.My Hospital, My First Birthday, My Birth

I have always said
(and I think this is true)
if I had an older brother
he would have no younger brother.

So it was
on May 4, 1943
as two of my sisters waited in my home-to-be,
(on Van Buren, six blocks away)
and two in my school-to-be
(Saint Columba, seven blocks away)
I arrived
at the Northern Pacific Benefit Association Hospital
on Charles Avenue,
Saint Paul,
Minnesota--
the hospital I would visit again, again and again
with broken fingers,
evil appendix,
Osgood Slaughter,
gashed wrist,
and the like.

It is the place to which I ran from my front-porch steps
after I saw a terrible lightning bolt strike,
heard its boom.
The hospital chimney!
I ran at my top speed to see this brick giant.
Yes,it had a jagged, open rip from top to bottom.

It is hard to believe this memory,
but I see myself there standing alone,
as if I were first on scene,
mouth open to this destructive miracle by nature.

It is harder to believe another memory,
but I remember standing nearby,
a few years earlier--
propped by my dad's hand on the hood of his car.
My mother was in the hospital,
a patient
waving from a second-floor window.
She had to see her son on his first birthday.

I remember watching my dad disappear
around the front of the hospital.

I remember waiting, waiting
until he came back
to take me out of the car,
stand me on the hood,
and tell me to wave,

wave to that vague figure 
(behind a screen at a second-floor window ).
Dad assured me that was Mom.

:: :: ::

It always seemed normal
(and I know this to be untrue)
that my father’s railroad should put our hospital
where I could run to it,
walk to it,
whenever I needed it.
Once I went with a policeman in his car.
But that must be another story
so that this story can conclude:
I was born.

 

– – – – – – – 

published in The Famous Big-Stick Ambush.

– – – – – – –

The “She had to see her son on his first birthday” line is, of course, not in the original memory. I was told this years later when I mentioned my memory to Mom. It is she who told me it was my first birthday. (I believe this is recorded in one of the Dad-Mom story-telling sessions of which I have audio recordings.) She said something like, “I told Pete I wanted to see my son on his first birthday.” It is easy for me to believe it was a birthday even though I don't remember that fact. I do wonder, however, if Mom had the number right. It's easier to believe that I would remember a fragment from my second birthday than my first. But, then I ask: if it were a later year, wouldn't she, in quoting herself, have called me “Bobby” rather than “my son.” If I had been two, wouldn't she have been relieved to have a few days away from me if I were in my terrible-two stage? We shall never know. I know it was not my third birthday, for of that I have a memory that I long thought was my earliest. I burst into the kitchen that day from the back yard and asked Mom what she was doing. Her response, "I'm making your birthday cake." That is all I remember of that day, but I do remember remembering it from time to time.

(c) from date of posting, by Bob Komives, Fort Collins

Blackman Rebuilding

 

Blackman Rebuilding at Dartmouth; Only Three Starters Return From 1963 Ivy Co‐Champions

Sept. 8, 1964

HANOVER, N. H., Sept. 7—A winning football team has become a tradition at Dartmouth College since Bob Blackman became coach 10 years ago.

During that span the Indians won the Ivy League title outright in 1958 and 1962 and shared the championship with Princeton last season. The record is a strong testimonial to Blackman's dedication and perseverance: In nine previous seasons Dartmouth has won 54 games, lost 24 and tied three. The Indians have never finished lower than third in the league.

But this season it looks as if Blackmail's problems are real ones, and it will take all his concentation to solve them.

There are but three starters among the 16 letter‐men returning from 1963. Five linemen and three‐quarters of the backfield of that winning combination have been graduated.

So Blackman faces an almost complete rebuilding job with the second and third stringers of last year. The particular problems are at fullback, center and right guard.

The mainstays of the first unit are Ted Bracken and Ed Keible at left guard; Bob Komives at center; Tom Clarke of Ridgewood, N. J., at right end, and Capt. John McLean at right halfback.

These four gained valuable experience a year ago, but the other candidates on the 77-man squad are short on playing time. The other leading line candidates are Jaan Lumi of Port Washington, L. I., Jerry LaMontagne, Pete Sapione of Port Chester, N. Y., and Pete Frederick.

