My Redacted Life: Chapter 34 (Cont._2)

 The days leading up to the wedding passed by like gray horses filing through a morning mist. I was apprehensive. Brenda was busy. Friends were inquisitive. I’d never attended a church wedding so I didn’t know what to expect. Ours would be a simple affair by modern standards but an affordable and accessible one. I still harbored a fear of speaking before a group, but I wouldn’t have a lot to say.

Besides, the three harpies had made me go over my lines do many times that I knew I couldn’t fail. The pressure seemed to make Brenda grow prettier every day. I don’t know exactly why. She wasn’t landing the catch of the century or anything. I was overweight from the eating binge that had accompanied my successful decision to quit smoking. I wasn’t above drinking too much. I could summon up a temper when I wished. I still felt I was four years behind my peers who had successfully avoided the draft.

But she stood by me, a trait that would continue.

My neighbor wasn’t so kind. She constantly reminded me that my bride-to-be could have “had her pick of men.” I should, therefore, consider myself lucky and do exactly as I was told. Hadn’t I been to boot camp?

“Well, yeah.”

“Just consider this another boot camp. One for wedding preparations.”

“Now one is not helpless simply because one is a man,” I said. “I have a good job, I served honorably in the military, People are starting to show a great deal of respect for my work and my opinion. I don’t have to stand for being treated like a two-year-old.”

“Shut up and listen,” she said.

“Okay,” I said. She had caught me going to my apartment and stopped me in front of her door. She fastened the top button on her blouse and pinched each side of her bra through the material with her fingers. She tugged it back and forth until she was satisfied with the fit and stuck a finger toward me.

“This is going to be one of the most important nights of her life,” she said. “It’s up to you to help make it happen.”

“I plan to.”

“What are you going to wear?”

“A suit?”

“Not a tuxedo?”

“She said I didn’t have to.”

“I’ll verify that,” she said. “You’d better not be lying.”

“She said we didn’t need any extra extravagances.”

“That sounds like her, but I’ll check anyway.”

"You do that."

“I will. Who’s going to be the best man?”

“My brother.”

“Will he be sober?”

“I suppose so.”

“You’d better know so.”

It went on like this for a while. I became confused. Weren’t weddings supposed to be about love? If so, would not wedding preparations also be about love? I was feeling more like a Marine recruit that a soon-to-be husband. She broke my reverie.

“You know I’m doing this for your own good, don’t you?”

Before I could answer, she continued. “We think an awfully lot of that girl.”

“I do too.”

“Then you’d better pay attention and carry it off like it’s the greatest thing that ever happened to you.” With that, she opened the door to her apartment, went in, and disappeared. I didn’t know what the hell to do next. I was thinking that I wasn’t going to put up with this crap from a bunch of women much longer. I was the man in the group and damned sure ought to let them know who was in charge. It surely wasn’t this neighbor with her lack of attention to dressing skills. We'd get this straightened out. Still, I didn’t move.

She had neglected to dismiss me.

This marriage thing wasn't
going to be as easy as I thought.

My Redacted Life: Chapter 34

August neared and the wedding date loomed on the horizon. I was busy working during the day, trying to ignore the jokes and jibes. Was I the first person who had ever planned to marry?

Oh well, Brenda was busy sewing, in addition to her own wedding dress, those for her mother, her bridesmaid, and the bridesmaid’s sister.

Some evenings she would take a break and we would drive out old Highway 70 along Hill’s Lake, find a quiet spot, open a bottle of Boone’s Farm Wine, and talk about the future. We would lean our heads together and count our blessings until the sun went down or the mosquitoes overtook us. Here I was, fulfilling a dream. I had a sports car convertible and a lover with long flowing red hair to ride next to me in it. I had come a long way.

At the office, the partners had asked if I wanted something called “a bachelor’s party.” I had no idea what that was. They didn’t have those in the old United States Navy. They explained that it was a party for men only where they got the husband-to-be drunk, acted silly, and talked dirty.

“Talk dirty?”

“Yeah, you know … filthy jokes and all.”

“That’s all you do?”

“Well, we get you drunk. It’s like one last super-blast before you get married.”

“You just get drunk, talk dirty, and make insulting jokes about being married?”

“Well, yeah.”

“Sounds like fun to me.”

I didn’t mention it to Brenda on any of our evening rides. Once though, I parked at the edge of a large field of soybeans stretching far into the horizon, with a band of clouds and thunderheads at its end.

“Isn’t this land wonderful?” she said.

I studied the soft curve of her back contrasted against the long straight furrows. The silence unnerved me and I said, “It’s okay here.” She didn’t respond so I added. “I guess next to the sea, I like the mountains best.”

