone from being an ongoing and bitter debate between local residents—with other far-flung Wapakoneta alumni weighing in as well—to actually making a ripple on the national scene.

Last week, Wapakoneta schools Superintendent Aaron Rex released a statement in the midst of a backlash from the Washington Redskins’ historic decision in which he stated, “At Wapakoneta we have always believed that our representation of Native Americans and their history in our area has been done with a great deal of respect. Our community was once a place inhabited by many Indian tribes with the last being the Shawnee under the leadership of Chief Black Hoof. In the last few years we have redesigned our school logo and feel that it has been done keeping the idea of respect and history in mind. Wapakoneta has a great deal to be proud of, as you know. Native American history is one piece of what makes our town one of the best small towns in Ohio.”

There are a few things blatantly wrong with that statement: First, as an educator, Mr. Rex should know that “beliefs” aren’t facts. What Wapakonetans have “always believed” about our way of representing Native American culture and history is in apparent and aggressive conflict with the view of the ethnicity involved. Second, any redesigning of the school logo has been carried out, according the representatives of the Shawnee Tribe, without consulting the true experts on tribal culture—namely, the Shawnee themselves. And third, although Wapakoneta may indeed have attributes that it can be proud of, its history with Native Americans in general and the Shawnee Nation in particular isn’t one of them.

The fact is that our white ancestors first forged a peace treaty with the Shawnee and then betrayed the trust of once great warriors and defenders of the land like Black Hoof, breaking the treaty, stealing the sacred lands of the Native American residents and driving them en masse on a forced march to the far off Kansas territory, during the course of which large numbers of them perished. Our history with the indigenous tribes of the region is, then, not a happy story of respect and ethnic diversity. Rather, it is one of abject tragedy, betrayal and complete disregard for the native peoples of our area, who had come to trust the European settlers enough to agree to a treaty in the belief that it was better to live in peace with them than to attempt to fight a burgeoning trend. Their trust, like elsewhere throughout the continent, was met with a ruthless and genocidal push to be rid of Native Americans once and for all.

In response to Mr. Rex’s rather cavalier statement, Shawnee Tribal Chief Ben Barnes tweeted, “You said, ‘Our community was once a place inhabited by many Indian tribes with the last being the Shawnee under the leadership of Chief Black Hoof.’ The office of Chief of the Wapakoneta Shawnee is now me. Ask us our opinion first.” So far, the chief reports having no response from Wapakoneta school officials.

In statements to a Native American publication called Indian Country Today—an online magazine that, it is worth noting, never writes the word redskin, referring to the clearly racist term as “the R-word” just as has become standard practice everywhere else when mentioning “the N-word” on citing racist references to African Americans—Chief Barnes again referred to Superintendent Rex’s statement, asking, “How can they say they’re honoring us if they won’t even speak to us?”

The Shawnee leader had earlier stated the position of his tribe regarding the decision of the Washington team to change its name and his hope that high schools would follow suit in also rejecting anti-Indian racism. “We are not mascots,” Chief Barnes said. “We are living cultures and languages with histories going back thousands of years. Our stories are a thousand-fold, filled with wondrous stories of our ancestors and our relationship to the land. It is in this way we want people to know us, not as an emblem on a hat.”

Ben Barnes, Chief of the Shawnee Tribe

In telephone statements made to newsman José Nogueras for an article that appeared in The Lima News—published in Lima, Ohio, fifteen miles from Wapakoneta and the county seat of what was once the Hog Creek Shawnee Reservation—Chief Barnes again commented on Superintendent Rex’s unacceptable defense of the Redskin name and logos saying, “Our nation and our office is totally preoccupied with COVID, and I can’t devote fifty hours to this, but at some point I will reach out to the school district, and so my tweeting was in a way to say don’t presume to speak for the Shawnee tribe.” In response to Mr. Rex’s historical reference to Chief Black Hoof, he added, “We are still here. I occupy the seat of Black Hoof’s descendent government. I’m in that position, so why not come to our nation and ask us. Black Hoof’s family exists. I know these people. They are here. They are available.”

Referring to the importance to Shawnee culture of the land where Wapakoneta now stands, the chief had earlier told Indian Country Today, “Wapakoneta is holy ground for us; it is where Chief Black Hoof died.”

The Shawnee chief also told Nogueras, “I think saying they are honoring us is at best disingenuous.”

