Heads shook. One woman blurted, “Oh, God no.” She, too, had apparently come straight from work, because she was wearing her beauty parlor operator’s smock. It was stained with little red blotches, which looked very much like blood. Carla, when she thought about this later that night, wondered what in God’s name the salon was doing to its customers.
There was only one thing worse than singing about Third Reich worldwide hegemony at Eisenhower Elementary. It was not singing at all. Greene retreated. “I’m aware, of course, that this is probably the least desirable of the remedies.”
The woman who liked to point, whose name was Barbara Calbi, suggested combining Mrs. Roesler’s class with another class.
Mrs. Roesler sighed her objection. “The other teachers wouldn’t have it. Because their students wouldn’t have it. My children have metaphorical cooties, you see. It’s common knowledge that we are the untouchables of Eisenhower Elementary.”
“Well I never!” exclaimed Mrs. Calbi.
“Children can be hateful little buggers,” said the auto mechanic. “When I was in the sixth grade, a bunch of juvenile delinquent sons-of-bitches stuck my head in a urinal and made me kiss a deodorizing puck.”
Several of the women drew back in revulsion, while Mrs. Calbi gagged involuntarily.
“May I then make a third suggestion?” offered Principal Greene. “It’s unprecedented, but in the end it would probably do the least amount of harm.” Greene was looking at Carla as he said this. It was her approval that would count the most.
It was agreed by nearly everyone present in the principal’s office that night — including Carla Willard — that this was probably the best solution, the one that would draw the fewest objections. Mrs. Roesler’s sixth graders would sing a different Rodgers and Hammerstein song — one not from The Sound of Music.
The text of the mimeographed program went as follows:
Welcome to Eisenhower Elementary School’s Seventh Annual Fifth and Sixth Graders’ Autumn Evening of Song. Tonight we honor, for the most part, The Sound of Music by Rodgers and Hammerstein.
Performances will proceed in the following order:
Mrs. McNutt’s Fifth Graders will entertain us with: “The Sound of Music.”
Miss Schulty’s Fifth Graders will enliven us with: “I Have Confidence.”
Mrs. Beamer’s Sixth Graders will charm us with: “Sixteen Going on Seventeen.”
Mrs. Holiday’s Fifth Graders will delight us with: “My Favorite Things.”
Miss Jackstraw’s Sixth Graders will enchant us with: “Do-Re-Mi.”
Mrs. Drexel’s Fifth Grade Boys will sing: “The Lonely Goatherd.”
Mrs. Drexel’s Fifth Grade Girls will dance the Alpian marionette dance.
Mr. Lipe’s Sixth Graders will touch our hearts with: “Edelweiss.”
Mrs. Domanian’s Fifth Graders will inspire us with: “Climb Ev’ry Mountain.”
Miss Willard’s Sixth Graders will enthrall us with: “Maria” and “Processional.”
Mrs. Roesler’s Sixth Graders will elevate us with “You’ll Never Walk Alone.”
The last song, which Carla remembered Jerry Lewis ardently rendering two years earlier during his telethon (suggested to him, he said, by a disabled child who was, no doubt, Broadway savvy), concluded the evening and left many in the audience elevated to the point of tears. Audience members were brought to their feet when on the line “Walk on, walk on, with hope in your heart,” the untouchables of Eisenhower Elementary stepped off their choral risers and literally walked down from the stage, each child then seeking out his or her grandmother and grandfather to embrace in a gesture that, while it had nothing to do with the song, was much appreciated by its recipients.
Those who were unfamiliar with the full repertoire of songs from The Sound of Music thought that this was the song that the Von Trapps must have sung as they were hiking the Alps to freedom. Those who knew better still commended the selection as the perfect inspirational finish to the concert.
Carla told no one — not even her opinionated brother — that her first choice (quickly dismissed) had been Oklahoma!’s “It’s a Scandal! It’s an Outrage!”
Few knew what a wicked sense of humor Carla Willard had.
1967 GOING THE VOLE IN NEVADA
Life’s a gamble. I learned this in ’46 when I married Lorna and took on her three kids by her former deadbeat husband like they were my very own, and voilà! I’m an instant dad and everything that goes along with that drops itself heavily into my inveterate bachelor’s lap, and whether or not I am up to the task is anybody’s guess. But it’s like Nescafé coffee. Some people try instant coffee and they like it, you know, instantly. Me, it took a while. But the kids did start to grow on me over time — Jed especially. Jed was born in 1938, the same year as the Nescafé company and the same year as this little convict-in-embryo who grew up down the street from where we lived in Butte, Montana: Robert Knievel. (More to come about Bad Boy Bobby.)
Now if you don’t know Butte, I’ll probably be doing you a terrible disservice by trying to sum it all up for you in a few sentences, so please forgive me. Butte from its earliest days was a wild and wooly mining town — one of the most notorious of the copper boomtowns. But Butte was luckier than most boomtowns, which seem to have an annoying habit of eventually going bust. The reason: Butte was diversified. She had zinc and manganese and lead and molybdenum and silver and gold and brothels. Big business, those bawdy Butte brothels.
That’s where Jed’s wife Babs was born. An unwed sporting lady by the name of Sicilian Cicely (most of the “soiled doves” of The Line, Butte’s red-light district in those days, had clever, geographically suggestive nicknames) was her mother, and it’s anybody’s guess who the father was, although I’d put my money on a favorite customer of hers named Bingham, which, coincidentally, is also the name of a copper boomtown in northern Utah that hasn’t fared nearly as well as Butte. Its ever-expanding open pit has literally been eating the town alive for years. And in 1971, the two dozen or so folks who were still left voted to disincorporate and get the hell out. It’s a bona fide ghost town now.
Jed didn’t mind that Babs, whom he married in 1958, was the daughter of a whore, and it wasn’t something that Lorna and I would ever hold against a person. Like I say, Jed was my favorite among my three stepkids (although I know that dads, and stepdads, for that matter, aren’t supposed to play favorites).
Now, I was talking about boomtowns, so I should make mention of Deadwood, South Dakota, which is where my stepson and his wife Babs moved in late ’58. Deadwood, as you might know, had a gold rush (1874—boom) and then a smallpox epidemic (1876—bust) and then a fire that wiped out nearly the entire town (1877—double bust). And that boom and bust pattern persisted into the twentieth century, as well. Right after Jed and his new bride got there — Jed was offered a job by a building contractor friend — there was a second big fire (1959—another blazing bust) that destroyed much of the town and sent the couple off on an interesting road trip. From 1959 into early 1962 they must have lived in about ten different western communities, Jed the itinerate laborer and Babs taking part-time secretarial work where she could get it. Their luck changed in 1962 when they wound up on a ranch outside of the little north Texas town of Summerfield, which coincidentally used to be called — I am not kidding—Boom. Jed worked construction and punched cattle, and Babs was employed as a receptionist for a dentist in nearby Hereford who took early retirement in late ’66 in large part because Hereford’s water supply has a high level of naturally occurring fluorine, and so few of the residents had much need for a dentist.