Canaries in My Coal Mine

Prologue

Back in the days before Electronic Early Warning Systems, coal miners would take a canary in a cage, down with them into the mines. If the canary stopped singing and fell over dead, they knew it meant “Warning-get Out Now!”.

I use this as a metaphor. We each live in our own coal mine of sorts and we each have canaries here and there to show us the way, or to suggest that it’s the wrong way, or that there might be a better way. Sometimes we hear the canary. Sometimes we choose to not hear it. Sometimes, we ARE the canary.

This is a story about the canaries in My coal mine.

Chapter 1

I was there when he left that day. I was five, hiding under the Mangle Iron and heard it all. Through the yelling and screaming, I heard it. Maybe she just didn’t want to hear, but I heard, “I’m sorry Mom!”.

My half-brother, Bob, was only 17 when he left that day. It would take a half century for me to find out what the argument was even about. I came to realize that it didn’t really matter. But what happened was – a friend had invited him to go swimming in Lake Mead and he was looking for a pair of dad’s swimming trunks and she caught him in their drawers. Mom always thought the worst of people and didn’t believe him when he told her about the trunks.   It was her house – her rules! “My way or the highway!”

For years after, she would say, “he never apologized”, but I knew he had.

• I couldn’t tell her that I was hiding under the mangle iron. She would have accused me of spying. I knew the consequences were too great. “Back talking” was not allowed!

Maybe it was because he stood up to her – she probably called him a liar and said he wasn’t lying – that’s all it would take – no one talked back to her!  As I was growing up, my dad would tell me, “Son, you’ll never win an argument with your mother. Don’t try, just take it and try to take care of her!”

Just take it!  I “took it” for a long time, but ultimately, just like my brother Bob, I left. Not the same way, of course. His was the hard way. I wanted a softer, easier way. Did I choose a softer, easier way?

Bob had saved $3000 for college. Mom said he was too dumb to go to college. She wanted the money for family expenses. He had earned that money. He had a paper route that included McKeeverville which was a slum of Boulder City. My brother says that it was hard to collect because there weren’t any addresses on the houses. He also was a pin boy at the bowling alley. This was when they had to set the pins by hand. Needless to say, this was a dangerous job for a teenager. He had worked hard for that money and he knew that he wasn’t stupid.

I had a paper route too, and at 14 I got a job at Von’s Market so on Friday nights when my friends were on dates with their girlfriends I was working.  And yes, she said the same thing about me (about being dumb) – but I guess I didn’t talk back to her.

Today, it’s called “Verbal Abuse”. It is as damaging to a person as any other form of abuse. The victim of abuse, no matter what kind, can spend a lifetime healing, or never heal then become an abuser, or possibly have to settle for something in between.

I knew that I had to get out of the house like my brother, and my English teacher, Mr. Hill – said he could get me into St. Mary’s College in Moraga Just on the other side of Oakland, California. I was fortunate that he had stood up for me. And although I wanted to go to Scripps Institute and be a photographer my mother said no about photography – but let me go to St. Mary’s if I took business courses. I agreed to go to St. Mary’s although I had no desire to get a degree in business. As it turned out it was really good for me. First of all it got me 500 miles from my mother And the business classes really helped me a lot.

As a freshman at St. Mary’s I didn’t have my car – my mom wouldn’t let me take it. But I devised a plan to get my car to St. Mary’s. I decided like my brother Bob to get involved with the R.O.T.C. program. Of course, St. Mary’s College didn’t have an R.O.T.C. program and if I wanted to take classes in R.O.T.C., I would have to drive to Berkeley three times a week at the University of California at Berkeley.

This was 1967 – I had gotten a deferment to go to college and, in those days young men my age, had a choice of going to college or to go to Vietnam. I figured that being an officer would be better than getting drafted. My brother Bob spent three tours in Vietnam.

My mom did the best she could. I know that now.

Her father seems to have left when she was a very little girl. When he came over to visit her and her brother her mother would lock them in the closet until he Left.

He was a border crossing guard at Noyes, Minnesota. Not in till years later did she find out he wasn’t as bad as she was told.

