A Simpler Time is about life during the 1930s and 1940s in the Midwest as remembered by a curious and impressionable youngster. The author grew up in Dearborn, Michigan, when school classes were well-sprinkled with children whose parents - like his - were immigrants, attracted by job opportunities in a community that was home to Henry Ford and his powerful Ford Motor Company.
Here are stories about an era when children had glorious free time, without constant supervision by adults, and when that time was generally spent outdoors. They tell of games that exist today only in distant memories, like rubber-gun wars, marbles, flipping baseball cards, and rushing to the back of the Iceman's truck to grope under his canvas cover for pieces of ice while he made his delivery.
The author takes you back to that past era so you live it together with him, whether he is making silk thread from dried cocoons at Greenfield Village, hitching a ride on a freight train in Montana, standing lookout on the periscope shears of a submarine underway in the Pacific, or learning to milk a cow on a small farm near Milan, Michigan
It is also a coming-of-age story about a sometimes rebellious youngster who survives detours through trade school and the Navy and finally, at the University of Michigan, finds a direction for his life.
The Missing Chapter
The following is from the author:
I was persuaded -- by people whose judgment I still respect -- to delete an important part of my life story from my book. They felt that a discussion of young male reactions to the opposite sex would be out of place, i.e. too personal. At least that's what they said.
Yet what was my book if not personal? It wasn't as if I were peddling gossip about others. I was only trying to explain how my relationship with girls affected me. I was fascinated by them. They were different. I'm not just talking about girls my own age; I fell in love (using that term very broadly) with some of my teachers, too.
Below is what was missing from A Simpler Time.
Chapter 10
Discovering the Opposite Sex
[PHOTO - Caption: A summer day with Mary Painter]
Sex - ah, wonderful sex - and how attracted I was to the girls, and women, even as a youngster. I met my first love when I was only three. Mary Painter had a cute, cherub-like face and dark curly hair. We played together a lot and we held hands. She was my friend. After I started school I met lots of new girls and fell in love with several of the pretty ones - and some pretty teachers, too, especially Miss Dombroski, a blonde beauty who taught fourth grade.
Actually, I found it much easier to talk to some of the girls on our block than to other boys, and I enjoyed being with them. At age seven or eight I entered and explored the wonderful world of kissing, this time with Vivian, a perky girl who lived across the street a few houses away. We played hopscotch on their sidewalk and sometimes cuddled together and kissed inside her home. Once when other kids were there we played spin-the-bottle. We clutched at one another and pressed lips and bodies together like in the movies, all in good clean fun. What else did we know?
A new frontier in sex opened up when I was eleven and we started dancing class. Students from the Edison Institute at Greenfield Village came to our school to demonstrate ball-room dancing. They taught us the basics: square dancing, the fox trot and the waltz.
The fox trot and the waltz were not separated, parallel-play dancing like today, where partners just gyrate, twist and sometimes don't even look at one another. Our dancing was the hands-on, hips-touching kind. We held one another, feeling our bodies in contact, our movements in synch with the beat. Some of the girls in my class were twelve or almost thirteen and starting to fill out, which made contact with their budding softness hellishly disconcerting for me. In no time I became a walking erection.
My prize dancing partner was Gracie Arsenault. Her bosom was already well developed, so dancing calmly with her was next to impossible, at least for me. What agonies I went through, trying to conceal the little bulge in my pants. I was sure that everyone in the gym noticed it.
About that time I developed an agonizing crush on a new girl in my class: Willa Johnston. She was a willowy brunette with a look of detachment and a sweet smile that melted me and made my knees weak. I thought she was the prettiest creature in the school, but I never had the nerve to say anything to her. I thought she'd just laugh at me. Dancing with her in class was difficult for me because the contact was so stimulating. I'm sure that lots of the other boys were smitten by her.
I don't think Willa ever knew I existed; I was just one of the crowd, on the outside looking in. Which is what I actually did a couple of times when I found myself near her home. I walked over and stood across the street from her home, hoping to catch a glimpse of her through their front window.
Epilogue: I met Willa in the University of Michigan library about ten years later. I forget how we happened to be seated at the same table. Neither of us looked a bit like we did back at Woodworth School, so I have no idea how we recognized one another or how we got started talking about Dearborn.
The long and friendly conversation did give me closure of a sort, though, because it was clear that there was no real bond between us. It was as if we were two different sets of people: the then us, who never really knew one another; and the now us, who were meeting for the first time and had nothing in common but an empty past.
In the thirties, no school that I know of offered sex education, but that doesn't mean we kids were ignorant about the subject. We might not have known much about technique, but we had the general idea. Kids who worked on farms saw what went on with animals. Anyone who had a dog, particularly an unspayed female, could have seen the same thing. Some of us kids used to visit a fellow student whose father kept rabbits. It was great fun to put a buck in the cage with one of the does and watch them go at it.
Most of us boys in the city learned what little we knew about sex from other kids and from dirty cartoon books and magazines with photographs of copulation and other sexual adventures. We leafed through these with open-mouthed awe.
I happened to get the basics of my own sex education when I was about eleven, and from a scholarly source: Havelock Ellis' Psychology of Sex, . The parents of a boy next door had a copy and he and I read parts of it - the graphic ones - together. It was fascinating reading, but I doubt that I really understood most of it.
What I was looking for as a youngster, though, was more than instruction and fantasizing; I yearned for an opportunity to enjoy sex. Can a fellow ever forget his first fondling of a girl's breasts?
It still seems like yesterday, but I was only twelve. I was sitting next to a well-endowed girl in the Carmen, a new movie theater with plush reclining seats. We whispered back and forth awhile and then I put my arm around her shoulder and we snuggled together. The next thing I knew I had my other hand inside her blouse, stroking her soft flesh, scarcely believing what was happening. That excitement gave me fantasy material for weeks.
My next Big Event was wrestling with Betty Sue [I wouldn't want to embarrass her by giving her real name]. A tall, well-built blonde, Betty Sue lived nearby, so I saw her often. I had never gone mano a mano with her because she could beat the snot out of me, and I knew it.
She had everything on her side: she was older, taller, heavier and stronger than I was. I'm certain that she blossomed into a beautiful woman, but at that time she was just a great-looking tomboy. She was also - unwittingly - the source of a young boy's high sexual moment.
A few of us kids were playing in the barn at the Ford homestead, jumping down from the hay loft into a large bin filled with hay. A general wrestling match broke out, and I was grabbed by Betty Sue. We grappled and rolled around, and I tried to break loose. In the process, my hands found some nice soft places on her. I ended up on my back, with her straddling me. She grabbed my wrists and pinned my arms back. I looked up at her as she was leaning over me, and suddenly liked the way she looked and smelled, and I surrendered without a whimper. It was a moment that I am sure meant nothing to her, but I never forgot it.