After a week of wrangling with local opponents to a team name change, I feel that “disingenuous” is a perfect term for the arguments I’ve heard for maintaining a racial epithet and a racial stereotype for the name and mascot of Wapakoneta’s home team. One local history-hobbyist sought to convince me that it was only now, in the wake of the George Floyd slaying and the Black Lives Matter movement that people had started getting touchy about anything that could be construed as being even vaguely racist. The term “redskin” had only recently become taboo in this context, he claimed. Before, he indicated, when we were all young, it had no pejorative significance. It had been, he posited, a sort of term of endearment.

In order to provide a bit of context, I should mention that this is the same local history-hobbyist and antique picker who, the previous week, had sought to convince me that there was nothing racist about so-called “lawn jockeys”, those caricaturesque and stereotypical little hitching post statues that depict antebellum stable slaves holding the hitching ring and a lantern at the service of their masters.

A quick perusal by myself and others of a variety of online dictionaries that all qualified redskin as a pejorative and insulting term failed to convince the pro-Redskins crowd including my local history buff interlocutor. It was all a recent liberal (for many “libtard”) political play and they were sure the Indians wouldn’t mind “because we’re honoring them and ‘our’ Native American history.”

Clearly, Chief Barnes and the folks at Indian Country Today beg to differ, as do I. There is nothing recent about the pejorative, racist status of the R-word. While the same revisionist movement that erected multiple statues glorifying the Confederacy in the first half of the twentieth century apparently also ended up convincing dictionary publishers to edit out references to the pejorative nature of the term “redskin”, both earlier and later (post-civil rights era) editions have identified it as such. For instance, an early edition of the Webster’s Collegiate dictionary from 1898 defines it as follows:

Redskin — A North American Indian; —often contemptuous.  

In referring to Wapakoneta, I say “our town”, because, wherever I have wondered in my life, I have remained, truly, a Wapakoneta native son. Much of what I consider my best writing has been done about my home town and I have always felt a deep, inextricable attachment to it. So much so that I often describe myself as being like an aging vampire who still carries some of his native soil with him wherever he goes. Except that mine doesn’t hail from Transylvania, but from Wapakoneta, on the banks of the legendary Auglaize River, where the Shawnee once made their home and founded the Council House of their nation.

Expats like myself tend to be just the opposite of how the people we left behind see us. We all have different reasons for why we live abroad, but many of us find ourselves living in a kind of permanent limbo between the world we adopted and the world we left behind. We are not detached. We are, in fact, invested and hungry for news from “home”, from our next of kin, from our heartland.  What is more, while we tend to get deeply involved in the current affairs of our homeland, we also tend to idealize that world of our childhood and youth, freezing it in our minds exactly as it was when we left it.

For the first thirty years that I lived abroad, Wapakoneta was the stateside address in my passport, just as it had been on my Army papers for several years prior. And on every trip back to the US for a visit during those first three decades, Wapakoneta was home base. It was where my parents lived until their deaths, six months apart, in 2003. It was where I stayed, in the room I had shared with my younger brother when we were boys, where my books were still on the shelf, my keepsakes in the drawers, the place in which I was reunited with my sister and brother on every trip, where friends and relatives dropped by to see me. The place where my brother and I frequented the bars on the main drag and bumped into friends we hadn’t seen in years. Wapakoneta was even the county seat where I was registered as an overseas absentee voter.

Wapakoneta, my home town.

This was the town to which my father and two of my uncles came home from World War II to found what, over the next quarter-century, was to become an iconic Wapakoneta eatery, the Teddy Bear restaurant. It was the farming town where my mother’s German immigrant paternal family had started a new life, bought supplies and sold their produce, while farming the surrounding land since the mid-nineteenth century, and around which her mother’s people, who were of Scots-Irish and German descent, had farmed since no one knew when. It was the place where, for the last two decades of his working life, my maternal grandfather, Vern Weber, was the superintendent of the local cemetery and laid to rest the dead of three generations of Wapakonetans. Indeed, it is the place where all of my dead loved ones have been laid to rest as well. For me, as for the Shawnee, Wapakoneta is, then, a sacred place. But that doesn’t mean that I am blind to either its attributes or its failings.

When my parents passed away and their house was sold, I grieved not only for them, but also over the fact that Wapakoneta would no longer be my stateside residence. First it was Ocala, Florida, where my brother had gone to live in what had once been my parents’ winter home. I had no kinship to Ocala or to Florida and resented having that address as my Stateside home. I was only consoled by the thought that it was where my little brother had chosen to live until two years later, when I lost him as well.

