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Today's Featured Biography
Phil Freyder
Born to a materialistic tyrant and a frightened alcoholic in 1945, I was among the early unwitting participants in the post-war baby boom. It all started for me in the maternity ward of the Jenny Edmundson Hospital in Council Bluffs. Years later an allegedly Tibet-trained seer who claimed to be able to read people's past lives said I had come into this avatar from a previous life in 1942. According to his reading, a guard at a Nazi concentration camp in Czechoslovakia battered me to death with his rifle butt. At the moment of my brutal murder I was a tiny baby. The seer said that that experience had deeply jaundiced my view of the universe...and nearly made him puke.
Born to a materialistic tyrant and a frightened alcoholic in 1945, I was among the first unwitting participants in the post-war baby boom. It all started for me in the maternity ward of the Jenny Edmundson Hospital in Council Bluffs, Iowa. Years later an allegedly Tibet-trained seer who claimed to be able to read people's past lives said I had come into this avatar from a previous life in 1942. According to his reading, a guard at a Nazi concentration camp in Czechoslovakia battered me to death with his rifle butt. At the moment of my brutal, blood- and brain-spattering murder I was a tiny baby. The seer said that that experience had deeply jaundiced my view of the universe...and nearly made him puke as he saw it played out in his visionary “trance”.
When I was three, my father, a salesman with a lightbulb personality, packed my mother and me into his very dark blue pre-war Studebaker and and hauled us across the Missouri into Omaha. We installed ourselves in a little wood frame house with white clapboard siding, a sandstone arch extending the facade on the right side, and a white picket fence. Its address was 1702 South 58th Street—on the corner of 58th and Hickory Streets. The arch and adjoining section of fence were graced by climbing roses. One of my cousins once commented that the joint reminded her of an English country cottage.
My first visual memory of the house, from the day we went there to close the deal with the realtor, finds us in the highest room in the place, the room that was to become my bedroom until my sister took it over. The adults are talking, I'm looking out of the window. I see a street intensely lit by a hot summer afternoon sun, a neighbor's lawn dominated by a great gnarled elm tree, and a collie trotting down the street. That was Soapy, Jimmy Stallons' dog, I was to learn later.
Another visual memory. From my dormer-window high bedroom, I could easily access the attic. One Saturday morning I climbed up the attic stairs, made my way to the small louvered ventilation outlet at the apex of the east wall of the house, smack over the garage, and peered down through the slats at my father in the driveway. He was leaving for work. As always, he was wearing a hat, sportcoat and tie and held a smoking cigarette between his lips toward one side of his mouth. In the driveway, where he'd parked it the night before, was his deep blue 194? Studebaker. That was probably the car he bought before he went to war (in 1941 or ’42) and used to make his sales calls for the Gooch Milling company (http://www.nebraskahistory.org/sites/mnh/neb-made/milling.htm). He sold it back to the dealer when he enlisted and, when he was demobilized in 1945 or so, repurchased it for the exact same price. Very few private passenger cars had been manufactured in Detroit during the war. Years of exposure to the sun had turned that deep, deep midnight blue finish iridescent.
The house next door saw a succession of dwellers. The first set was an elderly couple. After the husband died in his sleep one night, his widow decided to move away. The next occupants were the family of Robert Allen, who was my age and a good playmate. Robert's mother, a divorced alcoholic, often sent him down to the basement to pluck a bottle of brandy from her stash. "I don't know how she stands the stuff," Robert remarked one day. He had a little brother, Jimmy, who at three or four had picked up his mother's swearing habit, albeit with imperfect pronunciation. "Dammo!" he would often exclaim when frustrated or irritated. One day I offered Jimmy a bit of my Babe Ruth candy bar. “Don’t take the whole thing, Jimmy,” I said, “just a bite off the end." He obliged by cramming nearly the whole bar into his mouth and striving to cut off the largest possible chunk of it with his incisors. But he'd taken so much of it into his mouth that he couldn't quite get his incisors through the chocolate-covered log. He had to back off an inch and rip off a smaller piece, leaving the rest of the candy bar glistening with his saliva and marked by his teeth.
