Historical December 1993 article. Dates, prices, services and contacts describe the source period; current availability has not been established.
Thank you. It’s nice to know that someone reads this column. Even better yet, someones. Month after month, I toil away, pouring my heart and soul on to my trusty word processor, sharing my syllables and essence with you, dear reader.
Most often it’s a bit like throwing a rock into the ocean; who can tell? Not the rock.
But last month’s column was different. What a reaction!
I heard from well over a dozen readers, and even received some fan mail. Obviously, the sharing of my family touched you, if I say so myself.
To those folks who stopped by the office to see the wedding photo of Aunt Liz and Uncle Ira, attired respectively in basketball outfit and referee’s uniform, I’m sorry that it was unavailable.
As soon as the franie gets repaired, I’ll have it rchung. And to Ms. Elaine Deutch, thank you for your nice note. You’re right; learning about California’s history from the San Francisco Chronicle’s obituary column sounds like something that belongs in my family! It’s nice to ring a responsive chord.
I guess all of us have odd family members, and my column reminded all of you of all of yours. (Heck, maybe my column reminded another one of your family members of you!) See, you’re not alone.
But there’s more about my family.
As a teenager, Uncle Zeke used to steal cars. Now, in Zeke’s defense, he would say that he wasn’t actually STEALING the cars, he was borrowing them.
He always intended to return the cars to their rightful owners. (In fact, on two or three occasions he did just that. Once he had a Ford Thunderbird for two weeks before he returned it, parking it back in the garage from which he’d taken it.
He even filled up the gas tank. Mileage was important to Zeke.) I first remember hearing of Zeke’s ear-borrowing exploits at the dinner table when I was ten or eleven.
It was a typical family gettogether, a celebration of someone’s birthday. Everyone was there, even Cousin Polly Esther from Burlington!
She came in, late as usual, and with $5 checks for all of us kids.
We each came to her for a hug and a check. Finally we had all collected our cheeks, but she still had an envelope in her hands. “Where’s Zeke?” she said and the room grew quiet.
I hadn’t realized he was missing. Finally my Aunt Annie said, “Zeke’s gone on a vacation.” “WOW,” I chirped, “a vacation! Where’d he go?” The icy stares that came my way could have been no worse had I asked Cousin Polly if this year’s gift check would bounce too. “We’ll talk later,” my mom said, clamping her hand over my mouth and rolling her eyes toward the heavens.
It turns out that Zeke had grown bored just borrowing a car here and there, and had decided to add a little excitement to his life. Yep, you guessed it: he stole a bus. And not just any bus, but the bus that the police use to take prisoners from the courthouse to the jail! It’s a green bus with metal screens all over the windows, a gumball red light on top, and a sign on back, that shouts in big letters, “CAUTION! STAY BACK 50 FEET. MS BUS CONTAINS PRISON. ERS.” One of the guards had gone somewhere and left the keys in the ignition, Zeke just got in to move the bus away from a fire hydrant. At least that’s what he told the judge. Zeke and Paul, his best friend, started heading west.
With some logic, they figured that once they got a state or two away, no one would think twice about the prison bus.
It was actually pretty good reasoning. Zeke later told me that they had been only stopped once during the entire vacation, not counting the capture, by a policeman in Salinas, Kansas. Paul was driving and told the cop that they were bounty-hunters and had leased the bus from the police department. That seemed to satisfy him, and they were on their way again.
The trip, Zeke referred to it as his “WestWaralo Vacation,” lasted until they got to Reno. By then, word of the missing Prisoner Bus has reached the authorities in every state in the union. Zcke and Paul were caught while eating in the bus at a drive-in hamburger stand and were sent back to St. Louis for a trial. By the time they were caught, they had painted the Prisoner Bus red, covering all of the printing, and had removed the gum ball light on the top.
The steel mesh screen on the windows gave them away.
It turns out, though, that on the way to Nevada they had been driving down a side road, had seen some heavy black smoke, stopped, and wound up using a garden hose to put out a house fire, rescuing a mother and six-month old baby in the process.
They had been local celebrities for a while until Paul figured that they better head out before too many questions were asked.
They vanished in the night, making their heroic deeds all the more mysterious and exciting.