She turned and looked at me the way a teacher would look at a student who had failed to solve the easiest problem of the day. “That’s just it,” she announced as if announcing the solution.

“What?” I said.

She smiled and the smile completely unmanned me, a trick of hers I had learned to dread.

“You see, here you create your own mountains.”

“Your own mountains?”

“Yes,” she said and her eagerness and certitude kept me unbalanced. “That way, you don’t suffer constraint.”

“Constraint?”

“Yes, constraint. Your mountains can be as big as you want or as small. They can be covered with snow or even have a giant cherry on top like that one there.” She pointed to a thunderhead on the horizon, topped by a round black cloud that did indeed seem to radiate a red hue in the late afternoon sky.

I held her hand. We studied the field, spread out before us like a chart drawn to illustrate perspective.

“How do they plow them so straight, the rows?” I asked.

“They have a marker on an arm of the tractor that they use to measure from the last row plowed,” she said. “Like this land itself―each generation is built upon the values of the last.” She paused and then added, “Daddy’s been doing it so long, though, he really doesn’t need a marker.”

I looked back at the fields and felt a breeze that swept me forward for a fraction of a second—not really long enough to register fully— and I saw the tedium of, year after year, coaxing life from this fecund land. Her voice jerked me back the way a young calf is jerked as he comes to the end of the roper’s lariat.

“It would be truly sad, wouldn’t it?”

I focused on her and processed what I thought I heard her say.

“Sad?” I said.

“It would be so sad to know that you had actually to be where the mountains were in order to have them. That you couldn’t just do it whenever or wherever you chose.”

I failed to find a response. Instead, I looked at the distant clouds as they transformed themselves into snow-clad mountains of heart-piercing peace and beauty.

Was I about to marry a sorceress?

Maybe Keats had it right.

My Redacted Life: Chapter 33 (Cont._3)

Attending a lot of planning commission and city council meetings in those days, I began to notice a lack of young folks on the boards. In fact, some planning commission meetings resembled “war-story-time” at the old-folks home. Most commissioners were white men, although an obligatory African-American would show up occasionally in cities with a large minority population.

Women would show up later.

Young folks didn’t appear for years. It was like the old guys were hanging on and weren’t ready to pass the torch. Or maybe the young guys were busy getting started in life and didn’t have the time or energy. Whatever, one still sees the results of a lack of youthful vision in many cities.

More often than not, those in power didn't care much for policies or plans. Those things tended to lock them into specious decisions which they made anyway.

Then there was the night a commissioner had stayed a little too long at Happy Hour. He was ready to protect his city at all costs. A developer proposed to redevelop a large area of homes he held “under contract.” This was a common occurrence in cities wherein homes were sold to families who couldn’t have applied for a mortgage. They paid a monthly payment, absent a mortgage that might build equity. After paying for years, they might miss a payment and find themselves on the street while another family moved into their previous home under a new contract.

The men who operated these scams invariably posted a “man of the year” plaque in their offices. Often, they were deacons of their church or the equivalent.

This night, there was a little grumbling about destroying so many homes, mostly from minority spectators living in the subject neighborhood. Our intrepid planning commissioner came to the rescue, as he saw it, of his businessman friend.

“Look folks,” he began—so far so good. Now “everbiddy” knows that this area ain’t nothing but a collection of rundown [adjective deleted] shacks and the whole area would be a lot better off if they were all bulldozed down.”

A long silence filled the room. Faces dropped. The other planning commissioners suddenly found something fascinating among their papers. People in the audience fidgeted. I closed my eyes and silently began to count to a hundred. The commissioner making the remark simply stared ahead as if he had announced a recipe for world peace.

This was the small-town South where I began my career. There were times when, had it not been for meeting Brenda, I wished I had stayed in the Navy.

What? Oh yes. The commission approved the development.

What the ...?

My Redacted Life: Chapter 33 (Cont._2)

Urban planning requires a lot of public hearings. Some are useful, some not. Some are entertaining, some not. Most are interesting. I attended a few during the summer of 1972 while I waited for my wedding day. I remember one in particular in my home town.

The way public hearings were conducted in those days was pretty standard, in most cases. Once the major decisions had been made, the city invited the public in to make comments or ask questions. After enduring what often turned into an ordeal, the city went ahead and carried out its original proposal. Planners would change the approach as years went by, but this was years ago, remember. One might say that we were, back then, approaching the twilight years of the good-old-boy days.

I don’t really remember what the public hearing in question involved exactly. I remember that it had to do with housing, and the room was full. I also remember that major actors in town favored a positive outcome. I remember that some people in the room didn’t.

