MEMORIES OF RAISING FOUR CHILDREN – PART I

Circa 1956 – 1984 – and beyond

 By Dr. Robert E. Plucker

After having read through many other pages of this set of memoir stories, our son John suggested that I write about the four children, their various childhood experiences and how all this had affected me. Parents, at least in theory, are not supposed to have favorites, and fortunately for me, all four of these people are equally blessed in talent, charm, personality, beauty, intelligence, and all other good things. Daughter Virginia would jokingly remark that they all have good posture too. This makes it much easier to write this essay. They all have very different special qualities, however, as will be shown in the following pages.

Virginia's arrival was auspicious in more than one way. There had been a prolonged cold winter in Minnesota l955-56, and everyone was more than ready for spring. At the end of April, one should be able to expect some promise of spring, but instead of the promise, we got some 22 inches of snow on the 26th of April; heavy, wet, discouraging stuff. Threatening weather continued for the next several days until the 10th of May. On that day God smiled on us, Ginny was born and glorious spring weather appeared.  

Other events of that spring were: l.) I quit smoking. This was fairly easy, as I had never smoked heavily, I didn't want my first child to have to breathe all my smoke, and the Surgeon General's first warnings of cigarettes causing lung cancer had appeared. 2.) Barbara and I had gone into debt for a new 1956 Plymouth. 3.) We had also acquired an impossibly cute cocker spaniel puppy. The puppy had to be shut up in the car while I was on some errand or other, while Barbara was in labor in Winona General Hospital. I was having a fit worrying about her, the coming baby, and the new car with the untrained puppy shut up inside it. I should never have had to divide my worrying capacity that much, with being concerned about the unimportant things. In those days, the fathers were never, absolutely never allowed near the delivery rooms. I should have acted like the other expectant fathers, pacing about in the hospital waiting room, smoking furiously, worrying only about news of the birth. Nope, I wasn't even smoking. As a 1950s first-time expectant father and worrier, I was a failure.  

So in spite of my failings Barbara gave birth to a beautiful child. She took pride too, in never having missed a Sunday singing in the church choir during the entire nine-month process. I must have been an awfully demanding choir director in those days. (When Daughter #2, Dorothy, was born, the birth took place on a Sunday afternoon, so Barbara was not able to repeat this remarkable feat.) 

Barbara and I made the somewhat rueful discovery that once you get home with the little one, it takes probably less than half an hour for the kid to wise up, and start demanding constant service. It became impossible to do anything at home, without somehow deferring to the wants of Her Majesty, the Baby.  

After some fifty years, there are some events in Ginny's early years that I remember quite well. Since she was the oldest grandchild, Barbara's mother and father bought her a lot of "stuff" including a sand-box with white sand. The sand had to be white. For all I know, they had to send to the French Riviera to get the sand. There was also a swing set with a slide. Virginia loved to be pushed on the swing, and I remember one late afternoon when I was pushing her, she seemed utterly fearless, swinging higher and higher.  

Next morning was the first day of teaching for me, at Jefferson Junior High School, and I was all excited, as usual, as I would be on any first day of teaching. But Barbara came rushing out of the kids' bedroom in a state of near-shock. "Ginny can't walk!" was all I could understand. We didn't know if she could not, or would not walk, and of course I was very disturbed. Dr. Boardman was consulted over the telephone, and he must have said something comforting, as I went to school, even in my agitated state of mind. Ginny did not seem to be in any pain. Polio was our first concern in those pre-vaccine days. I had had a cousin who was permanently crippled by it; also the son of my best teacher friend in Winona was affected by it enough so that he had a bad limp from then on.  

I seem to remember that Barbara gave Ginny lots of massage, and after a week or two, she began to improve gradually, eventually having no lasting effects from whatever it was she had. Barbara and I were sure that her mysterious ailment actually was a very light touch of that crippling disease. Perhaps the one lasting effect was that she was never again willing to swing high on the swing.  

Ginny and Dot both had to have tonsillectomies; they seemed never to be able to shake colds and sore throats. Dr. Rose recommended that their tonsils come out. Both of them had the operation at the Methodist hospital, stayed until they were discharged as OK, and Dot was indeed OK. Ginny was not, as she woke up one night and coughed up what looked like gallons of blood all over the bathroom. It was very cold that night in Green Bay, probably somewhere around a minus 10. The 1960 Rambler started all right, and I had time to warm it up a bit while Barbara was wrapping up the kids for a hasty trip to Dr. Rose's office. Ginny was wrapped up very warmly in blankets, the whole bundle enclosed by the warmest quilt we had, a slippery satin comforter.  