My sister Wendy (changed decades later to Wenndi for numerological reasons) was born at Omaha's Children's Hospital in 1951. Since I had ruled the roost for five and a half years before her arrival, I thoroughly resented her. As I watched my mother changing her diapers on the second-floor closet shelf used to bathe and dress her, what I saw was a hideously long, red, repellent creature who was always screaming. She was a colicky baby. I can recall my mother holding the inexhaustibly squalling infant while walking back and forth, back and forth the length of our living room, trying to calm her abdominal pain. On at least one occasion I recall vividly, Mom inflated the decibel level by berating me at the top of her lungs all the while. I was inconsiderate (major felony in our family), egotistical....
I wasn't happy when the Allens moved away.
The next residents of the house next door may have been the Bordys; my memory is not clear about this. I remember Harold Bordy as an affable fellow about my age, tall, blond and of a softish consistency.
The Bordys moved away and were replaced by a perfectly normal couple with a daughter, whose name might have been Pamela. Inexplicably, I found the family intensely irritating. When the father set about mowing his lawn, I would sometimes fire dried peas at the machine through a striped plastic tube we called a pea shooter. I did this from a convenient hiding place behind one of our swinging wooden garage doors. The peas would rattle as they hit the lawn mower, the man would put on a perplexed look and I'd shoot some more peas at it. He'd finally shut it off and examine it to see why it was apparently tearing itself apart while I guffawed silently behind the garage door. Then he'd fire the mower up again and I'd restart the game.
His daughter Pamela was a pretty little girl who was my sister's age. They played together often. For no reason at all that I can identify, I thoroughly despised her. I was always aggressive and hostile in her presence, although I never aimed any of these feelings directly at her; I had no reason to. One day she was playing by herself on the little sidewalk that bordered her house on its north side. I watched her from our southern strip of lawn. I held a makeshift “whip” in my hand—a slender branch that had fallen from our weeping willow. Aware of my presence but not wanting, or not daring, to say anything to me, she moved alongside her house, chanting "Bohssey-bo, bohssey-bo, bohssey-bo" to herself and skipping occasionally. I snarled and growled fiercely and cracked my “whip” again and again. Her family eventually moved away. She contracted a form of sleeping sickness that affected her brain, making her incorrigible. Her parents had to intern her in a mental institution for the rest of her life.
As a grade schooler I was definitely a tree ape, spending long summer hours gently swaying and endlessly fantasizing in the sturdy branches of a massive mulberry tree overarching the sandbox in our back yard. Mrs. Flint, a compulsive neighbor who invariably became anxious as she observed me sitting or clambering amid the foliage, would frequently telephone my mother: "Mrs. Freyder, don't you think you should get Philip to come down from that tree? I'm afraid he'll hurt himself!" My mother would make some politely dismissive answer while she thought, "You meddlesome old bag! He's perfectly safe up there and, what's better, he's out from under my feet!" I never fell out of the tree. I ate tons of mulberries. I still fantasize a lot.
One of my earliest childhood fantasies goes back to my first years in that high, pre-attic bedroom at the top of a steep flight of stairs flowing down to the second-floor bathroom. Sometimes I'd sit on those stairs and watch my father shaving in the morning. He used a safety razor and foam. That early fantasy was engendered by my fascination with the random patterns and and figures created by frost on my bedroom window, eerily backlighted on winter nights by the streetlamp on the corner of 58th and Hickory. I can't recall what ethereal creature my four- or five-year-old eyes thought they detected in the etching on the gelid window. Because it was unknown in the real, diurnal world, it needed an invented name. I called it the Cleepadona. As I crouched in bed in the darkened room on bended legs, leaned forward to place my hands palms down on the mattress and rocked rhythmically forward and back to sedate myself in preparation for sleep, I'd occasionally turn my head to the left to peer at the frosted windowpane, looking for the Cleepadona crouching down in or stealing silently through the silvery forestscape.