She was just a kid herself, fresh out of Michigan State Teachers College. She was born in Montana. The country was trying to climb out of the Great Depression.

With a bicycle strapped to one fender and an ironing board on the other, Charlotte Joan Goebel set off West, to Nevada, to a little town called Boulder. A company town, it had sprouted out in the Nevada desert, near Las Vegas, to support the construction and completion of the Hoover Dam Project. Boulder needed teachers.

Miss Goebel became the 6^th Grade teacher of my brother Hank Jr.. My dad and Bernie were college sweethearts. She met her when he was going to St. Mary’s College in Kansas.

Having won the “Babe Ruth Trophy” at Lincoln High School in L.A. he had gotten a Baseball Scholarship St. Mary’s College in Kansas. That was a big deal in Los Angeles in those days. His plan was to graduate from St. Mary’s but in the meantime the “Great Depression” hit and St. Mary’s closed their doors. Had he graduated from St. Mary’s he had been promised a job at Lincoln High School as the baseball coach.

and it seems my dad did not do well with that; he drank too much. My mother would tell it, “I came in and saved that family; I raised five boys”, our dad being included.

Henry “Hank” Patterson was liked by every person he ever came in contact with. He was born in 1907 in a tent on Telegraph Hill in San Francisco, one year after the earthquake.

His younger years were filled with moving from town to town because his father was a railroad man and a drunk.

After San Francisco, the family moved to Bakersfield, then Los Angeles. It seems about that time, his father, Hank Sr, became weary of supporting a family, so he left his Irish wife, two sons, and two daughters.

As a teenager, my dad was a star – President of the Senior Class at L.A.’s Lincoln High School, All League, All State, and Recipient of the Babe Ruth award for Excellence. That’s where the Pro scouts found him. Baseball was his passion!

After some time in the Minor Leagues, he made it to the “Bigs”! He signed with the Boston Red Socks in the years of Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and Lazaro. My dad’s time in the Big League was short-lived. Then the fall from grace; he was sent back to the Minors. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten the real story about my dad’s “fall”. It might have been his temper (he had one), or did he really “throw his arm out”?

Now, with two young boys and a wife to support, during the Great Depression, he knew he needed to get a real job offering better pay and security than with the Minors.  Because of his fame in L.A., he landed a job with the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power cutting branches away from power lines. Remember, during the Depression any job was a good job.

Then his second “big break” -Water and Power needed someone to keep the fleet of trucks oiled and watered properly in some place called Boulder City, Nevada -Hoover Dam. He got the job! So, he packed up his wife, Bernie, and two sons and they moved to Nevada and a new start. After that, Bernie got sick, then she died.

I’ve been told my dad stopped drinking the day I was born. I don’t know if that is true or not. I do know I never saw him take a drink… not ever!

I didn’t see much of my big brother, Bob, after that day I hid under the Mangle Iron. I was told he lived with a family across town, then he went to college on a baseball scholarship where, to help pay for it, he joined the ROTC.

Second Lt. Robert J Patterson looked so cool in his Formal Dress Military Uniform when he got married in Carmel, CA. When my mother wasn’t around, my dad showed me photos of it. I, of course was not allowed to attend my own brother’s wedding.

Twenty-two years in the military does something to a person. Check Point Charlie in Berlin during it’s worst days, three tours in Viet Nam, four Bronze Stars and who knows what else.

Retired Lt. Col. Robert Patterson lives in Palm Springs now. Politically, he thinks that we are exact opposites in our views. We seldom visit, write, or phone one another, but we have been there for each other in times of crisis. When the his son was in a motor cycle accident we were there. And when I opened my restaurant although he was in Vietnam at the time is wife joined us to celebrate the opening. While at St. Mary’s and he was in Vietnam I always had a couch to sleep on when I wandered off campus to visit his wife and kids in Castro Valley. His kids Lori and Kirk and Julie got a kick out of getting my Volkswagen bug’s burglar alarm to go off. And his dog Ludy was always so happy to see me that he peed all over my shoes when I arrived.

 I hope one day he might read this, and we will talk, that I might get a big brother’s point of view of all those days and events.

He doesn’t know…

           The day he left, he became…

                        One canary in my coal mine!