The first speaker was a young architect whose firm was designing the project. I felt a little sorry for him since nothing in his experience or training had prepared him to deal with hostile audiences. They generally train architects to assume that they know best and to behave accordingly. There were emerging factions in the 1970s that didn’t buy into that. They called them “neo-hippies” and worse things. A group of them were in attendance that night, to the discomfiture of the architect.

They pulled his chain from every direction imaginable. They made him mad when they questioned his judgment. They made him defensive when they suggested revisions. They even made him go red-faced and almost cry when they questioned his motives. Flustered, he introduced the developers. They would know how to handle a crowd of people.

Speaking of the crowd, it wasn’t uniformly hostile. The proponents of the project had assembled a goodly throng of adherents: real estate folks, tradesmen, bankers, wholesalers and others who stood to profit from the project. All in all, it proved a rollicking good time. I felt that way since I had no vested interest. I simply drove down and attended to further my education.

It finally came to the point where a young activist was questioning the primary developer of the project about its possible impact on an adjacent low-income neighborhood. She wore a long, flowing gown-dress, sandals, love-beads, and a flower in her hair. She looked as if she belonged more in Candlestick Park than Pine Bluff, Arkansas. Her questioning concerned the lack of open space in the project and whether the housing couldn’t be built “up more than out.”

The developer answered her in the tone of a parent explaining to a four-year-old why the sun doesn’t shine when it rains. The design followed the demands of maximum economic efficiency. The design would provide maximum housing for minimum expenditures. Any other design wouldn’t be profitably feasible. Were there any more questions?

The woman said something then that produced a wave of laughter from the proponents of the project, as well as from the planning commissioners.

She said, “I don’t happen to believe that one should profit from providing a basic human need.”

The developer chuckled at her in response. The Chairman called the public hearing at an end and a vote hurriedly followed. As the men stood congratulating themselves, the activists marched defiantly from the room. The whole thing made me think.

Her comment sure sounded ludicrous at the time. With each passing year, it sounds less so.

My Redacted Life: Sunday Break

As the month of August grew near, I contemplated our upcoming marriage. Appearances indicated success, but who could tell? I grew increasingly fond of Brenda’s parents, particularly her dad.

Robert Julius Cole grew up in the rich farmland country of the Arkansas Delta, the oldest boy of three and brother to three girls, one a half-sister who was born before her mother was widowed at age 16. By the time Julius was nine, he was managing a mule as it plowed the dark soil.

Having made it through the Great Depression, his generation saw the world head directly into World War Two. Although, as the eldest son on a family farm, he could have claimed an exemption from military service, he took the place of a younger brother and went into the army.

He found himself assigned to the 313^th Regiment of the 79^th Infantry Division. The unit had come ashore at Normandy on D-Day plus seven. By the time Julius joined it they were well into France and headed for Belgium and Germany by way of the Battle of the Bulge.

Some of my favorite memories involve sitting around the supper table and listening to his stories about the war. I’ve always felt that the supper table helped produce so many fine writers from the South. Kids learned the art of story-telling from master craftsmen. Julius was one of those. One time he would tell about when, during the last days of the war, as the Germans were listlessly expending the last of their artillery shells, and his company was lined up for chow, a random shell killed the shortest soldier in his company.

Another time, he might tell about the time he told a young French girl that she had a nice puppy, whereupon she disappeared and returned holding a roll of toilet paper. He might tell about his comrades, after the war while on leave in Rome “Itley,” placing prophylactics on the statues of naked men in the plazas.

“Many of our guys got killed by our own artillery,” he would recount. “Most of those killed were new kids who would freeze during an artillery barrage and not move out when they told us to.” Or, “I spent one night in a fox hole with a dead German boy. As soon as I jumped in, the fleas left him and crawled on me.” Or, “Jimmie, you would say just let me live one more second. Just one more.”

“Wounded by artillery shrapnel, he survived the war in Europe. They disbanded the 79^th Division and shipped him to another unit. It would be the First Infantry Division, the “Big Red One.” Had the war moved to the invasion of Japan, it would no doubt have led the way as it had at Normandy. The war ended, though, and he spent a year in Germany before rotating home.

There, he never, as far as I know, bothered another living soul. I still catch myself, from time to time, pitying those who never had the honor of knowing him.

A photo copied from the  Internet that
 may include Private Robert Julius Cole.

My Reacted Life: Chapter 33

Some things were simpler for a planning and engineering firm in 1972. Some weren’t. Take an interesting project at a Little Rock landmark. It unfolded like this.

The Arkansas Game and Fish Commission had decided to move its staff operations from the Capitol grounds to site adjacent to the new I-430 bypass in West Little Rock. It was to be part of a large campus to be called the Natural Resources Complex or something like that. Since it would also house state agencies like the Plant Board and Crime Laboratory, the architect for the Game and Fish boys thought some advanced site planning would help. Jack Castin was the perfect choice for the assignment.