Another protagonist of my early fantasies was a real person we called Skippy. Edna Hanford Kelly, my maternal grandmother, had been widowed before I was born. Her husband, John Hedges Kelly, had been editor of the Sioux City Tribune in the days when the northwest Iowa community supported two dailies. Early in their marriage, the editor, a Princeton graduate, put his Vassar-educated wife in charge of everything connected with the management, repair and maintenance of the family home. (He found that appropriate for an Ivy League college alumna.) He dubbed her "the skipper of the ship". To the six grandchildren engendered by three of their four daughters, she was simply Skippy. Herself a scion of the Hanford family, descendants of a Puritan divine who left England and settled in Norwalk, Connecticut in 1750 and founders of the Hanford Produce Company and Hanford Airlines (eventually sold to Braniff Airlines), Skippy accumulated a lifetime store of the lore and culture treasured by rich Americans. When she visited her daughters’ families, she would habitually bring along a care package laden with some of the emblems of this culture: smelly Camembert cheese, caviar, annual reports of the companies she favored investing in…. She was a veteran of several European tours, a late-night crossword puzzle addict, a profitable investor and race track bettor, and a dedicated reader who endowed us with a veritable family library embracing Olive Beaupre Miller's elegantly illustrated My Book House and the World Book Encyclopedia for us kids and, for the grown-ups, the Harvard Classics, a 50-volume “five-foot shelf of books” that, in fact, inhabited five feet of shelving in our living room. Charles W. Eliot’s anthology offered everything from Plato and Aeschylus to Machiavelli and Dante to Shakespeare and Cervantes to Darwin and Jenner. The title that most intrigued me over the years, because I found it utterly undeciperable (my grade school conversational Spanish was of no help whatsoever), was I Promessi Sposi by Alessandro Manzoni. I never read a word of that 17th century Italian novel, nor anything else in the Five-Foot Shelf, although my sister and I did use the encyclopedia and delved into My Book House, and I subsequently read a number of the authors assembled by Dr. Eliot in other editions. Skippy's Christmas presents to us included subscriptions to children's magazines such as The Children's Digest and adult magazines such as The National Geographic and Horizon. Inevitably, to kids growing up in stultifying Omaha, Skippy belonged to a rare and exotic species.
The Skippy fantasy I recall finds me in my third-floor bedroom. I'm four or five years old. I've taken the wood building blocks out of the white-painted wooden toy box with its heavy wooden lid long since ripped off and built a house and surroundings. I chew briefly on a small piece of paper and, when it is fully soaked with saliva, I remove it from my mouth and mold it into an elongated blob of pulp which, I determine, represents Skippy's foot. Grasping the "foot" between a thumb and forefinger, I walk Skippy all around the house and neighorhood I've built, invent and recite her conversations with friends, relatives and neighbors, and generally take her through a busy, richly varied day.
A heavy sleeper as a child, I was unable to wake up and become sufficiently cognitive during the night to get out of bed, descend the steep stairs from my bedroom and make it down to the bathroom when my body demanded such sorties. So I peed in the bed until I was five or six. My father, a psychological illiterate, repeatedly warned me, "If you don't stop wetting the bed, it'll drop off!" (It, of course, was his chickenshit way of citing my penis.) His stern admonitions had no effect. Skippy became aware of this grave problem during one of her visits. Since she habitually stayed up quite late at night, she determined to lend a hand by climbing the stairs to my room in the middle of the night, lifting me out of my bed and carrying me down to the bathroom to have a slash, as the British used to say. This she tried. Once. With my inert body in her arms, she slipped on the stairs, fell and painfully bruised her hip. Either I remained sound asleep during the entire adventure or managed to get to the john to do my duty and promptly forgot it after I’d returned to the arms of Morpheus.
