Life on Memory Court

by

Dr. Robert E. Plucker

Circa 1960

Bob and Ginny (1st daughter)
Photo by Jean E. Straatmeyer

Memory Court is an arch-shaped street in Allouez, a suburb of Green Bay, Wisconsin, which as every one knows, is Packer Football Country.  Former wife Barbara and our two pre-school daughters lived at 401 Memory Court for only four years, 1960 to 1964.  Those were very good years.  “401” is at the top of the arch, and we had neighbors mostly of our own age and financial condition.  Every house was mortgaged (I think).  Directly across the street from us in the inside of the arch lived Doug and Carol Small.  Next door to them and on their right was the house of Bob and Patsy Weich.  Across the street from them, and outside the arch lived Stu and Liz Morris.  All the people on Memory Court were wonderful people, but these were the people I was most drawn to.  There were young children of various ages on the Court, except for Stu and Liz.  Their youngest was very young indeed, and the rest weren't even born yet.

These families were not near-clones of each other, but there were some strong similarities.  Morrises and Smalls were Catholic; Weichs were Methodist, as we were.  This split was close to being the same all over the Green Bay area, but the Catholics outnumbered the Protestants just enough so that they kept us on our toes.  We may have gone to different churches, but we were all united in being Packer fans.  Barbara and I acquired this Packer lust very soon after we moved in, and were able to talk "red dog" , "blitz", "keeper play", "audible" and "shotgun formation" about as well as the next one.  Sunday afternoons when the Packers were on television was the time for partying.  The gang rotated houses from game to game.  Packer home games were blacked out of TV for the most part, and so we felt disconnected.  Why not simply go to the home games?  Tickets to a single game? Unthinkable except from scalpers.  Season tickets?  Only if you had some kind of influence with someone.  These were the beginning of the Lombardi years!

The Packer parties were great fun; beer was served (after all, this is Wisconsin) and snacks went along with the beer, usually a chip-and-dip tray. One party at Doug and Carol's was noteworthy because of the dip for the chips. None of us could figure out what went into the peculiar reddish stuff that resembled no dip we had ever seen or tasted before.  After adroit questioning, Carol told us it was equal parts of peanut butter and ketchup.  I don't remember if the Packers won or lost that day.

Doug and Carol drove a 1961 Ford sedan.  When Doug drove it, it seemed to start OK, but Carol had a difficult time getting it going even when the weather was not severely cold.  She called a towing service one day when she was required to go somewhere.  The guy came out, got in the car, turned the switch and started the car.  No hesitation.  Carol asked him why she couldn't start it like that.  "It's your attitude", said the guy, "you have to get in with the idea that you are the boss over this mere machine and that it is unthinkable that it shouldn't start."  An unusual kind of advice, but it worked after a fashion until Doug traded it for a new 1964 Ford station wagon.  (Possibly she was releasing the starter before the engine had had a chance to catch?)

The Memory Court neighborhood was quite close, and everybody there probably knew within a day of the purchase, how much was the asking price, how much the agreed-upon price, the amount given in trade for the old car, and how much was owed on the new one.  The Memory Court residents somehow knew how to draw out this sort of information with the speed of a Packer running back.

Doug belonged to the National Guard and sometimes had to endure some gentle razzing from Barbara and me as he drove out of the driveway on his way to a drill.  We would stand on either side of the road with raised broomsticks or shovels and proclaim the current Guard slogan, "Sleep well, your National Guard is awake!"

Bob and Patsy Weich, on the inside of the arch and next-door to Doug and Carol, had children about the same age as the Smalls.  They liked to spend time outdoors and would arrange elaborate outings and picnics for the children together in the summer.  It seemed to take them a long, long time to get everything loaded in the cars, children all accounted for (including their shoes), and the dashes back into the house to get forgotten items.  Barbara and I used to marvel at their patience and determination to have "jolly family parties."  They would come back all sunburned, dead tired, but their efforts were surely worth whatever trouble they were. This was truly an example of the “Togetherness" that at least one of the women's magazines was promoting in those years.

Bob and Patsy were among the few people of my generation that knew how to play "500", a card game that resembles bridge.  Barbara and I would play with them occasionally, Patsy and I would be partners facing Bob and Barbara.  Bob and Barbara always played the conservative game, not often winning the bid, but when they did, they were reasonably sure of taking the required tricks.  Patsy and I were the diametric opposite, sometimes taking huge losses, but coming back by making very large bids.  If you know 500, you know about "10 no-trump" and "double nula."

