Rhapsody In Blue

Priscilla Sue Wood, 1967

The title of this blog is “Memoirs of the Brain Damaged” and is based on the title of a 1965 book by Oscar Levant called “Memoirs of an Amnesiac,” which I thought was a very funny and appropriate title for my posts. I had seen Levant on Jack Paar’s Tonight Show, which he had taken over after Steve Allen had created NBC’s late night talk show. Actually, at that time I only got to watch the late night shows during the summer, or whenever I had no school the next day, because I usually had to be in bed by ten. But when I was in the 7th grade Jack Paar left the Tonight Show because of its grueling schedule – at that time it was on 105 minutes (1 3/4 hours), five nights each week – for a weekly Friday prime-time hour at 9pm (Central time). There I got to see him with guests like Levant, Jonathan Winters, Bill Cospy, Woody Allen, Cliff Arquette (Charlie Weaver), and many other.

What I wanted to write today is about my first girlfriend Priscilla Sue Wood. We met just before my junior year in school, where we were both in the band at South Garland High School. She was a sophomore who played flute and she had an older sister, Winifred, who played piano. A year and a half earlier, spring of 1964, Winifred had performed at a band concert in our school playing George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. One of the records I had played and loved as a child was Gershwin’s Rhapsody, that my parents owned that was on three sides of two 78rpm records – it is a 15 minute song that had to be split onto three sides. I had purchased a copy of that music and tried to learn how to play it every day for many years from the time I had taken piano lessons in the fourth grade.

I had dated a few times before 1966, but that was before I could drive and my parents had to take us wherever my “date” and I wanted to go, so that had only happened two or three times. By the time I met Prissy I had my drivers license and we could do what we wanted. I was even allowed to drive our 1959 Chevy Impala (the family’s first automobile to come with air-conditioning!). We dated throughout my junior year and then I got the opportunity to attend a summer seminar st SMU called the John Von Neumann Mathematics Seminar for Secondary Students, sponsored by the National Science Foundation. It was a six week long program that required us to live on campus, so Prissy and I drifted apart. We had pretty much started breaking up even before that, but being gone through all of June and half of July put the end to our relationship.

A year later I went to college at SMU, but left after just one semester to go to East Texas State University in Commerce. Like her sister, she probably went to SMU – their mother worked there and so they got much reduced tuition. I never saw her again or even spoke to her. I did hear a few things, mostly from my mother who would tell me about her being mentioned in the newspaper. Prissy married someone who shared her musical skills and they worked with Fred Waring’s Philadelphians and at Burt Reynolds’ dinner theatre in Jupiter, Florida. Her husband died young, but I have no way now of finding Prissy – I don’t even know what her late husband’s name was.

I am hoping someone who reads this blog may know how I can get in touch with her, or can suggest how I might find her.

Air-conditioning

My parents moved to Garland from Dallas in late 1947. In 1940 the population of Garland was only 2,233. Today it is more than 100 times that size – 226,876 in 2010. Air conditioning is what has allowed Texas and the south to become the haven for all those families who have been freezing in the north to migrate to the south over most of the past forty years. Before the widespread use of air conditioning, few people wanted to live all year long in the south.

When I was in grade school about the only buildings that were air conditioned were at the State Fair of Texas. Since my father worked there during each fair (usually late September through the end of October), I spent days there every year as a child. Even that late in the year it could be very hot and we would always head for the Automobile Building where it was always cold. My father, who worked in downtown Dallas at the Federal Reserve Bank, has shown me photos from the 1950s where all the windows were open and every office worker’s desk had a ceiling fan above it. In the 1970s after those offices had been air conditioned, all those fans were removed and sold to people to use in their homes. Our house today, which was built in 1961, was the first place I lived where we had central air-conditioning. At the time it was built, only businesses and stores used ceiling fans. Now we have one in every room of the house!

Big Town Mall, located just off of U.S. 80 E. and Loop 12 in Mesquite, Texas, was constructed in 1959 and was the first enclosed, air-conditioned shopping mall in the Southwest. It was about a ten mile drive from our home, and was a frequent shopping destination for our family. I remember we parked at the entrance to Montgomery Ward where my father would buy us bags of movie-theater-style popcorn to carry as we walked around the mall. About that same time we bought our first air-conditioned car, a 1959 Chevrolet Impala (see the photo above). I remember there were billboards along the highways into downtown Dallas selling after-market air-conditioners that could be retrofitted to cars built without them. No, you probably cannot find a car built with it.

The first school I attended that was fully air-conditioned was my high school – South Garland – which opened in 1964. I had gone through kindergarten, grade school and junior high without the luxury of air conditioning.