Later, my sister, by this time divorced and her children grown, moved into a condo in Cleveland, and was kind enough to share that address with me. I was an Ohioan once more and Wapakoneta was only two and a half hours away by car. Each year when I return, I “go home” to Ohio and home to Wapakoneta, where I bask in the warmth of family and friends, both new and old. And where I walk the familiar streets of my childhood and youth and the surrounding countryside.

I mention all of this for two reasons: First, because in discussions like the one now raging over the Redskins team name, it is on the tip of the tongues of many “locals” to tell me to butt out, since I left and, according to them, have nothing more to say. To these people I say, sorry, I feel I have every right to opine, because in my mind and heart and family traditions, in my history and the history of my family, Wapakoneta will always be my home town. And as such, I will always not only portray my best memories of it in my writing, but also my worst, since there is nothing more consistent in human beings than conflictive feelings and the constant dichotomy of life itself. Second, because I think my expatriate status provides me with a tiny crack in the window into the pain that the Shawnee must feel when faced not only with the history of having been driven from their sacred lands on the banks of the Auglaize, but also with the indignity of white residents of the area mocking the traditions of their race and supposedly “honoring” them with a racial slur.

I recall our Wapakoneta High School football games in the sixties in which we all delighted to the “war dance” of our Sammy Spirit mascot, an unmistakably white classmate who donned TV stereotype Indian buckskins, moccasins, war paint and plains Indian headdress to cheer on our team, firing a miniature cannon every time our players scored a touchdown, before whooping and hollering and waving a tomahawk in the air. At Redskins basketball games our fair-skinned, blonde-haired “Indian princess” with long twin braids did the honors in a cute little beaded, buckskin outfit that distracted many of the male spectators from the game. There was no intentionality in the inherent racism and mockery of these theatrics, and we were indeed proud of our town’s Native American past and unique Indian name.

But it was all a fantasy, a myth, like the bedtime stories we were fed about noble Chief Wapa and his lovely daughter, Princess Koneta, who only existed in white people’s story books. Our feeble attempts to “honor” the native past of our town have blithely ignored and continue to ignore and inadvertently disrespect the true and tragic history of the Shawnees’ encounter with white settlers. Says Chief Barnes, “The Shawnees of Wapakoneta and the Shawnees of Hog Creek were both forced marched after The Indian Removal Act (1830), so Wapakoneta is built on the pain and suffering and tears of the Shawnee people, and they can’t even get the headdress right or talk to us about the mascot.”

I asked some of the people I debated with this past week how they would feel about “honoring” our own ancestors, the German and Scots-Irish settlers who replaced the Indians on the site of our town and the surrounding countryside. Perhaps we could call our team “the Krauts” and our mascot could be an apple-cheeked lad in lederhosen and a Tyrolean hat with a feather waving a beer stein in the air to cheer the team. Or maybe the mascot could dress in a storm trooper’s uniform and goose-step up and down the sidelines threatening to send the other team to the Russian Front. Or, how about calling ourselves “the Micks” and dressing the mascot in a kilt and bagpipes on which to drone the Fight Song, while waving a whisky bottle at the crowd? Don’t our own ancestors deserve to be “honored” as we “honor” those of the Shawnee?

Chief Barnes makes it clear that the Shawnee have never tried to step in and legally force teams to change racially charged names and logos, but his people ask that whites permit a dialogue to discuss a more empathic and respectful use of Native American names, history and symbols. In particular, he considers the use of the R-word as a team name unacceptable, pointing out that it is beyond hypocritical to pretend to “honor” the Indians while using a name that is racially insensitive and has a long history of demeaning application.

The chief laments the fact that while terms such are Oriental, colored, the N-word and logos that were offensive to other races and ethnic groups have been retired from use, stereotypes and racial slurs that are offensive to Native Americans continue to be considered acceptable by the white community at large.

My hometown has a poor record for racial tolerance. This is a confession that has always hurt me, but it doesn’t make it any less true. Until far too recent decades, it was known as a “sundown community”—a place where African Americans were forcefully discouraged from allowing the sun to set on them within city limits. It made national headlines in the latter part of the twentieth century by turning down a project to build a Japanese firm’s auto plant there because the mayor at the time had “fought the Japs” during World War II and refused to have them in “his” town no matter how much progress and how many jobs the firm might bring. And time and again, it has resisted attempts to change the Redskins team name and logos despite unequivocal messages from Native Americans explaining that the name is disrespectful and racist and that the logos are offensive and have nothing to do with the tribe that they allegedly honor.

