The Introduction (Part II)

Or was it the time, during the War, when we drove “over the river” to the Sears & Roebuck store on Reading Road?   Grandmother Edith came along, too.  So there was Mother, Dad, Grandma, and I in the “machine”, as automobiles were called in those days.  “Don’t ask for a thing,” mother warned.  She was especially on guard that I would talk grandma into buying me something that they, themselves, would not want me to have.  Surely in the entire store there had to be at least one item I wanted that was the very last thing they would allow me to possess, and it did not take me long to find it.

World War II was raging, and would rage on for at least another year longer as we walked through Sears.  All the talk was of the war.  Walter Winchell and H. V. Caltenborn’s voices coming over the nightly newscasts on grandma’s living room radio are still haunting today, more than half a century later.  I also recollect a neighbor walking past our house on 41st Street, soon after a summer thundershower had passed and a beautiful rainbow appeared, getting into a heated discussion with my father.  “Black Market,” yelled the man, fervently, who had just stepped off the Rosedale bus, coming home from work as he did every day at the same time.  “Black Market!”  What did it all mean, I wondered?  The War was constantly on everyone’s mind; even a three-year-old boy was caught up in the excitement and fear that permeated everything and everyone.  Dad’s only brother, Uncle Ray, was in the Navy, somewhere in the Pacific, but father, a police officer with a small child, had been able to stay out of the draft this far into the war.

So on this day, we all packed into the machine and took a long ride over to the Sears store, a rare treat in those times of gasoline rationing for the war effort.  Grandfather Jesse did not come along, so he must have been at the Bavarian Brewing Company where he cooked the mix of oats, and hops, and barley in huge copper kettles, two stories tall, and made a liquid called Wort.  Yeast was later added, and this fermented the wort, and within the precepts of the Zymurgian art, this infusion ultimately became the rich, golden beer that everyone who drank it agreed tasted better since grandpa started working in the brew house.

Without having to search through all the contents of the Sears store, I found myself standing, almost magically, before “her” as she lay in a special rack in the toy department.  How her polished wooden stock gleamed!  And her barrel, although wood, too, was painted to look like metal, just like the real ones used by “our boys” overseas.  Looking around to see if anyone was watching, especially my mother or father, I dared to pick her up and cradle her lovingly in my arms.  Her action was silky-smooth and much to my delight as I opened the bolt; there was a golden wood bullet that went in and out of the chamber with the sliding mechanism of the authentic bolt.  It was a war-child’s version of the 1903 Springfield Rifle.  I was love-struck and had to have that wooden rifle.

“Put down that thing down.” You’re not getting any gun!”  My dreams were suddenly shattered by mother’s booming command.  Though it was useless to plead with her, I tried my best until she guaranteed a “good whipping” was waiting when we got back to our home across the Ohio River.  Reluctantly the dream piece was carefully laid back into the rack, but a sinister thought suddenly came into my mind, and off I hurried to find grandma.

“Ple-e-z-z-e-e.” I pleaded and pleaded until my grandmother dug into her purse that always smelled like White Shoulders perfume, and laid the cash onto the sales counter, and I marched proudly out the door where my folks were waiting and wondering where we had gone.  Until we met them outside the store on our way to the parking lot, they did not know that grandma had bought me the wooden weapon.  Both exploded in anger when I came out the door with the rifle that they had forbidden me to have.  Though my parents and grandmother became ensnared in the chaos boiling around me, I could care less.  The angry words spoken between my father and his mother mattered little.  My beloved rifle was in my arms and that was all that did.  Grandma, now determined that I was going to keep my new gun, both pleaded and demanded with her adversaries to consent to allow me to keep it, but before an a settlement was reached among them, I spied an Oriental couple putting their packages into the trunk of their automobile.