Now when we leave our air-conditioned house in our air-conditioned car, we don’t go anywhere that isn’t also air-conditioned. You cannot live in Texas today without that wonderful invention.

 

My father

Ted Spreng

Mary Elizabeth “Bess” Cassidy did not want to have any children.

She was born March 20, 1897, to an Irish Catholic family in Galveston, Texas, where at 23 she married Theodore Pears Spreng on October 23, 1920. Ted, the son of a successful surgeon in Sioux City, Iowa, had learned to fly biplanes in his early 20’s and joined the US Army Air Service during World War I. The Signal Corps sent him to Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas, to train recruits to fly the new aircraft.

When Bess soon got pregnant, she was devastated. My father – Theodore Junior Spreng (so named because Bess didn’t want the bother of thinking up a middle name) – was born January 21, 1922 and immediately given to friends and family for his upbringing because Bess refused to nurse him, not wanting to risk disfiguring her beautiful breasts. As a Catholic, she would never consider an abortion, so to avoid ever getting pregnant again she abstained from sex. As the manager of hotels,Ted Senior was often asked to provide customers with the services of prostitutes, and from then on was relegated to that himself.

Ted Junior grew up in hotels in Joplin, Missouri; Miami, Oklahoma; Houston, Bryan, San Antonio and Dallas, Texas. He was eight in 1930 when they moved to Dallas. The Texas Centennial Exposition was a World’s Fair held at Fair Park in Dallas to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Texas’s independence from Mexico in 1836. More than 50 buildings were constructed for the Exposition, which ran from June 6, 1936 to November 29, 1936. My father was 14 then, and with his cousins Lee and John Junior often climbed the fences at Fair Park to enjoy the exposition. The following year Fair Park hosted the Greater Texas & Pan-American Exposition which ran from June 12, 1937, through October 1937. Ted managed to get various jobs there, mostly working the rides, like the ferris wheel and the bumper cars and the roller rink, where he laced skates for the skaters. Except for a few years after the rink burned down in February 1942, Ted worked there for the Berts for nearly twenty years, even while he worked at the Federal Reserve Bank, where he started working in December of 1941.

Also while working at the rink, he always took his vacations at the Bank when the State Fair was being held so that he could work selling tickets and managing the Fair’s bank. And for the four years before I was born my mother also worked during the Fair. I remember going to the Fair every year when I was growing up.

Ted loved sports. He and Mom often went to watch the Garland Owls football, basketball and baseball teams, but locally and when they would be involved with post-season playoffs. Dad also helped organize Garland’s first Little League baseball program, along with a couple of other like-minded residents. In 1953, we watched baseball’s first nationally televised World Series, between the New York Yankees and the Brooklyn Dodgers. Because Ted had grown up as a fan of the Yankees, I took the Dodgers as my team. I really enjoyed watching those baseball games on TV, but we were forced to miss the final game, which the Dodgers lost, because we had to take my mother to the hospital to give birth to my sister Sande Elizabeth Spreng on October 5, 1953!

On Saturday, September 24, 1960, Ted was selling tickets at the Cotton Bowk at Fair Park,  when the Dallas Cowboys joined the NFL as the league’s first modern-era expansion team. He took me with him once or twice each year, seating me on the top row of the end-zone until he finished selling tickets and could join me in the stands. Even though he would be saddled with Alzheimer for the last 35 years of his life, he never missed a Cowboys game, selling tickets as long as they played in the Cotton Bowl, and after that, on television. He passed away on October 2, 2012, less than a month before I was taken to the hospital from being struck by that car.

I learned a lot from my father, but what I appreciate the most was his insistence on having willpower, the strength to do what was necessary and what was important in  life. His father’s life had been destroyed by alcohol and gambling and his mother had tried to ignore him as much as she could, but my father was a bastion of willpower, knowing how to control his emotions and do what needed to be done to make his life as good as it could be. I am nowhere near the man he was, but I am glad that he taught me the strength to do things like finish college, work all my life and even lose so much of the weight I put on.

Thanks, Dad.

I was a free-range kid

Cabell’s Minit Market

I am reading a new book called FREE RANGE kids – How to Raise Safe, Self-Reliant Children (Without Going Nuts with Worry), by Lenore Skenazy, about how and why she let her nine-year-old ride home alone on the New York City subway. Actually, I am not reading it; rather my wife Jean is reading it and telling me about it, since I still have so much difficulty reading.