I was amused the first time I was in their house to see some of the furniture that Patsy prized as "antique".  One piece was a spring seat like the ones we used on the farm some years ago on farm wagons.  Normally the farm wagon of my day, pulled by two horses, had wooden spoke wheels and iron tires.  There was no springing, and so if you had to go over rough ground you could set this wide wooden seat on the box and get some relief from the jouncing.  There were leaf springs at the sides that would absorb some of the shock.  For me, this was no antique; I had gone out many times with my Grandpa to fix fence with horses and wagon, spring seat in place.  Sitting alongside my Grandpa on that wide seat made me proud as could be.

Patsy also had an old-fashioned kitchen sink and a matching hand pump for water.  It was only a "decoration" in her house, but when I was a kid, this was what we had in one corner of our huge kitchen on the farm.  I must protest! Antique?

And then we come to Stew and Liz Morris directly across the street from Bob and Patsy.  I don't really remember if Jane, their oldest daughter was born by the time we moved onto the Court, but what impressed me soon after was that Stew, who had the finest lawn in Wisconsin, would push his hand lawn-mower through his lush grass carrying Janey in one arm.  He had endurance to spare, apparently, because I had the impression that he spent a lot of time mowing and cross-mowing that incredible grass, and that as hard as it must have been to push, he never put Janey down.  He just kept at it.

Stew was/is a physical type, as he was/is one of the most knowledgeable and respected physical therapists in the country.  He was the chief organizer of the Memory Court softball games; ice skating, picnics and so on.  Barbara and I were invited to play in one of the softball games before we even moved into 401.  I don't know how he got our names or how he got in touch with us.

I had been envious of Stew for a while because he had nerve enough to own a very bright red Ford convertible car.  Barbara and I had an uninteresting green Rambler station wagon.  Useful, but dull.  Stew's example made it possible for old Stick-in-the-Mud me to think about following suit.  I figured if he could drive a flashy red car with a cloth top in cold Wisconsin weather, so could I.  I shopped around for a small Falcon convertible, but Barbara was not enthusiastic.  We wound up with a super-flashy red Ford Galaxie convertible, bought right off the showroom floor.  As I mentioned in another of these essays, this car made me the hero of West High School faculty as far as the students were concerned.

When I first arrived in Green Bay I had been limping around with some painful plantar warts on the bottom of my right foot.  The biggest of these warts was especially painful because a Winona doctor had tried to burn it off with X-ray.  Something burned all right, but the wart itself seemed to be untouchable.  The wart hurt, and now the burn hurt too.  After Stew had noticed the limping he asked me if I would be a kind of guinea pig in a new treatment he was thinking about.  I figured he couldn't make it any worse, and so Stew had me in for three sessions of rubbing the warts with an ultra-sound generator.  The notion of ultra-sound was still fairly new in l960, I guess, and after the third treatment Stew thought it would be good to call a halt.  But the wart began to feel much better right away with the first treatment, and evidently continued to heal after the end of the third one.  It was not long before the wart was just an unpleasant painful memory.  Thanks again, Stew!!

Liz, who was a nurse at St. Vincent's hospital, was often busy; I believe she worked at several different shifts, and I don't remember seeing her very much except at the great pot-luck dinners we had with Weichs, Smalls, and Davises. The dinners were all terrific, with the wives in a friendly (?) competition of course, and we had a great time eating. But the best times for me were the discussions after dinner.  We talked Packers, of course, and sometimes about the Braves who had not yet moved to Atlanta, and politics.  This gave me the chance to argue that we should never have been in the Viet-Nam conflict, it was their business, not ours, and the "domino theory" was a lot of bunk.  After all, we had already suffered one stalemate in Korea, fighting an Asian war that was not supported by the public and was too costly in lives and money to attempt to win.   Now, of course we have the same problem in Iraq.

About a year before we left Memory Court I bought a bicycle.  The bike I had ridden as a kid was a (shudder) girl's bike, a hand-me-down from our rich cousins.  Now I was going to have the bicycle of my boyhood dreams.  It turned out to be a shiny black Schwinn, with big tires and shiny chrome fenders, just the bike I had wanted when I was about ten or twelve.  But this bike even had a Bendix two-speed rear hub.  The modern system of throwing the chain from different sized sprockets was not yet widely on the market.  I mention this because Stew may have been the only guy on the Court who did not laugh at this "little bald guy riding a bicycle".  I suppose I could have been the only person over thirty in Green Bay who rode one.  Kids would point and laugh, dogs chased me.  The bike served me well until the move to Seattle where the hills took their toll on the "back-pedal" brake on the rear wheel, and the Bendix two-speed system fell apart at about the same time.  It was finally replaced with a Gitane ten-speed.

