Photo: My families house in Pleasant Hills.The empty lot was pretty big. It was the corner lot right next our house. The neighborhood kids and I played baseball on that almost flat, weed covered field of so long ago. We used big rocks for our bases and we didn't need much else except the bat and ball plus a few willing kids.
That fateful day was Memorial Day and the year was about 1950. I wasn't a very good baseball player but this time I got a fine hit, maybe even a home run. As I rounded third base I tripped and took a hard fall.
When I got up my left arm was filled with a sharp and horrible pain and was limp, hanging at a strange angle. It was broken, my elbow was fractured.
My folks were out of town. They were at the horse races in Wheeling West Virginia. So my neighbor, Mr Kunzie, drove me to Shadyside hospital. There I was exceptionally lucky for they gave me a great doctor named Dr. Tuttle. He was an orthopedist, a bone doctor, a specialist.
In those days hospitals couldn't give a general anasethic without the permission of the parents or guardian so the staff tried to reach my parents at the racetrack by phone.
In the meantime Dr Tuttle was worried and decided to try to set my arm anyway.
It was a terribly painful process. Xrays had to be taken and developed each time the doctor set the bones to be sure they were lined up properly. Then he would start all over again because he couldn't get it exactly right.
He wanted me not to be crippled and it had to be set properly.
Finally the staff did reach my father who refused to give permission saying I needed to learn to tolerate a little pain. Shocked by that response, Doctor Tuttle expressed dismay and disbelief at my fathers incredibly callous decision.
Eventually the bones were set properly and I was put in a hospital room. Later they put on a cloth and plaster of parris cast that covered not only my left arm but also my entire upper torso from my waist to my shoulders.
The doctor explained this was necessary because if my elbow moved at all I could be crippled for life. In other words, if not set right the joint would never work properly.
So for the next 3 hot summer months I perspired and itched in the sweltering, seemingly endless, summer heat. An itch that couldn't be scratched because of the cast.
Being made of plaster of Paris the cast didn't breathe. When they removed this cast I had no use of the elbow. It seemed frozen in place. So I had to carry a heavy weight which over the next several months ever so slowly pulled my lower arm down. Over the next six months I slowly but surely regained almost complete use of my arm.
That Spring day so long ago was my first realization that my father wasn't the man I believed he was. Why would any man let a son suffer nearly 3 hours of a doctor trying to set an arm without being under general anesthesia? Maybe it was something in his background.
Dad, who signed his name J.D., but liked to be called Jim by friends, had been raised by a very strict and firm father who had worked his four sons very hard but not unreasonably.
Dad told stories of working in granddads farm and also in his feed mill, carring two fifty pound sacks of feed for hours on end. Dad rebelled as a teen in the early nineteen twenties and had tried to beat up his high school principal. His Dad felt my Dad needed more discipline and sent him off to Staunton Military academy in Staunton, Virginia.
Dad also told of hitching rides on the freight train to Pittsburgh from his home in Meyersdale by hanging on to the steel ladder inside a box car filled with his father's grain.
Also stories about how in the frigid winters of the early 1900's in the southern Pennsylvania mountains, of his Dad, my grandfather, hanging a side of beef and a pig from the rafters in the attic. When they needed meat for dinner they simply would go up to the attic and cut what was needed. It was much colder back then than it is today.
Those were also very different times.
Grandad had gone to work at age 10 in the coal mines leading mules through the dark tunnels. Later he became a working partner in a general store, delivering food and supplies as far as 90 miles away in a mule driven wagon. Following snow covered trails in the Appalachians between Meyersdale and Frostburg, long before there were roads across the mountains, Granddad was physically small, very tough, hardy and stubborn. He had raised my dad and his three other sons to be tough as nails, as tough as he himself was.
Dads mother passed away when my dad was 22. He told me it had a lasting effect on him
He was a good provider. He did provide a home and all the rest and buy nice things for us. During WWII he built a speed boat and let us use it. He was generous in sharing things but he didn't much share himself.
Dad loved to take home movies with his 16 millimeter Keystone camera and shot scenes and reels of us kids playing and traveling. The films made it appear that he was participating in our activities such as fishing but that wasn't so. He did things for us but very rarely with us.
As I look back on my childhood I realize my dad, who was an avid hunter and fisherman, never took me fishing or hunting. In fact he never came to watch a ball game I was in or any other event. However he did teach me the fundamentals of flying as his hobby was flying in his Cessna 140.
Photo: Dads Cessna 140.In a way we kids were spoiled with physical things but there was little or no emotional support and near zero guidance from my Dad other than an an occassional licking from his black leather belt. The spankings were invariably my mother's idea and not his. In addition he knew my mother was abusing me and did little or nothing about it.
However when my own children were born nearly a decade later, my Dad took quite an interest in taking them for walks and doing things with them. I was glad to see that and I need to mention that he did the same thing with my sisters children who were older than mine.
And of course Dad did financially support our family and support us pretty well. He paid for my brother and sisters college education and part of the first year of my college education.
But a secret had it beginnings when my father called me to the dining room table one evening when I was about 13. He asked me to sign some papers. He explained he was buying a small life insurance policies on each of his kids. Small policies for a few 1000 dollars.
After I signed the first time he thumbed through 15 or so more pages and holding the page where I couldn't really see the writing asked me to sign one more time. And I did. Half a century later I learned that what I had signed the second time was a much larger policy. It seemed strange that he didn't tell me about the 2nd policy.
That was just a small piece of a family secret and nearly a quarter century later the secret would slowly begin to out in an unbelievable way.
Footnote: 9 years later my new wife would also do something similar, but she went a step further, forging the signature.
This story was revised and extracted from one of Dave's unpublished books.
