My earliest memory is of being held in my mother's arms while she sang "Over The Rainbow" and rocked me gently. Although I haven't encountered anyone who claims to have memories of infancy and have heard it said that the mind does not retain them, I nonetheless do indeed have this snatch of memory and cherish it. This song and George Gerschwin's "Summertime" stick in my mind from her singing them to me so much. I didn't sing "Over The Rainbow" to my children when they were little, but I did fumble around sufficiently with a guitar to find four chords that augmented "Summertime" and I would sing it to them at bedtime.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSZxmZmBfnU
A few years ago, I had the occasion to recreate this moment with two of my grandchildren and when I started to sing the words, my scant infantile memories and those of my own beautiful children snuggled safely in their beds flooded my mind and I was so overcome that I had to croak out some of the words in the dark. Afterward, my little granddaughter, Annabelle, commented from her top bunk, "Grandpa, that was so beautiful that I almost broke out crying!"
"Over The Rainbow" was sung by Judy Garland in the movie "The Wizard of Oz" in the 1930's and "Summertime" was from the play Porgy and Bess in the same era. My mother would have been a fourteen year old girl when these gems came out. They were already 'oldies' by the time I was born but Garland continued to sing her song for thirty years, never changing the way she sang it.
The first hit song that I would have been likely to hear from my dresser drawer, which doubled as a bed, was Perry Como's hit titled, with considerable irony, "Chi-Baba, Chi-Baba (My Bambino Go to Sleep)".
I was born in May of 1947 to Elsie Patricia (Hanson) Lathrop, a beautiful young mother of 21-years who had married her high school sweetheart after he returned from serving in the Navy toward the end of World War II. The marriage was not destined to last very long and, things being as they were in the middle of the 20th Century, I subsequently did not know my own father, also named John Lathrop, very well at all and I don't have memories of him at all from my infancy.
My mother always went by Patricia, using the E or the total Elsie for a middle name. She did not like her first name, presumably because she was called "Elsie the Cow" by other children when very young. "Elsie the Cow" was the mascot for Borden dairy products and was prominently featured in advertisements and embossed upon the glass bottles that milk and cream came in.
In those days, there was a milkman, much like a postman, who once or twice a week made his rounds and left full bottles on the porch, taking away the empties for refilling. However many empty bottles one left on the porch was the number of bottles the milkman would leave and it was likely that "Elsie the Cow" decorated each one, to my mother's chagrin.
The first person in a child's life is his or her mother. I believe awareness of one's mother to even preclude awareness of one's self. Once the self is perceived, the journey has begun and I was immensely fortunate to have my journey begin, not in one of any number of inhospitable places, but in Sparta, Wisconsin where the glaciers carved huge valleys out of thirty-million year old limestone and sandstone, their melted remains digging tracks like the Beaver Creek, which runs through Sparta and into the La Crosse River and ultimately into the Mississippi at La Crosse, twenty six miles distant.
My mother and father grew up and went to high school in Sparta. Camp McCoy, an Army base, was located about eight miles to the east. Japanese Americans who had been unjustly sequestered by the government, were housed there at times, as were German prisoners-of-war. But mostly, Camp McCoy was a training base for infantry and artillery.
The constant presence of rotating military staff and trainees ensured that Sparta was an active party town in those days and ever since and I can only imagine the competition my father and his classmates endured from the steady influx of handsome and exotic young men for the attention of the girls, as well as the consternation of the parents of the local girls when the night spots and dance bars were overrun with these intriguing fellows.
This situation, added to the fact that the war had ended, led to an aura of general festivity and celebration, which resulted in what is referred to as the "baby boom", of which I was at the front end. The soldiers and sailors who survived the war and made it home were regarded as heroes and either married sweethearts who waited for them or found sweethearts to marry.
My grandmother wrote a journal about her life and, to give one shocking example of the changes in her time, she recounted that she was courted in a horse-and-buggy in Westby, Wisconsin yet lived to fly in a jetliner to Germany to visit her own daughter and to watch a man walk on the surface of the moon.
My own series of stories is intended to continue in that vein, with the hope that my own grandchildren and great-grandchildren might one day be amused to read what life was like for a boy growing up before such things as arcades, shopping malls, computers, cell-phones, and the internet and by my memories of those wonderful, wistful, and hard-working giants, their ancestors!
As for my mother's story, it would be impossible for me to condense it into one brief, smarmy essay. She will appear many times throughout, her history being a long braid consisting of strands of exuberance, delight, success, failure, triumph, but always with a string of sadness entwined within, because she was a beautiful person, not superficial in her ability to think and experience, but who was burdened, like us all, with some tragic flaws.
My memory of her love for her infant child is fleeting but intense, and it is the earliest thing that I can claim to be a witness of, but based upon experiences of my life with her I can make some speculations. I believe that the milieu in which my mother found herself being an adolescent was one of great relief that the great depression was over, but also one of great trepidation about world events. After all, the boys of her generation were dying in Europe and in the islands of the South Pacific.
I know that my grandmother rented, from time to time, a room in her house to various wives of servicemen overseas, and that sometimes the husbands of these women would return and there was a happy ending to their stories. In other cases the women got tragic news. In both cases, I cannot imagine any of these poor ladies thinking of my grandmother as anything other than a surrogate parent.
It was the proximity of Camp McCoy that fostered all of this and my mother and her siblings would have shared in the drama surrounding it all.
Elsie Patricia Hanson, or "Patty" as everyone including myself called her, didn't get high grades in home economics and cooking. She got high grades in reading literature. She was lousy in mathematics but wrote nice poetry. She was very pretty, so she got a lot of attention from the boys.
She was the oldest of four siblings and, from what I've been told, they all were party animals while in high school and after, but only when their mother was preoccupied elsewhere and my mother was left in charge. The music and dancing of the day were wonderful, almost any town in Wisconsin had at least one brewery, and in the case of Sparta, there was an army base next door which supplied a plethora of dancing and drinking partners.
I think that Patty Hanson was quite a rebel. I think she likely tried to defy most of the rules and constraints placed on her, even if it meant going underground to do so. The 1940's were not times when women were particularly liberated. I never heard of my mother or her two sisters considering attending college. They went to secretarial school and learned to type and take shorthand. I believe she learned quite early to view other women as competitors for the attentions of men.
Like myself, she was quite capable of being alone and finding ways to entertain herself. She read voraciously and loved to collect books. She never developed much of an adeptness for technical or mechanical matters and remained so all her life. She never learned to drive a car, although she once tried.
I have this notion, although it is pure speculation, that as a 20-year old she was having a great time but, like many young girls of her day, wanted to marry and live happily ever after and felt that time was wasting and that perhaps even within only a few months she would be an old spinster and realize that life had passed her by.
I have this notion, although it is also pure speculation, that my father bounced around the Pacific Ocean wondering how he had gotten into that mess, dreaming of the day that (if he survived) he would be discharged, go home, and find the girl of his dreams and live it up, because it was all going on without him.
They both likely were too young to be married and should have lived life a few more years before trying. Lucky for me that they were impatient.
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