The Nevada press tracked them down to St. Louis.
While the van was painted, Zckc had been wearing a Cardinal hat and a John Burroughs t-shirt, so it wasn’t too hard to figure things out. Two reporters called here trying to interview him.
They found him in jail, awaiting trial.
But when the judge heard about Zeke’s and Paul’s bravery, he gave them a suspended sentence and they were let go. Of course, when Cousin Polly arrived from Burlington, the boys were in the City’s holding tank.
We hadn’t heard about their courageous adventures yet, and knew only of the borrowed Prisoners Bus, so the family was a little uptight about thc entire adventure.
The fact that Zeke had sent several postcards from Kansas and Utah, commenting about the bad mileage he was getting from the Prisoner Bus, didn’t help either.
But as Zeke always said, “All’s well that end’s well.” He told me that he got to see the west, saved a couple lives, and was a local hero, so he figured it was a pretty good deal for everyone.
Each time he’d discuss the adventure, though, he’d complain about the poor, gas mileage he got from the Prisoner Bus. And I also didn’t tell you about Gino’s experience with Amway. Several guidance counselors, parole officers, clergymen, and two Scout leaders had tried to show Gino the right way, but all had failed.
He wasn’t interested in what was “right”; he was interested in what he could get from a situation. Gino was always looking for a fast buck.
He was well known for saying, “staying in fine clothes and keeping the dollies happy isn’t easy, but somebody has to do it.” So Gino had odd-jobs here and there: pumping gas at the filling station, being a waiter at a Pizza Inn, working in Las Vegas one summer, even having a part-time job as a librarian. And then Gino came upon Amway.
If you know Amway salespeople, you know that they tend to be TRUE BELIEVERS. Well, there was never an Amway truer-believer than Gino.
He was a proselyte’s proselyte! Gino sold cleaning supplies to everyone. You couldn’t talk to him for more than 30 or 40 seconds without him asking about your soap needs.
My mom still has six or seven gallon jugs of liquid soap that she bought from Gino.
I suspect she’ll have the same six or seven ten years from now: she never got around to buying a liquid soap dispenser.
But she kept buying liquid soap from Gino. Gino, who in his pre-Amway days always reeked of cigarette smoke and stale beer, laced with Old Spice, now began to smell remarkably like fresh lemons!
To this day, I can’t see or smell a glass of lemonade without seeing Gino huckstering Amway.
His scent drove our dogs, Tokar and Cleo, a bit crazy.
They probably thought he was the first wave of the invasion of the citrus monsters. And then there’s dad.
He had a great sense of humor and was wonderfully generous.
He was many things, but he wasn’t handy. I’ve inherited my inability to do anything around the house from him.
My favorite memory of his unhandiness was the time he and mom decided to change the linoleum tile in the bathroom.
We had this old bathtub with clawfoot legs. Somehow dad knew that the legs could be unscrewed so that they could be removed.
He and mom figured out that it would be easier to remove the legs to lay the tile than cutting the tile to fit around the legs. Unfortunately, he was right. Dad unscrewed all four legs of the tub, so that it was about four inches above the floor, suspended only by the water pipes running up from the basement. Then, in an effort to get the linoleum laid in the corner by the window, dad stepped into the tub.
He wasn’t a heavy man, but he was heavy enough. Mom helped him into the tub and it happened. Sure enough, the tub sagged under his weight and the pipes broke. Water shot everywhere.
It was like having two geysers in the bathroom, one hot and one cold. Ever the helpful son, I started laughing uncontrollably, and got yelled at.
To this day, whenever I see a clawfoot tub, I think of my dad, standing in the leaning tub with water spraying everywhere. What started out as an exercise in home repair ended up as a vocabulary lesson: I learned all kind of new words from my dad that day! That was the last time dad ever tried to do anything around the house.
My mom was eternally grateful. Even more now, I think that the nicest thing about my family is that when I think about my relatives, I feel normal.
Originally published in The Times of Skinker-DeBaliviere, December 1993.
Read this article in the original newspaper issue.
Original source: SD_Times1993_12.pdf, printed page(s) 8, 6; PDF page(s) 8, 6.
