Saturday, October 31, 2020

Zela Trip: Day 6

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Day 6
Joplin to St. Louis
We left Joplin in the morning after Wenonah had given Zela two hearing aids. This made conversation with Zela much more pleasant the rest of the trip.

On our way to St. Louis we stopped in Rolla to look up Howard and Shirlene, but they didn’t have a phone.

Howard is Grandpa’s brother.  He is sort of a “no-account-bum”. He was married originally to a rather slutty woman who gave him a daughter and, much later, a son that wasn’t his. It was “common” knowledge that the boy was someone else’s, but Howard took him after the divorce. Howard then married Shirlene. She was so much younger that she had gone to school with Howard’s daughter, but she loved him and has stood by him always.

They moved back and forth to California and Missouri often. I wanted to see them (they were one of the few relatives I knew) but fate was not with me.

The drive through the Ozarks was deep green. In St. Louis we stayed with Lula Mae Bedwell (HAM’s sister) and her daughters Sandi and Patti.

Lula is a kind woman who treated us great, simply because we are family.

Our first night in St. Louis, we had a terrible lightning storm. I stood outside and watched it for a long time. Sandi finally came out and said, “Now don’t tell me they haven’t got lightening in LA.” It was great.


I mention Howard and Shirlene here because Zela gave me the details on Howard and Sherlene. All those things you don’t hear when you’re young. And yes, it turns out her name was not “Shirley’ as I thought, but Sherlene. Add it to a long line of names I got wrong as a young man.

I had meet them many times before. Howard was Albert’s younger brother and had lived in Los Angeles once or twice while I was younger. I remember because they had a lovely young daughter and a rather belligerent older son. The son, Roger, was probably 4 years older than I was, so he was obviously cool. Today would call Roger autistic, but then he was just a delinquent. In fact, the last time I had met him he had just come from “Juvi” (that’s what he called it). Before he had just been kind of mean, but Juvi turned him into a much more angry, violent person. He was called a “retard” there and a “fag”.  He explained what both were to me – although clearly, I understood the term retarded at the time because of Martha It isn’t used now except as a slur, but in the 1960s, “retarded” is what they called kids with Downs Syndrome. And his explanation of “fag” hit a 10 year old me a little close to home.

On this trip is where I learned that Sherlene wasn’t Howard’s first wife. Howard’s first wife and Roger’s mom had left Roger behind, who was probably autistic, and took a runner. Sherlene was a girl almost 20 years younger than Howard and wound up pregnant at some point. Even though it was another man’s child, Howard married Sherlene and raised the newborn with her. The child was a lovely young girl. Howard raised her as his own. Oddly, the family seemed to have a problem more with the age of the wife, than the parentage.

Despite this rocky start, Sherlene and Howard were together until they both passed, with a few months of each other in 1991. I thought it was a bit odd they didn’t have a phone, but it turned out to be more common among my relatives than I thought. And Zela had tried to write them, but didn’t have an address, besides ‘they lived in Rollo.”

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In St. Louis we stayed with Lula May Bedwell. She was Albert’s siter. She lived with her two daughters Sandy and Patty in a suburb of St. Louis. The girls were both extremely nice and treated us all well. They don’t seem at all upset to be around Martha. She quite often makes people, even relatives, uncomfortable.

Lula May was a warm kind woman whose biggest gripe at us was that we wouldn’t eat anything that first night in town. They had a basement, which again, I was amazed by. Sandy and Patty thought it was hilarious that I was impressed by the basement. This one wasn’t as nice as Wee Nona’s but it did have a bathroom down there, which I liked when I slept down there.
 
Image 16: (L-R) Zela, Martha, Lula May

There was also a funny moment as a thunderstorm moved over the city. I went on the porch and watched the lightning and loved it. I called Zela to come out and see it. One of the daughters came out and said, “Don’t tell me they don’t have rain in California either!”, referring to the basement. 

Zela laughed and said, “Well, we do have rain, but not like this.”
 
Image 17: Sandy and Patty

I think Patty and Sandy thought we were both a little slow. But lightning and thunder aren’t usually Los Angeles things. We get fog and rain, but not lightning. But it did mean that years later, when Ed and Lauren both called each other to enjoy a lightning storm I got it.


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I’m in Steamboat Springs - most posting begins on Sunday

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