Local defenders of the Redskins name argue that they mean no offense and don’t consider it a racist term. But that argument is rendered invalid by virtue of the fact that the Shawnee are indeed offended by it, no matter what white townspeople’s intention might be, and do indeed consider it a racial slur.

I find it sad that the white leaders of the hometown that I still carry in my heart have once again had the chance to get on the right side of history and do what is proper and have failed the test, thus missing yet another opportunity to shrug off the town’s racist reputation of the past. And in so doing, they have also offended the very aboriginal tribe that they groundlessly claim to be honoring, turning deaf ears on the outreach from Chief Black Hoof’s own descendants.

Blogger’s Note: I would like to apologize to readers of my blog, the Shawnee Tribe and the Blackfeet Tribe for an error in an illustration that originally accompanied this post, "Wapakoneta on the Warpath". The photograph that I captioned Chief Black Hoof was actually of Chief Mountain of the Blackfeet Tribe. The fact that I had only seen one image of Black Hoof in my life—the one above, which now illustrates the blog entry—and that the image I used was mislabeled on the site from which it was culled is illustrative of precisely what I discuss in the "Wapakoneta on the Warpath": namely, the abject ignorance of most white people, including myself, about the history and protagonists of Native American tradition. My thanks to FB friends and reader Judy Clark Walter and Joel Smith for the heads-up, and again, my apologies to all, even when the error only serves to underscore the premise of the piece.

THE RELUCTANT ATHLETE: Part Three

From the age of twelve, work became a big part of my life. I started out, like a lot of boys, with a paper route. My dad, Whitie, thought it would be a good idea.  He felt I needed to man up. The implication was that if I wasn’t going out for any sports, the least I could do was learn how to earn my own spending money, and not just be sitting around the house “with my nose in a book all the time.” It would build character for me to get out and see what earning money entailed, to see that it didn’t grow on trees, that there were no “free rides”.

The first paper route I had was for a morning newspaper, the Dayton Journal Herald. The city of Dayton was over an hour away from Wapakoneta, my home town. And the Journal Herald didn’t have an arrangement, like a number of other Ohio newspapers did, with the local Newsstand—actually not a “stand” at all, but a storefront business—so each morning the Dayton daily’s distributor delivered the local carriers’ bales of papers, hot off the press, to the Post Office across the street from the Newsstand. Although the Post Office counter was closed behind a heavy rolling metal curtain at night, the main hall of the building was open twenty-four/seven, to allow patrons to get to their PO boxes. So it was the perfect place us for paperboys to get together with our papers.

The job entailed getting up at five in the morning, pedaling my bike up to the Post Office, cutting open my bale of papers with a pair of wire-cutters I carried for just that purpose, rolling my papers to a proper throwing size, slipping a rubber band around each one, packing them into my delivery bag, and then making the rounds of my paper route, which started a few blocks north of downtown Wapakoneta and extended almost to my house in the west-side Oakwood Hills addition. I would arrive home in time to wash up, have breakfast and catch the school bus or ride my bike back to town for classes.

Reba Mae, my mother, was less convinced than Whitie that this was such a good idea. She was concerned about my health. The year before, I’d been seriously ill, having caught infectious hepatitis. I’d spent several weeks in bed, so sick I could barely look at food.

Illness was something Whitie and I had shared that year. He was experiencing one of multiple nervous breakdowns that he was to suffer, from the time I was five years old on.  That year, when I was eleven, his manic depression was rampant and he spent weeks on end holed-up at home, mostly in the room he and my mother shared, curtains drawn and sleeping throughout much of the day, while Reba Mae took over for him at our family restaurant, the Teddy Bear, running both his shift there and the house until he got better. So while my older sister and younger brother were off at school and Reba Mae was off at work, it was just Whitie and me there at home, in our new house on Kelley Drive.