The backfield will be manned by Bob O'Brien at left halfback, Bruce Gottschall at quarterback and Mike Urbanic at fullback. Urbanic, a 200-pound junior, has been converted from right half to replace Dick Horton. Horton, a major league baseball prospect, has given up football to concentrate on the diamond.

Gottschall earned his letter last season mainly as a defensive back. Blackman says he is head and shoulders above any of the other quarterbacks right now. But Gottschall is a question mark as a passer, a department where Dartmouth's aerialists have been the league yardage leaders in four of the last six seasons.

Sapione's severe knee unjury, suffered a year ago, makes the right guard situation precarious. The 240-pound senior is unable to take part in any contact work, but if his knee heals quickly, Sapione will fill the line's trouble spot amply.

There's no question of Komives's ability. He is the anchor of the line. The problem is lack of depth behind him, and Blackman may have to do some switching to shore up the spot.

Despite limited varsity experience, Dartmouth's three platoons will be in the thick of the Ivy League race, Blackman believes. Captain McLean expressed it this way: “Maybe that inexperience will be our strong point. For two years most of us sat on the bench. We have no laurels to rest upon. The fellows who won the championships are gone. Now its our turn.”

 (c) from NYTimes

https://www.nytimes.com/1964/09/08/archives/blackman-rebuilding-at-dartmouth-only-three-starters-return-from.html

 

Two years ago this morning

 

I write this on August 13, 2023. Two years ago this morning, I awoke early in my motel on Snelling Avenue in St. Paul, Minnesota—a few blocks from my boyhood home. Sweaty and more than a bit out of my mind after another dreadful night, I was to transfer to another motel closer to my 60^th high-school reunion which would begin that evening. I could not get beyond the thought that I was certain to infect everyone in attendance with this new thing called COVID There were so many sane options for me to chose, but instead I packed up, got in my car, and drove south out of St. Paul—informing no one. My symptoms got worse as I drove. After fewer than 70 miles, I pulled into a motel in Owatana, Minnesota that happened to have a room I could occupy immediately. Again, there were so many good options for actions and communications. Instead, I apparently thought I could rest and recover. After a miserable day and a yet more miserable night I was in an ever worsening brain fog. I chose to leave the motel in the morning, get into my car and back onto the highway. It is hard for me to believe that I actually thought I could drive home to Colorado. I do remember nothing until I was pulled over by an State patrol officer (or was he a county sheriff?) as I headed west on what I believe was highway 20 or 30 in Iowa. Through the rear-view mirror I saw him exit his car, draw his gun and point it at me. That cleared the fog enough that I could begin to record some memory. When I opened the door of my Honda Fit he asked me not to move or get out as he informed me that I had been reported for erratic driving and tailgating. The vague details of what I remember and what I have been told of subsequent events are interesting enough to be written down, but here I record only that a couple of hours later, another door opened. From my hospital bed in Fort Dodge, Iowa I could see the nurse standing at the door as she told me that I did have COVID. 

 

Memories slowly-by-slowly become clearer and yet more humbling, interesting, and touching from that moment, but here I record only that on August twenty-second I was back in my Fort Collins home.

(c) from date of posting, by Bob Komives, Fort Collins

A Well-tanned Memory

There is no real story here—just a well-tanned memory.

It starts with my my five-plus-decades-past Model Cities identification badge from Little Rock, Arkansas. I rediscovered an image of the badge when posting a link on Facebook to “Little Rock Story #1”. I noticed that the tan I had earned during the previous two years as a Peace Corps volunteer near the Pacific Coast of Guatemala still lingered on my face.

For reasons more, I hope, than narcissism, that tan memory caused me to search for an almost four-decades-past photo of me with my parents and siblings at my parents' fiftieth wedding anniversary, in St. Paul, February, 1985.

