During World War II my Dad was a employee of Allegheny Ludlum Steel, a wartime defense plant in Dunkirk, New York. There is surprisingly little information about its wartime activity, but it apparently produced steel products for airplanes and tanks. He had been too young for World War I and turned too old for the draft in World War II shortly after its start. Besides, he was married and was working in a steel plant at the start of the war. My mother had married him in the late 30s, to some degree, because he was to her rather provincial upbringing, an exciting and traveled man, who wrote her flowery letters. He had been in the CCCs and had been stationed in Fallon, Nevada and Carrabelle Beach, Florida. Her other suitor at the time was, in her view, totally boring, and when I actually met Stillman in the early 1960s, I had to admit that she was right. Unfortunately, my father, while initially exciting to her, turned to be a narcissist who could not keep a job and was later diagnosed as bipolar. He was also a liar, who boasted about actions in which he could hardly have participated such as being in the Texas Rangers, winning a million dollars in Las Vegas, driving the fastest race cars and the fastest passenger trains, and breaking his neck in a high dive, and walking out of the hospital the next day. He was a font of fabrications and misinformation, much like our current leader (one reason I can’t stand to see the latter’s visage), but then my father did not have money or power and could only destroy his family!
My dad’s inability to control his temper was his undoing in regard to his bosses, especially in the case of his last permanent job for the Bureau of Reclamation. In 1946 he had moved us to Yuma, Arizona, and I completely lost contact with my aunts, uncles, and cousins and my only contact left was my grandmother Ida who wrote to me and sent a silver dime in every letter. By the time I was 14, dad was out of work, we were near desperation, and living near a small town in southwest Arizona. My father’s behavior was erratic to say the least, but for the first time in my life I had friends near my own age. Unfortunately my father moved us again to a desolate farm house just outside of the rather unfriendly town (one local former Boy Scout leader bragged that he had helped drive all the black people out). It hadn’t helped that during our stay in that remote farmhouse, my mother had a breakdown and as a teenager I had to convince her not to commit suicide while we walked in the nearby sand dunes. There were other horrors I won’t go into, but suffice it to say my father was little or no help.
Within a year we moved again, back to Yuma. I had been homeschooled (See: www.dailykos.com/…) by two people who never finished High School (although my father actually did not really do much.) To a large degree this was because my mother was convinced that I was handicapped, although there was no sign of a visible problem. They had finally decided that they could no longer teach me anything and bought courses for me from Calvert School and American School. These were excellent institutions. I’ve pretty well described this in my earlier diary on the subject. My point in writing this current diary is to exorcise a demon from that period after my father moved us back to Yuma, in the hopes that it may help others who might have had a similar experience, but I felt I had to lay the background out if anybody was going to understand my situation during those years in the late 1950’s and early 1960s, before I went to college. The new house was in a date grove and the nearby young people were generally younger than I was. I reached twenty years of age there. I needed friends badly and mostly found them through correspondence with people my own age. My mother forbad my writing to girls and I reluctantly obeyed, partly because I had nothing I could offer a woman with the kind of family I had, and I lacked salable skills, but I found several young men who were interested in natural sciences and that did help. However, while roaming the nearby fields and groves, observing wildlife, including the only ant war I ever saw, and raising Giant Swallowtail butterflies from the eggs and larvae I found on nearby citrus trees, I still longed to have direct contact to others who shared my interests. It was then that I fell into a deep depression. I saw no way out. From the happy ca. one-year old in the photo above, I became a terribly depressed young adult, with no future. Photos from that period of both my mother and me were of such obviously depressed people that I destroyed all of them and in fact all of the photos of my parents were torn up years ago.
My serious depression that lasted into my mid-twenties was not at all helped by the neighborhoods I in which I lived, starting with the old farmhouse and extending until I entered college. The neighborhood that my parents moved to in Yuma in our return was a depressives nightmare for the most part. Down the way lived a parody of white trash. A father who was always threatening his three kids with a good “whooping”. A mother who was the milktoast “good wife”, a younger son who was still wetting the bed (obvious from the smell of their house), and a older son and daughter, who seemed normal and I hope got away from the rest of their family.
On the other side of the street across from the parody were two brothers, their mother and step dad. The step dad was a drunk who often kept the boys allowances (I suspect to buy more booze!). To top this off, a block away lived a well-known pothunter. How he stayed out of jail, I’m not sure, but such activities were often winked at in the late 1950s. In addition, our old landlady moved into a trailer on the same property as my parents and me, after her release from the state mental hospital.
Across the street from us lived the sanest family on the block. They included a very nice professional man and father, a schoolteacher mother, and their three children, the youngest of which was afflicted with Down’s Syndrome. (I was a honorary pallbearer at his funeral when he died of a heart attack while serving as a batboy to a local Little League team.) I would occasional get together with these kids and play sandlot ball, games of which ended when the ball got stuck in a date palm. It was the schoolteacher mom who suggested that I enter the new junior college. A ray of hope in a life that seemed hardly worth living to me. I asked my mother about it and she said absolutely not! We couldn’t afford it. So I went back to having nature be my only solace. At one point I tried to get the local kids and young adults interested in a science club, but that fell apart on our first meeting when one of the young men called me a “Homo” and made fun of the whole idea. I never tried that kind of thing again.
But then the Vietnam War happened and I was subject to the draft! My mother, terrified that I might be drafted, withdrew her objections to my entering college and so I walked into my first class at Arizona Western College in the fall of 1966 and the rest is history. I’ve discussed this in at least one of my diaries.
Meanwhile I got interested in jumping spiders and started corresponding with two other jumping spider fans in New York City. I got their names and addresses from Alice Gray, the outreach person for the Entomology Dept. at the American Museum of Natural History (See: en.wikipedia.org/…,) whom I had contacted in regard to getting a connection with other entomology or arachnology enthusiasts. I am still in contact with both of them to this day! After nearly 65 years! One became a professional arachnologist and a coauthor with me, and the other went into computers after serving in the Air Force.
Unfortunately, depression does not go away that easily and I could have not survived without my loving wife of 48 years, our daughters, and various therapists. I will certainly be fighting some tendencies toward depression to my grave, but all turned out better than I had thought. My last therapist ended our sessions, saying that I was no more disturbed than any average person off the street. However, at 20 years of age I had no hope for a better life. That may be why I feel sympathy for other people who have suffered prejudice and are look down on as different. Despite my being male and white and hererosexual (and I’m well aware that those attributes certainly helped me along my path) I had tasted being the odd man out, the invisible person, the object of scorn and ridicule. When I returned as an adult to Upstate New York, where I was born, almost everybody treated me as if I was still a four-year old, and thus of little consequence. Someone asked me what I was going to do with my life. I said that I’d like to become a college professor, little knowing that I would, many years later, become one.
Thanks for reading this!