For all the company we were to each other, however, my father and I might as well have been each on his own planet, instead of just down the hall from each other in our separate rooms. We were mutual aliens, he trying to purge himself of a crippling inner sadness that seemed to know no cure, and I, biding my time until my young liver turned from a volatile jelly-like state back into a properly functioning organ. One of us only knew the other existed by the creaking of the hall floorboards and the sound of the toilet flushing or the water running. Neither of us was eating much (with the state my liver was in, I mostly subsisted on weak tea and saltine crackers or dry toast) and neither offered to make anything or do anything for the other. In the harsh light of day, we were both painfully thin and pale, my own pallor a ghastly shade of yellow. But we were entities more separate than if we’d been living in a boarding house. If we saw each other at all, it wasn’t until Reba Mae and my sister and brother got home in the evening and my mother prepared supper. And even then our contact was limited since Whitie often refused to come out of his room to eat and, at my sickest, I took my frugal meals in bed.

I remember feeling guilty. I realized how depressing a climate Whitie and I were creating for the rest of the family and how worried my mother must be for both of us. For my part in this silent, blue environment, I was full of remorse.

Still, when I got to feeling a little better, so I could sit up for more than a few minutes at a time, I began to take a strange comfort in this illness, and because I did, I reluctantly began to understand, somewhat, how Whitie must feel holed-up there in his room. Hepatitis had become my shield from the world. The fact that I was so ill meant nobody expected anything from me. I was sick! There was nothing for me to do but stay in bed and get better. Once the early symptoms of the disease were past, however, I was free to do what I did best—read and write—all day long. In fact, it was part of the routine established between my mother and me “to keep me from getting bored.” In addition to bringing me my homework assignments from my fifth-grade teacher, who lived less than half a block from the Teddy Bear, every few days Reba Mae would bring me a new batch of books from the public library, and once I had finished my school work, I would almost obsessively gallop through that outside reading between naps. Then later, I would try my hand for a couple of hours a day at writing stories of my own.

After a couple of weeks of hanging out in my room doing what I loved most in the world, I began to feel safe and unassailable there. Even though I knew it wasn’t normal or healthy, I started developing a feeling that I never wanted to leave that room again. It became my world, my safe harbor, a miniature planet on which, despite my illness, I was in complete control. And through the books my mother brought me, I could live the most exciting adventures in my mind, traveling to exotic destinations without ever changing out of my pajamas. Whitie, I understood, must feel much the same way: safe, unaccountable, unassailable, immune to the demands of others, in complete control of something for a change, even if only of this hundred square-foot space.  

But remorse eventually got the better of me. It became impossible for me the read the sadness in Reba Mae’s face each day when she came back from work to find the house in the same morbid stillness it had been when she’d left and both Whitie and me still barricaded in our separate rooms. Somebody had to break this stay-at-home stand-off and, on the spur of the moment—one afternoon when I went by the kitchen door and saw my mother sitting alone at the dining table crying—I decided it would be me.

As soon as the yellowness had drained from my eyes, I emerged from my room one early-spring day, fully dressed and, donning jacket and cap, declared myself cured and told my mother I was going for a ride on my bike. She was too elated to tell me no, and instead smiled a little dubiously and said, “Well, all right, but don’t go far and don’t over-exert yourself. You’re just getting over something serious and you’re still very weak.”

As it turned out, her warning about “not going far” wouldn’t have been necessary. Within a very few blocks, I had run out of steam and had to laboriously walk my bicycle back home, panting and feeling awful the whole way. When I stumbled in the back door, she looked at me and said, the smile draining from her eyes, “Are you all right? Gosh, your lips are blue!” And with that she rushed me back to bed. So it was that I learned a new word: relapse. And I never could hear the term after that without picturing myself half-walking my bike and half using it as a crutch so as not to collapse, and wondering how I’d ever make it back home.

But perhaps my premature outing served a purpose, because that evening Whitie got up, and that same week he started back to work, and began going to the psychiatrist again. For my part, I spent another few weeks in bed, guilt-ridden the whole while by the fact that I couldn’t have felt more at home there.

So it was little wonder that, the following year, when I was just starting to gain back some of the weight lost and to regain something like an appetite, Reba Mae was less than anxious to see me hopping out of bed at 5 a.m. to ride my bike around in the dark delivering newspapers before school. But Whitie was on a manic high right then, being so assertive that he was hard to recognize. And when he was like that, weakness wasn’t something he easily tolerated. Working would be good for me—get me out of the house, give me a taste of reality.  