I could not find it in my archives, but my sister Judy (2^nd from left) and her husband Leaman found it in theirs. I had remembered correctly that, despite hints of resemblance, I looked out-of-place because of the Central American tan I brought to a place where everybody else was well into their annual acquisition of winter-white. I had flown up alone to the celebration from Costa Rica where the Colorado Komives family was in the midst of a 28-month residence brought on by my work in watershed management. I did get out into the field some during my work around Central America. However, the tan came mostly from weekend fun on an outdoor basketball court near our home in Turrialba. It was not until I was back in Costa Rica and photographs of the anniversary celebration began to show up that I saw how not-Minnesotan I had looked. I don't recall anyone mentioning the tan during my visit. Of course, Minnesotans can be close-lipped about personal things, but there is a more likely explanation of why nobody mentioned my exotic look. After all, they work and play outside in myriad ways through the extra-long days of their long-hot summers. The same can be said for guests from the several other states represented at the celebration. They had most likely arrived at September well-tanned and failed to notice a gradual tint change in their mirrors as deep summer moved inexorably into deep winter. 

Thus, again, there is no real story here—just my well-tanned memory.

 

 

(c) from date of posting, by Bob Komives, Fort Collins

Little Rock Story #2: In Lynn Found

Among the documents I had to write as part of my work in Little Rock was a relocation plan. Urban Renewal in the 50s and 60s had given itself a bad name for dealing poorly and unfairly with people displaced by urban renewal schemes. “Urban Removal” became the pejorative nickname for urban renewal. By the time the Model Cities program came into being the Department of Housing and Urban Development required that every plan submitted by a locality include a relocation plan to show how people displaced by the renewal could be beneficiaries rather than victims of the plan.

To my recollection, our neighborhood plans did not displace anybody, though there might be a way to use urban relocation assistance as a way to help some households voluntarily upgrade their housing. To that end, I read the requirements and guidelines well and penned a relocation plan that I hoped would both gain approval and help some people in our neighborhoods. Since our goal was to help people stay in a much upgraded neighborhood, the plan was quite modest. I remember no details other than that the plan could not come directly from City Hall; It had to come through the Little Rock Housing Authority which was a semi-independent partner to the Model Cities Program which was, indeed, housed in City Hall under the city manager's office. A woman at the Housing Authority was my liaison for the work. I wrote the plan, she reviewed it, offered a few suggestions and took the plan through her board for its approval.

That was the end of it, except … .

During the summer between my first and second year of planning school at the Graduate School of Design, I took a short-term position with the town of Lynn, Massachusetts which now had its own Model Cities program. I confess I did not do much good work for that program, my head now in the clouds of graduate school. However, they did ask me if I could help write their housing relocation plan, to which I said, yes. I was told I should first go to the offices of the Department of Housing and Urban Development in Boston to talk with the woman in charge of housing for the federal agency. She was known by the Lynn staff as someone who was difficult to deal with and could not be avoided.

I made an appointment and dutifully went in to face her music before beginning my task. I found her serious, but pleasant. I am not sure of the complete range of her duties, but several things from Lynn had crossed her desk that she believed were inadequately prepared. I told her my responsibilities only extended to the housing relocation plan. Before she would let me loose to submit more inadequate work, she took out a report, plopped it on the desk in front of me and told me that if I wanted to do an acceptable plan I should model it after the one she laid before me--“The best I have seen,” she told me. Well, color blind but in love with purple, I had foisted a purple color scheme on the work we submitted from Little Rock. And there it was; I recognized it immediately: the relocation plan I had prepared in Little Rock. She had worked for the Department of Housing and Urban Development in Fort Worth when we submitted our plan. It went first to the regional office in Fort Worth. These documents did not carry names of authors, and since it came most directly from the Housing Authority, she was hesitant to believe that I was the author. I'm not sure I ever fully convinced her. However, Lynn did get a start on a damn good housing relocation plan the summer I drafted it for them.

Apparently, this is a story I have seldom if ever told. It fit nicely into a conversation among friends a few evenings ago. When my wife told me later that she liked the story but could not recall having heard it, I decided it was time to write down Little Rock Stories, #1 and #2.

 

 

(c) from date of posting, by Bob Komives, Fort Collins

Little Rock Story #1: The Immortal Words of Mr. Liggens.

 

I do not know when it began, but I was working in Littler Rock Arkansas's Model Cities program when I first recognized I had a serious case of Acronym-Allergy. Acronyms make me itch and sneeze. Thus when I was staff for two citizen committees (one, housing; the other infrastructure) covering the two target neighborhoods in Little Rock I refused to voice acronyms in this acronym infested world.

