Ketzer Racing Team

[Ketzer]

Lips: If it couldn’t be flown, ridden, driven, shot, caught or cooked, Dad wasn’t too interested, and that applied to the world of the spirit, as well. But Mom was very devout and in church with her three boys lined up beside her whenever the doors were open. In the fashion of Bubba Gump’s shrimp, you had, of course, Sunday School church and Sunday morning church, Sunday night church, and then Wednesday night church, special retreats church, testifying church trips, church related concerts to see the likes of Doris Akers, church revivals, and church camp. Dad was opposed to all but the last that provided him and Mom the opportunity to go on a road trip back to Hot Springs without three boys fighting and complaining on the back seat. So, while Charlie, Jerry and I were in the mountains at Big Bear sleeping in bunk houses and jumping on trampolines—well, I jumped on trampolines; they were probably kissing girls somewhere—he and Mom took off on the road trip to Hot Springs to visit relatives, and discovered, while there, that Montgomery Field lacked an aviation maintenance facility, a discovery destined to affect our future.

Just prior to that, though, Mom and Dad separated for a brief period, but long enough for the house on Western to go away. We were all soon reunited in a rental house in Hawaiian Gardens. While it probably broke Mom’s heart to lose the new house on Western for the rather dilapidated rental (as she walked through the house in heels, a heel punched through the wooden floor: at some stage in its history, the house had been eaten thin by termites), to us boys, it was a regular Garden of Eden. A one-room guest house sat in the jungle of a back yard amidst trees, thick bamboo and elephant ears. Charlie and Jerry pretty much had a house to themselves. Also in the backyard was a concrete pad for shuffleboard and the yard backed up against an ally with a short chain link fence over which Charlie, having taken to fighting as a teenager, jumped into safety when chased home by Mexicans, Hawaiian Gardens being equally divided between Gringos and Mexicans who sometimes didn’t see eye to eye. Your yard and house were safe havens back then, as with Quasimodo in Notre Dame: Sanctuary! Sanctuary!

A power line ran down the alley and was perfect for playing myself at “Homerun Derby”—now I’m Mantle, now Maris, now Mays, now Musial—using as balls a bulbous, hard fruit of some sort that fell from a tree. Across the street in front was a golf driving range where Jerry got a job gathering and washing golf balls, and down the street a couple blocks, a Little League baseball stadium where I played left field and short stop for “Bill’s Auto Parts,” that won our division and were treated to a trip to watch the newly minted Los Angles Angels play the also new Minnesota Twins. On another occasion, Jerry, with our church group, took me to see the Dodgers play the Milwaukee Braves at the Coliseum (Don Drysdale pitched and also hit a home run).

It all came to an end when Dad talked a flying buddy into moving to Hot Springs and starting an aviation maintenance and air taxi operation: Ketzer and Wendel Aircraft. The boats and airplane disappeared, and in their place sat a box truck on the driveway. The box truck, a 1949 Chevy two-ton, once belonged to a carpet cleaning business that promised, after cleaning, your carpets would be, “as clean as a kiss.” Consequently, the truck’s white paint, looking like some target of affection for giant women, was covered with red lips. Dad painted over the promise and the company name, but allowed the lips to stay, and in that truck we loaded our portion of the world, including Pretty Boy in a cage, and headed back to Arkansas, Jerry and Mom taking turns driving her Corvair Monza and following behind.

That was the end of this segment, but since then, I read Wayne’s “Baldy” and came across a possible schism in the Baldwin family due to the Kennedy/Nixon presidential election. There was a similar schism in mine, but it was a bit more pronounced. Dad supported Kennedy, but wasn’t vocal about it, always believing you shouldn’t spill the beans regarding politics. Mom and her church-going boys, all Protestants, believed, should the election fall to the Catholic Kennedy, we would surely be put to death. My grade school was holding a mock election, and I was appointed campaign chairman for the Nixon side, not that I was any great shakes, but merely owing to the fact that everyone else was for Kennedy, because, for one, the students were mostly Catholic, and, for two, there was a rumor that should Nixon be elected there would be six days of school. What? Six days of school! Neither Democrat nor Republican was for that to the extent 99% were in the Kennedy camp. I didn’t believe the rumor, but didn’t know how to dispel it. Mom had a solution: “Stevie, why don’t you just write to them and ask?” So I did. I wrote to the Nixon campaign headquarters in Southern California. Not only did I get a reply stating the rumor was false, but they sent a bunch of campaign paraphernalia, in addition to what I asked for, all of which I took with me as I marched from class to class, read and showed the letter, and passed out free stuff. The Nixon staff apparently got a kick out of my letter and wrote about it in a news release to the L.A. Times, and the Times printed the story. Well, that’s where things went bad, because Dad’s co-workers at Douglas saw the article and razzed him unmercifully. Everywhere he went, my don’t-spill-the-beans dad got, “O, ho! We know how you’re going to vote, Ketzer!” No amount of “You don’t know how the hell I’m going to vote!” would convince them he wasn’t for Nixon. Kennedy still won the election at my school, but it was very close, a percentage point or two.

Under Kennedy, we spent the Cuban missile crisis in Long Beach, and then loaded up and headed back to the land of my birth, God’s country, that I had heard so much about. We would have seasons and snow. Why, there were trees all over the woods with nuts called hickory nuts that fell on the ground and were just there for the taking. There were persimmon and wild plumb trees and something called poke salad that grew everywhere. And for me there would be no more pulling tar off telephone poles and chewing it, because a tree grew in Arkansas, called a Sweet Gum tree, and you could walk right up to it and pull off gum.
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