We quickly got into the car and roared off to Dr. Rose's office where he had agreed to meet us. As we got out of the car, I was carrying Ginny, blankets, quilt and all, Barbara and Dot following. Dr. Rose was there and as he was holding the door for me, I said in a kind of agitated voice that she was slipping. Well, she was slipping because of the dratted slippery quilt and I was afraid I was going to drop her, but Dr. Rose thought I meant she was dying. I had some quick explaining to do. But Dr. Rose recovered his composure in a hurry and did his magic with the bleeding. So this time she was back in the hospital for observation, but not the Methodist hospital. This was St. Vincent's, the Catholic hospital where Liz Morris was a nurse. After all this tonsil hassle was over, both kids had significantly greater resistance to colds and things. 

Dot was doomed to get an early start in school. Ginny should have been two grades ahead of her, but as soon as Ginny was taught something in first grade, she would come home and play school with Dot. Dot was taught everything that Ginny had learned. Ginny's teaching was largely responsible, I am sure, for Dot's getting through kindergarten and first grade in one school year.  

When Ginny was at Everett High School she had a friend named Eleanor. Eleanor was a telephone addict and could talk about anything or nothing for great lengths of time, needing only an occasional "yes" or "no", or "you can't mean it", or perhaps not even that. Ginny would sometimes actually lay the phone down and walk off to do something else. Coming back, she would find Eleanor still happily yakking away into thin air not knowing her audience was taking a break. 

This telephone time could be irritating to Ginny as it often interfered with her flute practice. Ginny was extremely organized in those high school days, her room was always in perfect order, clothes hung to perfection, and she even hated to walk into her room after doing a perfect job of vacuuming her shag carpeting. What if her footprints should show? Listening to her flute practice was a pleasure to me, as she was an excellent high school player and eventually wound up with a degree in music with emphasis on flute performance.  

Another rather silly thing to remember is that for a time, Ginny and Dot were both taking instrumental lessons at the University of Washington. Ginny was studying flute with Jerry Pritchard, a grad student, and Dot with his wife, Virginia Yorke, another grad student in piano. The Music Building was at the top of a steep hill, almost a cliff, with a parking lot halfway down the hill. Coming from our house in Everett, we would park there, and then take the escalator (a parking lot with an escalator?) to Padelford Hall, then walk across the street to the Music Building. Now and then all three of us would be feeling frisky and run up the down escalator, or down the up escalator. I think many people would like to do this at least once or twice in their lives, but are afraid to try it in a department store or other public place.

My life was very busy with teaching, the church choir, the Civic Choir, the "Kilowatt Choraliers" (power company employees) in Green Bay, and later I was just as busy with teaching at Skagit Valley College in Washington, church choir every Thursday night and Sunday morning. I had the Skagit Community Choir on Tuesday nights, now and then taught night school classes at the college, and took every chance I got to make an extra dollar. The house mortgage, payments for a car, for furniture, for remodeling the old house in Everett, all came due every month. This was typical, I think, of the 1950s-1960s young father and we all became participants in the "rat race", an expression which came into vogue about that time. I truly wanted to spend more time with the family, but we had to keep up with the rats in the rat race.   

Dot was born in 1958, not long after my 30th birthday. Since it was January in Minnesota, one could expect it to be cold and nasty outside. On the 19th, it was actually a nice day, temperatures well above freezing and a bit of sunlight off and on. Winona General Hospital still made expectant fathers wait and smoke somewhere distant from the delivery room; besides, Barbara was not willing to have me anywhere near the place. I finally gave up; feeling left out, and accepted an invitation to lunch with Dave and Nancy Wynne. Barbara was at the hospital and had missed singing in the choir; I directed it as usual, a difficult anthem that had required a lot of rehearsal. The choir was being "difficult" at this time as well; I wrote about this in "Church Choirs." 

About 2:30 in the afternoon the phone call came from the hospital saying that we had a little girl. I actually don't remember my first sight of her (through a glass window looking into the hospital nursery) but I do know that she had dark hair, dark eyes, and a kind of a worried look on her face. Several days after we brought her home, she caught a cold, and it seemed to me that she never completely got over it until after the tonsillectomy. Then, like Ginny, her health improved.  