“Look, Japs!” I screamed as the barrel of my new rifle came down and drew a bead on the frightened couple.  Carefully I took aim and took up the slack on the trigger.  Mother’s screams of “NO! NO!” thundered in my ears, but nothing was going to deter me from my patriotic obligation of shooting two Japanese only three parked cars away from our own.  Mother seemed to move in slow motion as she struggled to reach me before I pulled the trigger on my Springfield Rifle with the golden bullet.  She was but a short step away when the stout metal spring released and allowed metal parts to come together with a resounding, ringing “CLICK”.  As though that was not loud enough, I let fly an even louder, “POW!”  That caused the Orientals to jerk nervously as they hastily threw their merchandise into their trunk and made for the safety of the front seat of their machine.  Hurriedly, their car backed out and was gone nearly a quickly as the offending weapon had been roughly confiscated and tossed brusquely into the trunk of our own car as I was as unceremoniously ushered into the back seat.   Had not grandmother been there, I certainly would have been soundly thrashed, as it was, the tension became so impenetrable that father decided to take a ride down to the river where the ancient cobblestone grade ran down to the Ohio River where the Greene Line wharfboat lay shackled soundly to the landing with heavy iron chains.

The drive down to the Cincinnati Public Landing from the Sears & Roebuck store was tense and not a word was spoken.  The atmosphere within the machine felt chilled like grandmother’s living room when Mr. Caltenborn’s voice came over her Zenith radio as he droned on about the War.

The Public Landing was once the doorway to the city when its length of more than a mile was chock-a-block filled with steamboats loading and unloading their wares.  Shouts of roustabouts and draymen, the hiss and roar of ‘scaping steam, and shrill screams and deep moans of steam whistles once filled the air, but now the Greene Line wharfboat and the few aging steamboats that still landed alongside it were the only remaining vestiges of that so-called “golden age of steam transportation”.  Time, ice gorges, progress, and now the War, had all taken their toll.  Only one lazy steamer lay dozing alongside the enormous corrugated floating shed.  Fading letters painted in its gabled roof still spelled GREENE LINE STEAMERS, but they were in immediate need of a painting.  The only person on the landing was a muscular colored man carrying a paper sack, walking down the cobblestones toward the wharfboat.

The grade from Third Street down to the river dropped off at a fairly steep angle.  An automobile turning suddenly off the horizontal surface of the street and onto the cobbles appeared to tumble over the side of the riverbank and down into an abyss that could be frightening to the unsuspecting.  Reports of cars running out of control on the Public Landing and plunging into the Ohio River, drowning all aboard, were rare, but they did occur occasionally.  The river and the sky were gray as the sludge left on the landing after a flood and the air had turned cold and was spitting snow as we neared the edge where Third Street plummeted onto the steamboat landing.

Since having my rifle confiscated and tossed into the trunk, I sat sulking on the seat behind my father who was driving the car.  Grandmother sat to my right, behind mother who was on the passenger side of the front seat.  As our machine approached the Public Landing, I looked out my side window, down into the forbidding waters of the river, and felt a foreboding as uninviting as an invitation to doom as unsuspecting flatboat immigrants surely must have felt when they discovered, too late, that that were about to fall into the hands of the river pirates at Cave-in-Rock.  Much to my bitter anguish, father suddenly turned the steering wheel over hard, and our machine made an immediate left-handed turn.  Just as suddenly, the car made a nosedive onto the cobblestones as it went from the sanity of a level, horizontal surface onto a sharp angle heading down a steep, slippery incline that terminated several hundred feet below where the paving stones met the winter waters of the turbulent river.

Where, but a moment before, I could barely see over the back of the front seat, I now had a clear vision of impending destruction as the hood of our automobile dropped so low beneath my line of sight that it was no visible from my seat, and the spectacle of the angry river, with the great tin warehouse afloat upon it, filled the windscreen.  An apprehension, much worse than what I had experienced the day of the ferryboat crossing now filled me with the most malevolent trepidation, and from within the depths of my soul came a primordial shriek so terrifying that my father’s foot slammed the brake pedal to the floor.  The tires screamed as the machine froze rigidly to the granite cobblestones.  Mother’s head flew toward the windshield, but stopped short of smashing the glass, and her long blond trusses flew out waving like pennants in a stiff breeze.  Further down the stone grade, the colored steamboatman stopped and turned around to see what was causing all the commotion on the hill above him.  He stared for a moment, long enough to glimpse the blur of blond hair on the inside of the windshield and watch the automobile rocking back and forth on its suspension mechanism.  Satisfied that he was out of danger, the boatman turned and continued on toward the ramp of the wharfboat with his sack.  Inside the machine everyone was in shock but I, who was just pleased to have been spared from the maul of the river once more.

© Capt. Donald J. Sanders 2006