Month: November 2017

First Haircut & Robin Center

Mrs. Pool lived next door (on the back door side). All of us kids called her Aunt Helen. Her husband, at least I think he was her husband, who had very little hair, gave me my first haircut in a little shop in the back of the house. I’m not sure of the relationship. I didn’t like him. I am told that I cried and screamed when he cut my hair. He didn’t seem to be around much. It wasn’t a regular barber shop. He was very quiet, unlike any other barber I’ve met since. Aunt Helen’s house was the one house in the neighborhood that was the typical cottage style, with a white picket fence. She baked cookies for the kids, too. It was a little creepy for a lot of the kids. I liked Mr. Kuperman much better. He had the shop in Robin Center. We could walk down there. It was only a block and a half away. He would always wink at my mom and give me the quarter change from the haircut, if I “was a good boy.” He was Jewish and had escaped from a concentration camp in Germany. He talked with a Yiddish accent, I ended up going to kindergarten and all through school with his nieces and my older sister was in his son’s class. I think his son and my sister ended up practicing medicine in the same hospital for awhile.

Robin Center was built in 1955, the same year I was born, the crest of the Baby Boom. The land it was built on had been turned over to the state as useless swamp land by someone who was fed up with paying city taxes on unbuildable land after the town had encroached on what had been a rural area prior to WW2. An enterprising citizen of Robbinsdale redeemed it from the government; then shipped in fill. At some places the swamp was forty feet deep. The shopping center had to be built on pylons. It has stood the test of time. It has had two face-lifts, one in the 1980s and one at the turn of the millennium. At this writing, it is still prospering.

Mr. Kuperman’s shop, the Mother Goose Stride Rite shoe store and the Fanny Farmer candy shop were all in a row there. A giant goose in the middle of the shoe store would dispense a genuine, 1921 or 1922 silver dollar each time we bought a pair of shoes. I was born with malformed joints in my ankles, knees and hips. Until I was three, I had to wear braces on my legs and feet when I slept. Whenever it was time for me to get shoes, there was only one choice for me to make: brown or black. They were always corrective wingtips. I couldn’t wear them home, because the special heels had to be installed. For all the good they did! I spent my entire childhood with bloody ankles because of those shoes! I remember the feeling of jubilation of successfully rounding the landing going up the stairs in the house on Shoreline Drive, only to have my face firmly hit the top step as my right toe predictably hooked my left ankle.

More than three decades later, October 1993, in a follow up visit with an orthopod after my acetabulum had been shattered and my ilium fractured in a motorcycle accident, the doctor asked me if I could walk. I told him that I had walked into his office, so, yes. He was looking at my hip X-rays and told me that this was impossible. He had been practicing his specialty for over 40 years and had never seen anything like this. I told him that it was rather difficult for the first three weeks after the truck hit me, but I was OK now. He said, “No, I’m looking at your good hip. You should not be able to walk!” I told him that I have congenital hip. He said that he knows congenital hip, and that there is no way I should be able to walk with these hips. This is not that. “Are you sure you can walk?” I told him that I used to run cross country. He looked at the X-rays again and just shook his head and said that it was “weird” and asserted again that with my hips, it should be physically impossible for me to walk. That’s how I received a professional evaluation that I am weird to the bone.

Revisiting that first haircut, many children have traumatic reactions to the first clipping of their hair. Tonsuring in the taking of monastic or priestly vows in various religious traditions is rooted in this primal, childhood reaction to this. The first haircut signifies the infant’s entrance into the community. All transitions have their measure of stress or trauma. There was always a small clipping of hair, or tonsure, at infant baptism in the ancient church, and to this day in the Orthodox Church. Growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, hair, length of hair, hair styles, were all a big deal, and focus for fashion, discussion, and even conflict.

In Minnesota, it was against the law for women’s beauty shops to cut and style men’s hair or for barber shops to cut and style women’s hair. I knew this, because my mom told me about her beautician’s (who was a gay man) after hours business for gays, transvestites, etc. My parents were very active in the Republican Party. They had met in law school. They had no fear or problem with homosexuals. They would have defended this man had he ever gotten in trouble for his practice. I ended up disagreeing with almost all of their political views, but I am indebted to them for my basic sense of justice and the respect of true equality of all regardless of race, gender, mental ability, nationality, birth status, or age. They taught us very clearly that no human is illegitimate! Our next-door neighbors, who had escaped Auschwitz, were shining, ever present examples to never let anyone tell you that anyone else is sub-human!

How’d we get from haircuts to here? This is how this memoir will go, I’m afraid. I am in tears and catching my breath.

Why write?