The solution to my bedwetting was ridiculously simple: a glass jar left on the bureau at night by my mother, who instructed me to use the receptacle as a chamber pot. This successful tactic excited my curiosity. Early one morning I filled the jar with some of my rich inner life, grasped it in both hands, examined the yellow liquid for a bit and asked myself, “Now what would this taste like?” With very little hesitation, I lifted the jar to my lips and quaffed a mouthful of my urine. It was warm and salty. Not nearly as pleasant or satisfying as the Seven-Up or rootbeer I often imbibed with gusto in those days. So there was no need for a second tasting.
Every time he saw me, Jimmy Stallons' older brother Gary, a cocky, mouthy adolescent with a phony, scornful laugh, would invariably say, "Freyder, I think I owe you a punch in the mouth." That was his standard line to all the little boys on the block. The young man was obviously an emblem of courage and nobility.
The Stallons were from Texas, as were the Reeses, who moved in shortly before we left the neighborhood for a custom-built house in west Omaha. Mr. Stallons worked at the stockyards, at that time a major regional meat packing center. Between Jimmy (my age) and Gary Stallons was Jeris, an adolescent girl who had an unabashed interest in sex.
One summer afternoon my peers Jimmy Stallons and Carl Cohen, who lived across 58th Street with his grocer father, housewife mother and little sister Marilyn, were down in my basement bedroom. I had been sent down into exile there as soon as Wendy was old enough to take over my housetop aerie. Carl and I were talking about sex. We were intensely imagining, as we had more than once before, how we'd lovingly undress one of the attractive University of Omaha coeds who lived in the neighborhood and explore the most recondite, mesmerizing regions of her lush young body. (I had a reasonably clear idea of what a nude woman looked like: on more than one occasion I'd woken my mother with my noisy fantasies of a Saturday morning, and she'd jumped out of bed naked and come bounding up the stairs to my original bedroom to ream me out.) Since I enjoyed drawing and painting and was already a habitu of the Joslyn museum (art classes and gallery talks), I suggested to Carl that, as we couldn't possibly get a woman to pose nude for us, he might slip down his pants, turn around and let me draw his butt, which I thought I might be able to feminize reasonably well from my imagination. He obliged and, just as I was getting started, there was a knock on my basement bedroom door. Now, the entrance to our basement, which also housed my father's home office with its great dark, heavy wooden desk topped by a slab of glass and ancient Underwood typewriter, as well as his darkroom, was just off the garage. The garage was usually open in summer, and anybody could walk in, come down the two or three steps that led from the concrete floor of the garage--right beside the washer and dryer ensconced at the end opposite the swinging wooden doors--and enter the three-purpose basement. Our visitor was Jeris Stallons. When she knocked, Carl hastily pulled up his pants and I hid my incipient depiction of his nates under a virgin sheet of paper. I opened, and she strolled in and asked, "What're y'all doin'?"
"Oh," I said hesitantly "I was just trying to draw a portrait of Carl here...."
"Can I see it?"
After some hemming and hawing, I pulled out the drawing and stammered that what we were really interested in was the female nude. She looked at my ridiculous droodle of Carl's ass, picked up a pencil, pulled out a fresh sheet of paper and said, "Well, the important thing is to get a girl's curves right...." and her voice trailed off as she began to sketch the contours of a young woman's body. "We want to make the line cut in here at the waist--and then flow...out...at the...hips...." Jimmy, Carl and I stared at her work in a hypnotic state of rapt attention. Our excitement was burgeoning by the nanosecond....
There was another knock on the door.