At first, I wondered how I would ever remember all of the houses I had to go to each morning. And the first few days, Reba Mae and I did the route together in the car until I learned the streets. She made it fun, almost like a game, and I quickly learned that each house had defining traits to help me remember it: an aluminum initial on a grill over the screen door; a nameplate hanging beneath the yard-light; shingles, stucco or tongue-and-groove siding; a lawn dwarf, a birdhouse, or a metallic-glass ball on a pedestal; a friendly dog; an unfriendly dog; a distinctive weather vane; a certain kind of wind chime on the porch, or any of a number of other distinctive features. In no time at all, I had learned the route and was ready to do it alone —even if, on the foulest of mornings Reba Mae was still apt to say, “Let me take you today. It’s just too awful out for you to do your route on your bicycle!”

Though I wasn’t particularly crazy about having to get up so early, especially as autumn progressed and the mornings turned frigid, and although staying awake in class got to be an issue, Whitie was right about one thing: Making your own money was a game-changer. Suddenly, I not only had new options and increased independence, but also a logical explanation for not doing the things I didn’t want to do, like going out for team sports. Those things were child’s play. In rural Midwestern society, work was serious business that superseded everything else. And a lot of things might be forgiven of a boy who worked compared with one who didn’t.

In the meantime, at school I had joined the band. I was studying percussion and loved it. Being a drummer took a great deal of brain-muscle coordination—precisely what Whitie had always claimed I didn’t possess. But as it turned out, I was quite good at this new coordination-intensive skill. I apparently had a talent for it. Who knew!
That, of course, quickly led to my wanting to also join some kind of pop band outside of school. For that, I needed a set of drums. A friend of my sister’s, who was three years older than I, was selling his old set to buy a new one. He wanted ninety dollars for it. I asked Whitie for the money.

“If I thought you’d stick to it,” my father said, “I probably wouldn’t mind. But how do I know you will? I mean, you’re not very good at sticking to things, are you?”

I didn’t say anything.

“Are you?” he repeated. “You know, baseball, basketball, and so forth...”

Still I didn’t respond.

“I just don’t want to put a bunch of money I don’t have into something like this and have the drums just sit around later.”

“They won’t,” I said. “I’m good at this and I really like it.”

“Well, yeah, Danny, but what if tomorrow you quit liking it?” he said. “Then what? I mean, you are kind of a quitter. I mean, be honest. You need to be more responsible. Maybe you should save up and buy the drums yourself. That way you’d appreciate them more.”

With that, he considered the subject closed.

I sulked. Eventually Reba Mae intervened. He wasn’t being fair. Hadn’t they paid for my sister’s trumpet when she joined the band? That was different, Whitie felt, because she stuck to things. She wasn’t a quitter. They eventually reached a compromise: he’d let my mother lend me the money to buy the drum set. But I’d be required to make weekly payments until the loan was paid back.

I grudgingly accepted the loan, determined to prove I was more than good for it. Very shortly, I found a bigger, better afternoon paper route with The Lima News, headquartered in the industrial city of Lima, Ohio, fifteen miles away. Its routes were run out of the back room of The Newsstand, operated by Russ McLean. Mr. McLean was good about letting me browse the racks in his shop before and after I delivered my papers each afternoon, after school. It was there that I started reading Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, as if I were in a lending library. I read “stolen” snatches of Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone magazine and Classics Illustrated, as well as of Time, Life, Look, Newsweek, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and other popular adult-audience publications as well. All of which fed my other passion: writing.

As I became aware of how liberating it was not to depend on my father for money, I sought more of both cash and independence. Keeping busy was, I found out, almost as safe a haven as holing up in my room. Who could expect more of an adolescent who kept busy every waking hour either in school or working for his own keep, instead of looking for trouble?

Before long, in addition to the bigger and better paper route, I had also started picking up extra work among my newspaper customers, mowing their lawns, raking their leaves, shoveling their snow, and doing any other odd job they might trust me with, as well as volunteering for kitchen work in our family’s restaurant whenever I had spare time on Saturdays or in the summer.  This allowed me to pay off my drum set in short order.

If Whitie was notoriously stubborn, the apple didn’t fall far from the tree and once the drum set was mine, free and clear, instead of finding the good in the lesson my father had sought to teach me, I tacitly and obstinately vowed to myself never to ask him for anything again and that vow was to form part of the emotional barrier he and I erected between us for a number of years afterward.

The most emblematic symbol of that division would continue to be team sports, which he loved and which I no longer simply avoided, but adamantly opposed. We asked and expected nothing of each other and chose to be strangers from that point on through my high school days.

To be continued