I erroneously thought that long-term I would win the battle. Aware that personal computers could not be many years or decades off, I was convinced they would obviate the need for acronyms. It might always be faster to type “EPA”, but the computer would seamlessly change that to “Environmental Protection Agency”, and when we spoke we would use the full term for the sake of clarity. I could not have been more wrong, but that sad truth is almost irrelevant to this story.

I worked weekly with my committees over the year I was in Little Rock, never wavering in my refusal to use acronyms. Others on the staff, did use them, of course. The one heard most frequently was “HUD”—rhyming with “mud.” I could not completely shelter the members of my committees from this abandonment of the English language because there were occasional full-up community meetings in which the hud-word was uttered. All anybody ever heard from me, however, was “The Department of Housing and Urban Development”. This can be a mouthful, I admit, but I believe it rolled off my tongue as if it were a line of poetry or a song lyric.

Over the course of the year, each committee and its staff person developed a chapter for the plan in which we would ask the Department of Housing and Urban Development and other federal agencies for millions of dollars to give Little Rock and our target neighborhoods a grand leap toward eliminating urban problems which, in my domains, included deteriorated housing, flood hazards, water and sewer inadequacies, street and traffic problems. My committees and I felt pretty good about what we were proposing, and we knew we would likely get the necessary money because the War on Poverty had made Model Cities its poster children. If we did our work well, our proposal would be met with the rubber-stamp, “APPROVED”, at federal agencies—including the lead agency, The Department of Housing and Urban Development. We did do our work well!

After much work, we came to the final meeting of the year. The combined membership of all committees from both neighborhoods assembled at a local school to vote on the whole package that we were to send off to the federal government: Little Rock's Model Cities Plan. There were a few sticking points. I don't remember what they were, but they were nothing that threatened to doom the plan. They did threaten to drag out the meeting until the wee hours of the morning. To the rescue came Mr. Liggens, a star member of one of my committees. Believing there had been enough debate, he rose to speak the powerful few words that brought the plan quickly to a vote and won its final approval.

 

I have special reason to remember those words; they not only warm my heart but also give me a life lesson in humility:

“We have talked long enough,” said Mr. Liggens,

“It is time to vote to send this plan off to Mr. Hud--or whatever his name is!”

 

 

 

 

(c) from date of posting, by Bob Komives, Fort Collins

1964, Dartmouth, My Last Season of Football

  

Dressed in Feed Sacks

In the late 1940s through the 1950s several of my shirts were from feed sacks as were my bedroom curtains and our kitchen curtains, as were several dresses of my sisters and mother. Mom's brother, Clarence, had a dairy and turkey farm in Polk County, Wisconsin. When we visited ("up from The Cities") my mom would lay out the emptied sacks from the turkey-feed and make her choice based on what she needed for her next sewing project. I believe, she may have paid her brother a nickle or dime per sack because there was a tiny extra cost or hassle in choosing feed in those sacks.

Kickapoo and the "White Hair"

 

In 1984, between shaving off my beard and moving to Central America to regrow my beard and work on watershed management, I consulted with the Kickapoo Indians of northern Mexico who were to choose land for a reservation on the U.S. side of the border in Eagle Pass, Texas (as authorized by federal legislation). I visited them in Eagle Pass and also  visited briefly their ejido in Mexico. Later that summer I met with them and the Oklahoma Band of Kickapoo at a city park in Fort Lupton, Colorado near where members of both bands were working in agriculture. 

Top: Múzquiz Mexico, the Kickapoo ejido. 

Bottom: meeting in Fort Lupton Colorado.

The Fort Lupton meeting used three languages--most of us fluent in only two. For example: when I spoke I spoke in Spanish to the Mexican Kickapoo; they translated my words into Kickapoo for the Oklahomans who translated them into English for the Sioux lawyer and the Texas preacher who were also involved. The little "game of telephone" helped me and others know if our words were understood. It was a great meeting! 

I learned that in the Kickapoo-Kickapoo conversations I was called "White Hair".

They acquired their land, but I know little of its subsequent development and the ongoing welfare of the Kickapoo. I see they have a casino.

Satellite view of Kickapoo land in Eagle Pass, 2021

 

 

 

 

(c) from date of posting, by Bob Komives, Fort Collins

Valentine 's Day

I feel a bit like an extraterrestrial each year on Valentine's Day. 