I was a free range kid. My father’s family moved to downtown Dallas when he was eight. His father was manager of the Campbell Hotel at North St Paul and Elm – in view of the Majestic Theater, and later the Sanger Hotel and Apartments, which was on land where Dallas City Hall now stands at Ervay and Canton. Each day my father would walk a mile each way to and from school at Sacred Heart Cathedral. My mother grew up on a farm near the small village of Shannon, (Clay County) Texas, where she too would walk to school every day, about a mile round trip. Like nearly every American child raised raised in previous generations, my parents were both free range kids.

They were married June 29, 1946, a couple of weeks after my mother’s 21st birthday. In late 1948 they purchased a house in Garland which stood next to the banks of Ruperts Branch which fed into Duck Creek, which in turn emptied into the East Fork of the Trinity river, just south of the dam for Lake Ray Hubbard. I spent the first twelve years of my life playing in and around Ruperts Branch (I didn’t even know the name of my creek until a few years ago when I looked it up on Garland’s city maps). My parents did not give me much in the way of rules or restrictions in my growing up. Yeah, they told me how to be careful crossing the street and climbing ladders and stuff like that, but they did not tell me NOT to cross streets or not to climb ladders. But nearly every day I would slip or fall into the creek – the way I usually told it, somebody pushed me – and my mother would strip me naked, give me a bath, give me clean clothes and send me back out to do more of the same, playing wherever and however I wished.

When I was three I was playing with Mike Cooper in his yard across the street when his mother Betsy came outside and sent me home, because she had to take Mike to the store or something. I was so disheartened by that disruption I decided to follow then up the hill on Overhill Drive riding my tricycle. By the time I had reached the top of the hill, they were nowhere to be seen. So I decided to continue down the hill, across Saturn Rd, up Devonwood Dr and across Garland Road  (TX highway 78) to where there was a Cabell’s Mini Market (which would later merge into Southland Corporation’s 7-Eleven). There I knew I could get some candy. When I told the clerk that I had no money, he asked where my mother was, and when I said she was at home, he summoned a policeman. The officer asked where I lived but I had not yet learned my address. I told him that I could tell him where to go to get to my house. So he paid for my candy (!), put my trike in the trunk of his police car and followed my instructions getting back to my home. I don’t remember what happened then but I’m sure he asked my mother to keep better control of me or whatever. Mom probably simply asked me not to do that again and that was that.

During the Christmas season of 1957, when I was in the second grade, my next door neighbor Hughie Sullivan’s mother took Hughie and I and Johnny Haubrich – I was nearly eight, so both boys would have been about ten at that time – she drove us up by the Little League baseball field where there were a number of trees covered with mistletoe parasite branches. She told me to shinny up and push down as many branches as I could. Together we gathered them all up and put and took them home, where she had us pack then into grocery bags. She then drove us into Dallas to the corner of Lemmon Avenue and Lomo Alto Drive where we all stood on the corner selling our bags of mistletoe for 25 cents apiece. Then she drove us up Lemmon to Love Field where she dropped the three of us boys and left. I honestly have no idea what she was doing; the only thing I can guess is that she wanted to raise money to do some Christmas shopping and then left us somewhere to play while she did her shopping! Anyway, Hughie, Johnny and I spent the next few hours playing throughout Love Field. We rode the escalator to the upper level to watch the planes landing and taking off, then we went to the game room where they had a few pinball games – I don’t think we had any money, so we probably just pulled on the knobs until someone shooed us away. When I finally got back home later in the afternoon and told my parents about my day, they just asked me if I had had a fun day.

During the summer of 1957 I read an article in Parade Magazine about some pirate treasure that had been found near Corpus Christi, Texas. I simply had to go there to get that treasure – probably to by candy! That year in second grade I talked about this article to everyone who would listen – my friends, my teacher and all of my classmates – telling them all that I planed to walk to Corpus soon to retrieve all that treasure! Sometime in the spring of 1958 a classmate and I (I cannot remember his name) took off to walk to Corpus. After about three miles our feet were so muddy that I changed our route and decided to make a stop at Eastern Hills Country Club, where my parents had been members a few years earlier. I knew they had golf shoes that would help us on our way to the coast. At Eastern Hills, after hearing my story, they called my parents who soon arrived and took us both back to our homes. A good time was had by all.

Then there was the time when I was nine and I went with Johnny and Danny Haubrich – aged eleven and twelve – to visit with their mom who worked in downtown Dallas at the Mercantile Bank. We caught a Continental Trailways bus downtown, walked around a while and then rode the bus back home to Garland with her.

I could go on and on sharing dozens of stories about my joys of childhood, but I will stop here for now. Suffice it to say that I had a wonderful upbringing and learned as much about life, living and candy as any child has a right to learn. As Ferris Bueller said, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

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