Possessed of a lightning-quick mind, Jeris immediately began penciling in the contours of a wide-flaring skirt that suddenly careened off the hips of her imaginary model. I went to the door and opened it. Standing in the doorframe was Jeris and Jimmy's dumpy, middle-aged mother. "What're y'all doin'?" she asked. Her crossed arms, voice tones feigning innocent curiosity and suspicion-arched eyebrows epitomized the attitude of the classic devious busybody. A dirty-minded redneck who could under no circumstances imagine that unsupervised children together in a closed room could be up to anything but delinquency. She walked in and over to the table where Jeris was still working on her drawing. "I was just showing the boys a few things about fashion art," she said. Now poker-faced, Mrs. Stallons glanced down coldly at the drawing and at her daughter. She made no comment other than to say, "Jeris, Jimmy, supper'll be on soon--tahm for us to go home."They left. Carl left. In the years since since that afternoon I've often speculated about all the things we seven- or eight-year-old boys might have learned about female anatomy if the old Stallons bag hadn't interrupted us.
Since my parents were amused by my invention of the name Cleepadona for my imaginary frost creature, they encouraged me to name our first cat, a domestic shorthair. I came up with Indubitably. I can't recall what happened to Indubitably, but he was replaced by a second cat, a gray and white domestic shorthair that was christened Tattletale Gray. If you like puns, you can replace --tale with -tail. The name came from the script of a 30-second television commercial (we got our first set in 1952, long after our more ambitious neighbors) promoting a hair-coloring product for women who were beginning to detect gray hairs creeping out of their follicles.
Monte Jo, my first grade heart throb, was the blonde, naturally curly-haired daughter of a construction industry employee who kept his family in a house trailer, which he apparently moved each time a new construction project took him to a new site. Seeing how smitten I was with her, my mother invited her and her mother over to our stone-and-wood-frame house on 58th and Hickory Streets. The two women talked over coffee and cake while Monte Jo and I played in my downstairs room, where I had arranged for us to do some watercolor painting. At one point while her hands were busy with her brush and picture, I kissed her on the cheek and called her cutie-pie. At some point I made one of those sudden clumsy moves (the sort of nervous gesture that has plagued me all my life, especially at the dinner table) that spilled the brush cleaning water on her dress. I apologized to her profusely and begged her not to make good on her threat to tell her mother. She nonethless went upstairs to report the incident. Her mother calmed her down, told her it didn’t matter, and we had some cake and milk. Not too long after that, she moved away with her family.
Somehow the overbearing loudmouth Gary Stallons found out about my love for Monte Jo (could it have been because I didn't stop talking about her for weeks?), and he occasionally ragged me about her: "How's your little girlfriend Monte Jo? You been kissin’ her? Hah?" Another of his attempts at humor consisted of answering his home telephone in a stentorian voice with the phrase "Fire Department!" Guaranteed to scare little kids like me into gulping and hanging up the receiver with trembling hand.
It wasn’t until the third grade that I developed a crush on light-skinned, dark-haired Gloria. It may well have been Gloria’s resemblance to my mother that attracted me to her. Apart from that, I’ve always had a penchant for Jewish girls. I kissed Gloria a few times on the playground during recess. She wasn't sure that was a good idea, and decided to consult her mother about it. Her mother opined that it was not advisable, so I stopped. End of that third grade romance.
The objects of my second third grade infatuation were two great big sixth graders who tooled around together. Their large size, full flowing skirts with flouncy petticoats and their budding breasts riveted my attention as I observed them on the playground of the newly built Belle Ryan School. Mary Ann Gatenby, a light-skinned brunette (again, her resemblance to my mother drew me in), was the daughter of a policeman. Her blonde friend Lynnea, who lived up the hill from us on Hickory Street, found my attraction to them an amusingly transparent case of puppy love. Her response was to mock me. When she saw me coming down the street, she often called out, “Well, well, well, if it isn’t Philip Freyder!”