It was a fun day in school in first grade--and through fourth grade when I made a paper-and-cardboard cash register with a slot at the top in which to deposit our valentines and a drawer to pull them out for distribution on February 14. From there my memory goes blank. 

I don't believe I ever had a date on Valentine's Day. I guess I was not in love. Nor did I feel personal pressure, nor peer pressure, nor girl-friend pressure to pretend. While eventually Marney and I were indeed in love, my guess is that we were never in the same town on February 14 until after we got married. Perhaps our letters had an extra portion of romance that week. When we got married the day had no special meaning among the Guatemalans of our Peace Corps site.

Then came Little Rock, Boston, two daughters, graduate school, Martha's Vineyard--aware of the day, for sure, but never part of a peer culture that gave it emphasis. 

I remember smiling and puzzling when I read how important the day had become in Japan. 

In the late 70s we moved to Fort Collins. I believe it was more the decade than the place, but I found myself in a culture where what had been for me a day to be enjoyed mostly by kids had become a day celebrated with enthusiasm and obligations by adults. My first reaction was a wish for adults to get out of the way and let kids have the fun. Yet, I could not avoid some guilt induced by annual comments from friends that I was not romantic, that I was neglecting a romantic obligation. 

I had these thoughts and feelings on February 14. Now, two days later, they are slipping away fast enough that I must capture them before they disappear.  Also, I do believe I must be grateful that there is a day each year that becomes a ceremony  to remind me of at least one item in my satchel of inadequacies.




(c) from date of posting, by Bob Komives, Fort Collins

The Boy with Green Hair

December 20, 2020. 

Sometimes it is therapeutic to feel guilty. It was 1948 or '49. A mother of five takes her five-year-old on a streetcar to a downtown theater for a rarest time almost to herself. In sympathy to others on the theater's main floor, she escapes with her naughty son to a sparsely populated balcony. There he continues to be bored . (He argues, for example, that they are watching a new screen in a different theater.) Poor lady. How could I have been so narcissistic even at that age to ignore her needs for a nice afternoon outing? I know that early in the video era I rediscovered the film and watched it, though I remember little. I found it to be strangely intellectual for kid and adult--an anti-war (or is it pro-war?) movie a few years after wwII--based on a deep short story of 1946. Tonight I'm going to try to twist an arm in my bubble and watch it again. I expect to marvel that such a movie came out in 1948 while confronting memory of another of my imperfections.

It took me 72 years to know it. But, after watching '
The Boy with Green Hair' again tonight, I must say it is a gem of a movie and I must brag again of my good fortune in the woman who took her naughty boy along on her day to see it.

 

(c) from date of posting, by Bob Komives, Fort Collins

 

Fifty-seven of this blog's autobiographic sketches have a theme-tag "AmbushBook".

Refined, edited versions of these appear in my 137-page book:

 The Famous Big-Stick Ambush

 

 

I also wrote a Foreword and an Afterword for the book

to add my perspective on this enjoyable endeavor.

 

Sample the stories here below in any order that suits your whim. Click on "Older Posts" to see more.

You may also wish to read them as I organize and present them in

The Famous Big-Stick Ambush.

 

(c) from date of posting, by Bob Komives, Fort Collins

Polio Across the Alley

Polio Across the Alley 

Buddy Himes' mother caught polio. I was aware of how much adults feared that we kids would suffer polio. I remember scenes on television from the Sister Kenney Institute in Minneapolis. They showed victims confined to "iron lungs" and others trying to learn to walk again at. I remember the summer we were forbidden to run through lawn sprinklers because that might give us polio. Yet, the disease remained a distant abstraction for me until Buddy's mom came home. 

Her arms and legs were paralyzed, but she was kind and welcoming as ever. Each time I ran into the house with Buddy she was in the kitchen smiling and sitting in a chair that was more contraption than chair. It had wheels; cables went from metal frames above her to her wrists. She was still practicing ways to make her pencil-thin arms and hands useful. Buddy seemed accustomed to his mother's predicament. I never got comfortable during my moments in her presence. However, I did not have long before they moved from their house across the alley. They moved to a brand new home at County Road B2 962. 

(c) from date of posting, by Bob Komives, Fort Collins