For years, in all sorts of conversations, all sorts of people told me I should write my life story in a book. Perhaps they were suggesting this because a book silently sits on a shelf and gathers dust. It is much easier to ignore than a living, breathing, speaking, shameless agitator. I have read a few memoirs, many biographies, and several autobiographies. Not all of them were by famous people. Several of them became famous after their memoirs became bestsellers. I don’t hold any illusions of grandeur on that account. I’m not from the right demographic. I was born at the peak of the baby boom, in a lily white suburb in middle America to parents who met in law school, the youngest of four children: two girls, two boys, evenly spaced, two years apart each, boy, girl, girl, boy.

My folks came from very different backgrounds. My mom grew up in a small town in Wisconsin until she was about eight, when they moved to Edina, the new, rich suburb of Minneapolis. They had live-in maids and nannies all through the Great Depression. Her father, my first namesake, Cranford Williams Ingham, was an executive with State Farm Insurance. Cran considered himself to be a very proper man. He smoked a pipe, was Episcopalian; to say he was thrifty would be a major understatement. He couldn’t bear to watch or listen to children eat, so he made my mom and her younger brother, my uncle Pete (Cranford Arthur Ingham) stay in the kitchen with the help to eat. They received quite an education on the ways of the world from the help. By the time I was born in June of 1955, Cran had married his third wife, Wathena Meyers Ingham, whom we all called “Aunt Wathena”. She had been one of my dad’s legal secretaries and my folks set her up on a blind date with grandpa, and they got married within the year, and it lasted until they died, he in 1977, she a couple of decades later. Aunt Wathena became my godmother at my infant baptism in the Episcopal Church.

Cran divorced my grandma, Jane Edith LeMay Ingham. She suffered depression and was alcoholic. Of course, Cran was also alcoholic, but he was higher functioning. Jane’s mother was a nasty woman who destroyed both of her daughter’s marriages and lives by never accepting their husbands and always saying terrible things about them and setting up impossible situations, etc. It was so bad that before my older brother was born, my mom told our great-grandmother that we would never know that she was related to us. She had ruined her daughters’ lives and damaged her grandchildren’s lives. She was not going to have a shot at another generation. My mom was good to her word. As it turned out, we did meet her once without knowing who she was. We did not find out that we had a living great-grandmother until we went to her funeral in Menomenie, WI, in 1969. It turns out, she had outlived both of her daughters, so it fell to my mom to make the arrangements. We stopped by the funeral home on our way out to Ohio to visit my dad’s mom. The place was empty for the visitation. I wandered into another room. It was set up with an old man half sitting up in an open casket for a viewing. That was the first time I saw a corpse. I hung out alone there with him until it was time to go. It was more comfortable than with my family and the closed casket in the next room.

“Freeman” Coulter

We proceeded from there to Racine, WI, to pick up my dad’s older sister, Aunt Betty Lund. We continued on to Youngstown, Ohio, to visit my dad’s mother, Mae Wise Coulter, in a convalescent home. She would come home again, once after that to her house that she shared with her longtime boarder and housemate, Aunt Phoebe. Mae was Holiness Methodist, but not fanatical about it. She was a practical woman. Her husband, my second namesake, Joseph “Freeman” Coulter, was an atheist, or as they called them back then a “free thinker”. No one called him by his name. they called him Free or Freeman. He was an auto mechanic. He loved his work. He liked his drink. He worked hard. He made decent money all during the Depression. He managed the business and brought the profit home for Mae to manage. Mae gardened and had a little Upjohn business on the side as well. During the Depression, Mae was always sending one or another of the four children out the door with meals and sacks of produce, sometimes with envelopes of cash included to various neighbors who had fallen on hard times. At any given time, they were supporting two or three other families. They were wearing threadbare clothes and going with very little to do it. Free was happy working. As long as dinner was on the table; his work uniform was laundered; his lunches were packed and he had a bit for the pub on Friday night, he was happy as a clam. Times were tough on everyone. From the stories my dad, his sisters and brother told, I think the Great Depression were the happiest times there were in America! And they seemed to be much happier for those who were sharing than for those who were not.

So, why write? After 30 years of working as a Christian minister, I have abandoned that faith and now view the world more similarly to my father, who described himself as a “Buddhist atheist.” Unlike my father, I am a communist, not a Republican. I have come to regret raising our four daughters in the naive faith in Christian mutual care. It just plain does not exist. As soon as charity has the name of a faith attached to it, it ceases to be charity, and it has become bait for a con. All during my years of ministry, I refused to approach it this way. For that stance, I was abused and bullied by Christian clergy of every stripe. One Mennonite pastor even threatened to kill me. So I write my story as a cautionary tale.

The stories families tell shape the lives of the people raised in those families. Some of the stories are true.