Present-day thinking has it that breast-feeding a baby gives it immunity to disease that cow's milk, or baby formula cannot give. Barbara did not breast-feed either of our kids. It simply was not the thing to do in those days. It was considered low-class. I suppose that Barbara's mother, who thought herself to be high-class, would have been horribly mortified to have her daughter do such a "common" thing.  

Just before we moved to Green Bay from Winona, a terrible thing happened to Dot. We were just saying good-bye to some company that we had been entertaining when Ginny and Dot both came in crying really hard. They were both so young, Dot not really able to talk in sentences yet, and Ginny not very articulate either when she was so upset.  

From what we could figure out later, she must have caught her tiny little finger in a closing door somehow, and literally tore off the end of it without breaking the bone. You could actually see a tiny bit of the bone sticking up through the stump of the finger, but fortunately, there was still a small strip of skin holding the nearly-severed tip.            

We wrapped up her hand in clean towels to soak up the blood, called Dr. Wilson, and met him in his office in a hurry. I thought I was being brave, not losing my head and running around in circles, or fainting. But Dr. Wilson took his needle and plunged it right into the stump of her finger while I was watching. It was then that Dr. Wilson told me I had better leave the room. He had relieved the pain, and then took a few stitches to fix the finger. Ginny and Dot got some pleasure out of showing Dot's "ishy finger" to their friends. I believe there is still a faint scar from that injury some forty-plus years later. 

The result of Ginny's teaching of her young sister became apparent immediately upon her entry into kindergarten. It was not long before we heard that the Jackson School (Green Bay) teachers had taken her to visit some of the other grades including the fifth, to show off her reading ability. Since Ginny was such a good reader and a good teacher, Dot became a kind of phenomenon. I believe they kept her (nominally) in kindergarten for a semester, and then put her in first grade to finish the year.

             In Green Bay, Mrs. Seifert, who lived two doors away, occasionally babysat Dot when her daughter was not available. The first time this happened, we picked up Dot, and asked Mrs. Seifert how things had gone. Her reply, "Does she always concentrate so hard?"  

About 1938 or 1939, in the spring we had experienced a terrific wind, rain and hailstorm in South Dakota. My dad lost a horse and several cattle. We never were sure whether the poor horse had been struck by one of the monster hailstones, or simply drowned in air so full of rain that it was impossible to breathe. Dad and my grandfather attempted to bury the horse where she fell, but the ground was so rocky it was too hard to get the hole deep enough. So after a long time, horse bones began to appear in that remote corner of the pasture. 
 

How the girls, Dot, Ginny and their cousin Faye, knew the horse bones were there I don't know, but they carried a few of these big bones to the grove of small trees at the far end of the farmyard. This became their "laboratory." By the time any grown-ups found out about any of this, they had scrounged up more bones, chicken bones, crow bones, whatever they could find. It was quite a bone laboratory for seven or eight-year-olds. Of course Barbara and my mother were horrified. 

On one of these South Dakota trips, I made the serious mistake of giving the kids a ride in the back of my dad's 1937 Chevy pickup truck. It was foolish of me to do this, but I thought that on these country roads where you wait all day for a car to come past, if I drove slowly they would be safe enough. Nope. I must have gone too fast and probably swerved the truck in some way, so sure enough; Dot fell out on the road. She was not hurt, but scared. But not as scared as I was of reporting the accident to Barbara. Should I tell her, or should I keep quiet and swear the girls to secrecy? Would I have to take the well-deserved dressing-down that would surely come? At this much later date, I truly cannot remember if I did the honorable thing and told her, or had I been the craven coward I was tempted to be?  

Ken Heiret became my first son-in-law. My first meeting with him was when Dot invited him to come along for a Saturday afternoon sail. He was not dressed very well, his hair came down to there, and I thought that Dot had picked a genuine loser. How wrong I was! This guy was to become the father of my first (brilliant) grandson, and was to work his way up from menial custodial work to a position of responsibility in a high tech job at Microsoft. At the time, I could not tell what Dot possibly could have seen in him. And he is a fine golf-player plus being a genius at the Rubik’s Cube.

Meanwhile, I was still trying to keep up with house, boat, car and furniture payments, feeling caught in the rat race. When Barbara returned to working full time, and especially after we left Green Bay for Washington, I was able to relax a bit more and enjoy the music I was always working on.

*** Stay tuned to this blog for Part II of “Memories of Raising Four Children.”

Photos in this section scanned from

the files of Jean E. Straatmeyer