Notes in November 4

Early Failure, Early Success

Original Post: Monday, April 5, 2010

You grow too soon old, and too late smart.

Pa. Dutch Expression

The hamlet of Hellertown is only three or four miles from Bethlehem, the city in which I was born and mostly raised, but as a new teenager (about the time the photo above was taken), I thought I had been sent to the Gulag.

At the time, my father was a steelworker (virtually everyone in the Lehigh Valley worked for the Bethlehem Steel Company), but somehow he got it into his head to leave our home in Bethlehem and buy a farm. He found a five-acre spread on a hillside that faced South Mountain, which—in a really moronic moment—I dubbed “Lazy Acres.”

There was nothing lazy about it. Each year—with a passion that I now recognize as equal to my own—he set off in a new agricultural direction: one year it was a truck farm, the next a poultry farm, and finally, a place to try to raise a gaggle of cattle. He supported this basically economically-unsound project with his job at the “Steel,” working swing shift, and with slave labor on the farm, mostly my own.

My memories of the farm are mostly repressed. I know I was in charge of killing the chickens and I probably assassinated thousands of “broilers.” Our farm raised White Leghorn chickens from the time they hatched until they weighed about three pounds. On butcher days my father prepared huge vats of boiling water in the summer kitchen. I cut off their heads and tossed them into bleeding funnels. My sisters or whoever was shanghaied that day dipped them into the boiling water, my mom and her helpers cleaned off the feathers and eviscerated them, they were cut in half, washed, packaged and sent off to the supermarket.

I regularly rebelled and just as regularly was beaten into submission. From the vantage point of old age, I think my father’s behavior was not cruelty (to me, not the chickens) but standard operating procedure for the kind of Pa. Dutch farm on which my father was raised.

To escape his clutches I got a job: income always trumps slavery. One of the businesses I passed on my way to junior high school in Hellertown was a nursery. I stopped in one day, talked up the owner, and got myself a minimum wage position as a horticultural engineer’s assistant. (That’s BS for a farmer’s helper.)

My first big assignment was to plant an acre of gladioli. I was given a huge crate of corms, pointed in the direction of the rows, and sent on my way. I planted, covered, moved four inches, planted, covered, and moved four inches—hour after hour under a murky spring sun. Eight hours later I had finished the job and proudly presented my empty crates to the nursery owner. After a cursory check of my work (the idiot waited until I finished the job), he suspected there was something wrong.

“How did you plant these,” he asked.

“With the roots pointed down, of course,” I answered.

“Which side is the root side?” he asked.

“The pointed side,” I answered.

Silence. I had planted an acre of gladiola bulbs upside down. The flat side is the root side. It was my first and last day on that job.

Perhaps I learned right then and there the importance of receiving and giving clear instructions and making sure they were followed. But I had another significant experience that year that unbeknownst to me was a harbinger of the future.

To get to school, I had to walk down our long gravel driveway and along a country road to the local church, where a school bus would pick me up along with the two or three other country bumpkins.

The ride to Hellertown Junior High School was so long that I felt like Pheidippides, the Greek messenger who ran non-stop from the battlefield of Marathon to Athens to announce that the Persians had been defeated—before collapsing and dying before the assembly.

To stave off madness—and to garner attention—I began to write and illustrate a newsletter that I called “Truth.” I wrote episodic stories hideously imitative of Dickens, drew caricatures of teachers in crayon and invented word games.  The newsletter was a hit—which shows you how desperate we all were to be entertained in those pre-cell phone, pre-iPod, pre-transistor radio days.

I’d like to say the bus trip became a permanent pleasure, but just as there are always budding writers, there are blooming critics. One boy said to me: “Ronald, why do you call the magazine “Truth” when there isn’t anything true in it?”

I conceded the point and worked on the problem for days. I didn’t want to mess with success, of course, and since it was too much work to redesign the cover (another harbinger of the future?) I finally came up with a new name, “Troth.” I just had to change one letter and I was sure that no one on the bus would have any idea what “troth” meant.

And they didn’t. After a few more issues, I (temporarily) retired from the publishing business—after falling in love with a girl who lived in front of the church who could play “Alice Blue Gown” on her family’s piano. We were never betrothed, of course. My family moved back to Bethlehem by the time I went to high school and, I heard later, she married the church minister.

Troth, indeed.