Chapter One
Monday night football, late in the fourth quarter. Wanting my Eagles to run up the score on the Cowboys. The phone rings. This late, has to be a wrong number. I let it ring twice more. I pick up.
“, they’re taking your dad to the hospital.”
“Who’s they?”
“He made me call an ambulance.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Has lots of pain in chest and stomach. You better come. Bryan Memorial.”
“Have to get off work, Mom. Try to be there early tomorrow morning.”
The next day I drive two hours to the hospital, walk into his room.
Mom is reading a magazine and snapping chewing gum. I wonder how she gets away with that. He used to blame her gum snapping for throwing off his concentration. It jinxed him, he said. Mickey is reading a newspaper. Dad is sitting up, an IV stuck in his hand.
He moans, “, you won’t believe what they put me through.”
“Have they found out anything?”
“Kidney stone or gallbladder problem,” Mom says.
Dad pushes against his right side. “Mickey, go get the racing form.”
Mickey leaves, nurses walk in and out.
Dad barks at them. “Where the hell’s my phone? I ordered one last night. Damn betcha it’ll be on my bill.”
“, go with ’em. Get the phone and hook it up.”
I shrug my shoulders and walk out. Why hurry, I think. I can’t be around him more than five minutes before he starts ordering me around.
Ten minutes later I hook up his phone. Mickey and Dad study the entries for the Ak-Sar-Ben races in .
Dad moans again. “Damn this place. Where the hell’s the doctor?”
He shifts his large frame around, groaning and cussing. He gives Mom his bookie’s phone number. Tells her to dial it.
Mickey nods his head toward the door. I follow him.
“Did you hear about last night?” He asked.
“Just that he had an ambulance drive him here.”
Mickey laughs. “I was there. They brought in a stretcher. He laid down on it. They couldn’t lift him. He walked out to the ambulance and laid down. The guys came back to town. Told everyone about it at the pool hall.”
“Anyway,” I say, “I don’t think it’s serious if all he’s going to do is lay there and bet the ponies.”
“Nah, think he’ll be home tonight.”
I walk back into his room. Dad hangs up the phone. Mom is back in her chair.
“Mickey, who you like in the fifth?” Dad asks. “Think Nellie Q’s ready to go?”
“Mom, I need to get back to work,” I said. “Dad, I think you’re getting better. Probably be home tonight. I’ll keep in touch.”
Both tell me goodbye. As I walk out the door, I hear Dad say, “Mickey, spot me twenty. I’ll hit a lick this afternoon and pay you back.”
In John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row, the poetic introduction of is this: “It is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream.”
What can be said creative about ? It’s not on the map and hasn’t been for years. But it still exists. I could give anyone a five minute tour of Wann. I could point out the structures that still exist which seemed so large to me during the 1940s.
You couldn’t call Wann a town or village; there wasn’t enough substance. Doesn’t the word “village” bring to mind quaintness--a white church spire, red and yellow leaves, and whitewashed dwellings?
Wann was a Podunk, a stopover, a whistle stop. To some misguided fools, Wann was a laughter—like “Wann, two, three.” During the late 1880s, a few dwellings materialized on the level valley after Wann was named for a railroad stop. In the years that followed, a church, a school, a general store, a bank, and a grain elevator began to operate.
Don’t be fooled by the smallness of Wann. Our Washburn clan kept the Podunk alive with strawberry picking, sweet corn husking, tomato planting, game playing, joke telling, and the raising of chickens, hogs, and cows. Even Aunt Jemima once visited Wann.
If you lived near or Wann (both located near the in eastern ) you probably knew of my Dad, Harry S. Washburn. He wasn’t one of those two-bit gamblers who would put a fiver on the Bears or send their two-dollar Daily Double bet to the Aksarben racetrack. Or the ones who played nickel/dime pitch or poker games in the Ashland Legion Club or the pool hall.
Gambling was Dad’s choice of lifestyles, his way of supporting a family of seven. If had a gambling business, he would have been the president and majority stockholder.
He taught his four sons to read by using the past performance sections in the Daily Racing Form. He taught us lineage by showing that the race horse Irish Bull was out of Irish Delight and Spotted Bull. When he took us to the races, he found empty Cracker Jacks boxes for us to fill with discarded tickets. That night we practiced bookkeeping skills. Each ticket checked against the program he had marked with the win, place, and show horses.
When we were old enough, he educated us in the skill of playing poker. Never draw to an inside straight, keep a poker face and know the odds based on the face-up cards. At times, he would be gone for weeks, especially in the winter. He drove to , or the racetrack in .
Consequently, our family life was like a roller coaster ride. When he won, we would eat all the candy we wanted, see picture shows, drink soda pop, and jingle coins in our pockets. When he lost, we kept our mouths shut, went hungry, and lived in houses with no indoor plumbing.
If Dad were alive, I couldn’t tell this story. Oh, not for the usual reasons one might expect. Like he might complain that it’s a bunch of lies, and I’ve got it all wrong and what the hell am I doing revealing our family’s life, making him look awful.
He would take over. He would write how the family he grew up in with nine children survived the Depression on a small farm. How he rode the rails to looking for work in exchange for a meal. How he joined the Civilian Conservation Corp. and sent his earnings to his mom. How his gold watch was stolen at gunpoint at the racetrack.
That’s what would happen. I can remember fifty episodes from our family’s life during the time when I was five years old to fifteen. But him? He could tell a hundred and fifty. That’s why the story couldn’t be told. Barnes & Noble doesn’t own enough shelves to hold all the books.
I’m not afraid of him now as I used to be. I suspect that if he read this story, he would enjoy most of it. He might correct me on a few incidents. Nonetheless, I will tell the tale from a good memory. I never spent time trying to understand why I didn’t become a gambler. Probably I didn’t possess the right stuff; maybe it was because of my rebellion.
Apparently, Dad never realized the extent of my longing to escape from his lifestyle. I kept my desire hidden because I was too young, too scared and too gutless. July 29, 1941 entry in Mom’s diary. The day of my birth, same as my Dad’s birthday.
“Oh dear God, I’ve just found out my baby has a crippled foot. I love him so much, why did this have to happen.”