While sitting together on the glider on the porch of the Gatenby house, the two girls would hold transcendent conversations. Lynnea: "My mother's going to take me to the beauty shop tomorrow for a shampoo and a haircut." Mary Ann: "My mother won't let me have a permanent. She says I'm too young." A pregnant pause ensues. Mary Ann bends down in the glider and places her head on the cushion, opening her mouth. “I’ve heard that if you leave your mouth open long enough, you’ll start crying. You can’t help it; it just happens,” she told Lynnea. She holds her mouth open. “How long does it take?” Lynea asks. Mary Ann remains silent, keeping her mouth open with great determination. "I'm not going to wait here all day!" says Lynnea, who has become impatient. I wasn’t either. I take my leave of the girls and return home.
Belle Ryan School had a principal: the implacably authoritarian, rigid, arrogant, punitive and overbearing old bag, Elsie W. Della. During recess one day I’d made a visit to the boys’ room with classmate Dennis Ocander, who promptly ensconced himself on the toilet in one of the doorless stalls and proceded to defecate while he affably described the texture and shape of his feces. Feeling a bit bored with all this, I entered an adjacent stall, clambered up on the toilet, grasped the top of the lateral walls and let myself swing freely for a few seconds between them. Just at that moment a younger boy—a skinny, mousy little fellow—came in and saw me at this harmless sport (no damage to the toilet or stall was intended or done). It never occurred to me that my innocent little caprice might be considered grossly wrong. The little fart promptly left and, as I was to discover later, reported this to his teacher, or perhaps directly to the principal herself. The next day Della strode into my classroom like a dreadnought steaming into port with the little fellow in tow. “Which one did you see swinging from the walls in the bathroom? Point to him!” Stern and swollen with righteousness, he pointed directly and unhesitatingly at me. “Young man!” the glowering Della spat out at me. “In this school we do not swing from walls in bathrooms like apes! Is that clear? I never want to hear of such shameful behavior again, do you hear?” She and the little rat left the room. Deeply humiliated, I crossed my arms on my desk and buried my head in them. I wept in shame. After a while Mrs. Butler told me brusquely to stop pouting, get my head out of my arms and get to work. Mrs. Butler had very little empathy.
I was the victim of variously crappy, incompetent or simply mediocre teachers in public grade school. The shining exception was my teacher during that all-important year, the first grade. Mrs. Brown was a vocational teacher with a strong will, empathy, love of children (she went so far as to adopt one of her students), effectiveness in the classroom and courage. Seeing the idiocy of the nefarious 'look-say' method (an educational fad that was imposed by ukase on all first grade teachers in our school system that year), she had the courage to clandestinely teach us to read according to the traditional phonetic method. She could have been fired for such disobedience. She was a peach. (A few years later, most of my peers who had been subjected to look-say had to take special phonetics-based remedial reading classes to repair the damage.) Mrs. Brown’s brilliant act was followed, in second grade, by a total neophyte who was incapable of maintaining order in her classroom. Miss Marian Hume spent the entire year screaming "Shut UP!" at us and didn't teach us diddly. How could she? She was exhausted and nearly voiceless most of the time. She retired from teaching after her first year to marry. Miss Hume was followed by Mrs. Butler, a third grade teacher guilty of nonfeasance who kept order in her classroom but, perhaps because she resented being lumbered with a bunch of laggards who were behind the power curve because of her predecessor's incompetence, interacted very little with us. My cumulative benefit from my second and third grade "education" was a mathematics deficiency. Among other lacunae, I didn't know my times tables. My fourth grade teacher, Mrs. O’Hara, was a psychoneurotic, an anal-retentive compulsive with the concomitant anal-expulsive streak. She quickly detected my math deficiency and turned math into an occasion of repeated humiliation, thus truly clinching the deficiency for me. Whence my avoidance of higher math and exact science in high school—this remains a major black hole in my education. Despite complaints from students and parents, as well as increasingly long absences during the academic year due to illness, my fourth grade teacher was kept on the staff until her retirement. I don't think this story is all that exceptional. It's past time something was done to prevent it from being repeated.
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