Things are not always what they seem Part 2 (The story)

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I’ve written how my parents moved to a neighborhood in Topeka shortly after the Supreme Court’s Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education ensuring that their very white children would be attending school with African American children whose elementary schools had until then been segregated.

To date I’ve written two columns for the Duluth Reader touching on that time and subject. The first mentioned my kindergarden-aged neighbor who said she didn’t want to “go to school with no n*****.” This was one of the first columns I wrote in a return to the Reader after a long absence. Even then it was part of my “long game” of challenging Trump clone Stauber for the first in what would become a string of protest challenges.

Even as I wrote the words, “to pull black soldiers off white prostitutes,'” I was bothered by not explaining them in depth. That bother stuck with me for several years until at last I had to address them. So, four years later I wrote this column: The MP who pulled black men off white prostitutes – the rest of the story

If you read the column now you can see how it fits in with this posts warning about jumping to conclusions. What I did not address was the family on the other side of our Topeka residence because that story’s main character is not so redeeming. And I really liked his daughter who was the first person I was ever in awe of. She taught me how to play catch. She’s out there somewhere and the last thing she needs to hear is me telling the unsettling things I learned about her dad. But here goes.

My neighbor’s parents were both public school teachers and good liberal democrats. When the 1960 election rolled around and I was nearing my tenth birthday I told my neighbor that Nixon, the Repuplican, was going to beat her family’s candidate John Kennedy the Democrat.

Her father was also a Red Cross trained swimming teacher. I have often told one part of his life that is truly uplifting. I found it referenced in at least four posts including this 2012 post. Every time I referenced it I know I was leaving something out that would likely change a reader’s perceptions radically.

My parents were selective in what they told me about my Red Cross swimming instructor/neighbor for a long time. When he divorced his wife with whom my mother stayed friends with I got a lot more backstory. My mother was very open with me about the facts of life. I heard things daughters are more likely to be warned about. I’ve always wondered if she wanted me to be more worldly than my dad.

Yes, as the post I linked to relates, the Motel where my nighbor taught swimming lessons started getting complaints from racist guests about the black children in the pool’s Red Cross classes its management demanded he stop teaching black children. Insead he built a pool in his own backyard.

Ironically, on our way to the Howard Johnson’s pool we always drove by a highway billboard with a huge Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren on it. The sign read, “Impeach Earl Warren.” Warren was a former liberal California Republican governor. His crime was getting his fellow court members to unanimously agree that segregation in public schools must be ended in the Brown case mentioned at the beginning of this post. We were midway between the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the passage of the voting rights act.

My swimming teacher/neighbor was a proud egalitarian and champion of civil rights. After we moved to Minnesota because my Dad had made the mistake of advising his boss not to accept gifts that could be mistaken for bribes we returned at least once a year to Topeka to visit family. My mother would come an addition five times a year, every other month to visit her father. She especially was able to keep up with our old neighbors.

I had a fair amount of nostalgia for Topeka because making friends in Minnesota started a little slow but I rarely got to spend any time with the girl who taught me to play catch. During one visit I decided just to drive up to her house to see if she was in. She was not but I was invited in by her parents where we caught up and they could ask me about my life in Minnesota. I’m sure I mentioned it was a Lily white city where folks had no clue about black people or civil rights. This was a subject my old swimming teacher could hold forth on. He told me how because of his civil right’s stand he’d had people call him a “white n*****.

That high mindedness is the perfect jumping off point for judging him under his book cover. I presume it was when his marriage began to unravel and he left his wife for a younger woman that my folks, or my mom told me what she was hearing from his angry ex on her visits home. To teach and watch his swimming students he always had a couple young women as helpers. One of them “Evie” was a fireplug of a swimmer and a member of a girls fastball league playing for a local packing house OSHE Meats. The family was partial enough to Evie that they followed her team and my family went to the the OSHE team in action on one occasion. Years later I learned that our neighbor’s dad had taken advantage, as it was explained to me, of Evie’s insecurities being more fireplug than Miss America and helped her have a fuller life of intimacy. That wasn’t the cause of the later break up. That involved a younger sexier woman who to the bitter satisfaction began taunting her Ex when she cast her eyes toward other men. When I heard this along with other salacious details I thought back on the highmindedness and persecution complex over being called names by racists and I was no longer so impressed. It struck me as a come on for extra-marital adventures.

My father had a rather different take. He had been aware of our neighbor in the local college where our neighbor was an actor in the playhouse. My dad sensed that he might have been gay a suspicion perhaps born of theater’s reputation although belied by his advances on his female assistant. At best he was a fair-weather friend and the obverse of our other neighbor who followed orders to keep black soldiers out of Italian bordellos.

About the author

Harry is a ferociously good natured eccentric in Duluth Minnesota who detests traitors dressed up as Uncle Sam. You can find somewhat better edited writings of his at the Duluth Reader "contributors." page. The URL is:

https://duluthreader.com/contributors/h/84/284-harry-welty