No account of Memory Court can omit the fellow who built many of the houses on the Court.  Francis Rentmeester, probably of Belgian extraction, was a kind of round-looking guy of medium height who rarely wore a shirt in summer, but never seemed to sun-burn.  He had settled on three or four house designs, all of which he carried in his head, and somehow was able to build them faster than anyone else, and with a smaller crew.  I worked for him for about ten days until I smashed my thumb with a hammer, and it never occurred to me that he pushed his employees to move faster.  He put up these three or four bedroom split-level houses with blinding speed; he promised George Seifert that he would have his house finished in a month.  Sure enough, he broke ground (next to Stew and Liz) on the 23rd of May, and the Seiferts were able to move in on the 23rd of June.   I am convinced that the houses were well-built and that no corners were cut that affected the quality of the houses.  And still the prices were exceptionally low.

Now and then some of the neighbors to the right of us would have a driveway beer party, a “kegger.”  I don't believe anyone was excluded from these events but the real hard-line participators all wound up playing a card game called Schafskopf.  In English: sheep's head.  Sometimes I would watch these games for a short time, but it seemed to me that the most important rules of the game were lots of very loud talk, shouting and laughter, with violent slamming of cards down on the table.  Fortunately, the game was usually played on a picnic table outside in the summer.  A regular card table would never have held up under slams of that weight and frequency.

Beer, again - this is Wisconsin, was a part of life on Memory Court.  I remember coming home from a choir rehearsal at First Methodist Church (I was the choir director there) with Barbara and discovering five or six of the neighbors sitting on the curb in front of our house drinking beer.  They weren't particularly loud or rowdy, but they were right under our bedroom window and I didn't see much possibility of sleep, even though I was plenty tired after a day of teaching at West High School, and a night of church choir.  Well, if you can't lick 'em, join 'em, as the saying goes.  So we did, and were not really any worse off the next morning.

This was certainly a jolly, good-hearted and helpful bunch of people on the Court.  When I made the mistake of praising Milt Nero's house on Loch Drive (Milt was an architect and had designed the house) and also mentioning that Milt wanted to sell it, Barbara glommed onto the notion of buying it.  No power on earth could dissuade her, it seemed, least of all me.  So in a short time we sold 401 Memory Court and moved to 1129 Loch Drive.  When we moved, we had the loan of the Davis' VW van, many pairs of strong hands, and lots of good will. All the move cost us was some pizza and beer.

One thing I discovered in that move was that a convertible car (remember the Ford Galaxie) with the top down is almost as good as a truck for a short-distance move.  You can pile all sorts of things, one on top the other with no restricting roof.  On a later subsequent move, I also found out that in sub-zero weather, you may be able to stand the cold for a mile or two with the top down, but your wife's house plants can't.

401 Memory Court was still under construction when we bought it, and of course it was a mess, as all construction sites are.   There is mud, no trees or grass, bits and pieces of wood, a raw look to everything.  I remember the incredible plague of crickets we had in the garage before the door was hung, or anytime afterward when the door was left open.  The floor would be black with them, and you would not be able to step without crushing a cricket.

Of course we had to landscape the place.  We planted a nice lawn, we planted fast-growing poplar trees at the edges of the lot except directly in front, and we had a couple of maples in the back yard and a mountain ash in front.  There were lots of flowers too.  The lawn, though not anywhere near as nice as Stew's, turned out well, as did the trees, in part because we watered them a lot.  But after we moved to Loch Drive, it seemed to take only weeks before the trees at 401 Memory Court began to die, the lawn turned brown and patchy, and there were abandoned kid's toys all over the place.  Several years later when I returned to Green Bay for a visit, the house was barely recognizable to me.  By that time the Smalls, Weichs, Morrises and Pluckers had all moved away.  The Davises may still be there for all I know.  I hope new generations of folks are having the same fun and fellowship that Barbara and I were lucky enough to experience there in the early 60s.

Convertible from:
http://www.ebay.com/sch/sis.html?_nkw=1965+1968+FORD+GALAXIE+CONVERTIBLE+AUTOMATIC+CARPET+
Other illustrations from Microsoft Word ClipArt.