There was another reason that site planning from an outside source would come in handy. Jack would find out about that later.

Everyone was in a hurry, a big hurry. Jack needed an accurate topographical map and a professional surveyor would need time to prepare one. Nope. We had to get started. The U.S. Geological maps had general topo lines, but their accuracy was unknown and the scale was unusable.

Ron McConnell and I put our heads together. Through an elaborate scheme that involved putting an accurate and measured line on the small drawing, and having our old friend Bob Wilson photograph and enlarge it to another semi-precise length, we produced a fair representation of a topo map at a workable scale. It would serve until the surveyor had prepared a more accurate version. We prided ourselves. The boss smiled. The architect okayed it. Jack went to work.

Then he learned the news.

Not being from Little Rock, he didn’t know that the plot of land they handed him contained the bodies of inmates who had died, with neither resources nor family, while housed in the state mental hospital. In those days, the government cared for the mentally disabled in public institutions rather than medicating them and turning them out alone to fend for themselves. That’s a topic for another day.

What we faced now was a site irreverently known to generations of Little Rock natives as “Crazy Graveyard.” It lay right in the middle of the property. It served, in addition to incarcerating the indigent, as a favorite “parking” spot for teenagers, young boys hoping that fear of the “undead” might serve as an aphrodisiac, and young girls willing to go along for one ride too many. Adding extra spice to the experience was a long-standing legend that the bodies therein were buried in a vertical position to conserve space. That allowed their ghosts quicker access to the real world.

Old timers say it worked as a love nest, Crazy Graveyard did. Who knows how many successful citizens of today might trace their origins to the site?

Anyway, the situation led to a great deal of consternation. What to do with the location of so many unclaimed and unknown bodies? The boys at Game and Fish didn’t care much one way or another. Truth be known, the architects didn’t either. Jack, being Catholic, wanted a resolution. Questions only produced a great deal of embarrassment and cover-up from state officials. Turns out that there had never been a state employee who had been the least bit involved in disposing of those bodies.

“What bodies?” they explained.

Eventually, some portion of the site remained a memorial. Jack did a masterful job of planning the site, as always. The architects were happy. The boys at Game and Fish were relieved, and the world continued to rotate on its axis.

Oh, and what about the makeshift topo map Ron and I came up with? It proved incredibly accurate as it turned out. Our technique came in handy, although later what took us three days would only take a few strokes of a keyboard.

I don’t know what they do with the bodies of mentally deficient paupers these days. They don’t keep many of them in public institutions, I am told, long enough to expire. They die on the streets and become somebody else’s problem.

My Redacted Life: Chapter 32 (Cont._4)

With marriage looming, we began to consider finances carefully. The state begrudgingly paid teachers around $400 to $500 per month, some two to three thousand a month less than the school superintendent in Little Rock paid his secretary, A distant dream was to purchase a house after we were married. Wasn’t that what a young married couple was supposed to do?

We began, based on our anticipated income, to determine how much house we could afford. The answer was staggering. Millionaires, my father insisted, lived in $20,000 homes and only the sorriest wastrels lived in homes built entirely by someone else. People in the know said “Buy a little more house than you could afford and, as your income increased, you would “grow into it.”

I’ve thought about this a lot since. Back then, I just fretted about it.

At the same time, I was dealing with the financial condition of our cities. They faced a different set of problems. A young couple running short of money could always work harder or get a higher paying job. Cities faced a finite revenue source. Property taxes paid a paltry amount of fees and revenue streams from utilities paid some. State turnback from fuel taxes helped with streets. As mentioned in an earlier segment, places like Conway Country, Arkansas, produced funds from their speed trap enterprises. How much of those funds went to pay for public services is anybody’s guess.

Cities relied on two or three sources for large capital projects. They are allowed to issue General Obligation bonds based on a defined increase in property taxes as the source of payment. Utility revenue streams could also create projects to be undertaken through bond issues. Then there were massive grant programs through the federal government for specified categories of projects. Local sales tax options were years away.

Cities managed somehow. Plans were based on predicted growth patterns. Oddly, predictions almost always matched the population needed to create enough revenue to carry out the plan or to fund an individual project. Fancy methods of prediction used birth rates, death rates, migration patterns, and the ability of specific cohorts to propagate. Nobody really understood the methodology. I suppose that was the intent.

Sadly, there would be only one major generator of population growth or decline among our cities in the coming years. Like an earth tremor awakening a sleeping monster, the cause was slowly winding through the federal court system on its way to the Supreme Court. It would have very little to do with quality of life, economic development, public administration, or good planning.

It would have everything to do with which way school buses ran.

I couldn't help but wonder
where this was all headed.