Back East
I was born in Binghamton, New York on November 29, 1950.
My father was Manville Dutcher Sherman, but by the time I knew him, he went by his baptismal name, John Augustine Sherman. My mother's maiden name was Irma (or Erma) Dorothy Livingston.
My paternal grandfather was Schuyler Van Rensselaer Sherman, born February 21, 1888, and my paternal grandmother was Elizabeth Ann "Bessie" Dutcher Sherman, born November 16, 1899.
Grandfather Sherman died in 1952, so I don't remember him at all, but I do remember my other three grandparents. My grandparents on my mother's side lived on West Main St. in Sidney, New York, after they lost their farm in 1954 and went bankrupt.
According to my mother, we moved 13 times before I was two years old. We lived in various places in New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, North Carolina, and back to New York state.
I don't remember this, but my cousin 1946 Tom Livingston does - in 1954, our family returned to New York State from Asheville, North Carolina, and we were now five in number: Mom, Dad, me, Joan and Joyce. They were both born in Asheville, NC. We had to move in with our cousins Tom and Ken, and Mom's brother Uncle Ken and his wife Rose; Tom once showed me the house they were renting on River Road in Sidney, NY at that time.
My earliest memories are of living in a very small town called Great Bend, Pennsylvania, about 1955. Great Bend is 11 miles south of Binghamton, and just next to Hallstead, Pennsylvania. We lived in a small house at 246 Randolph Street, which Dad had purchased.
The property included five acres of land. There was a pond, a creek that ran into and out of the pond, a barn, chicken coop, and a pig sty. We owned three horses, at different times, and sometimes chickens and a pig.
Down the road from us lived the Kenny Aldrich family. On Easter Sunday in 1955, when I was four, my sisters Joan and Joyce and I were sent to stay with the Aldriches for the whole day while my Mom was in the hospital having a baby. This was Joe, who was born in April of 1955. I remember this day in particular for two reasons.
First, because the Aldrich kids did the usual Easter Egg and candy hunt, while the the Sherman kids had to sit and watch - we were not allowed to participate, nor did we get any eggs or candy. Even at that age, I remember thinking that it sure was selfish of them to not invite us to join in, and that if I was an adult I would behave differently.
Later that day, we were playing out in the yard, where a small flock of farm geese were roaming around. I thought that geese were pretty fascinating, and I tried to get a closer look, when one of the geese bit me, and it hurt like hell. I've been pissed off about that ever since, and I still intend to catch a goose someday and kick the shit out of it, just to teach them a lesson.
In the other direction, towards the town of Great Bend, lived the George Van Vleck family. Terry Van Vleck was my age, and we became best friends. We played cowboys and indians or trucks incessantly. One of our favorite pastimes was building bridges and elevators with my Erector set, to use with our trucks. Terry had an older sister named Georgia, who was a teenager and a real babe. I couldn't wait to get older so I could go out on dates with her.
In 1957 my dad was working as a mechanic for the local John Deere dealer, and much of his job entailed travelling out to the nearby farms to work on their equipment. He took me with him quite often. We drove a cab-over Willys Jeep 4-wheel-drive pickup, which I thought was very cool. I've always been fascinated by cab-over trucks.
My job was to hand him the tools while he was under a tractor or whatever, which saved him the time of crawling in and out, and also to clean off the tools and put them away when he was done with them. It was a perfect job for me, as I have always been neat and organized by nature. I learned all the tool nomenclature, and knew exactly where everything was kept.
I started going to work with my Dad when I was about six, and continued until I got a paying job at the age of 16. Dad could only take me with him when he went on the road, and had to be careful that the bosses did not find out, as he would get in trouble. If they ever did find out, they never let on. I always believed that they knew, as someone was bound to mention it, but it was a good deal for them, so as long as I did not get hurt that was fine.
In Great Bend we almost always had a pony; first we had a big Palomino whose name I forget. When I was about five years old, Dad decided one day that I should lead the horse around the pasture while my sister Joyce, then just about two years old, rode him.
Let me say right here that I have always been afraid of horses and have never entirely trusted any of them. As the old saying goes, "you just have to show them who is the boss"; well, I already knew who the boss was, and it was the horse. And this one was huge.
Unfortunately, this horse had been trained to pick carrots out of your back pocket, which I did not know, and anyway I had no carrots. So, when this huge horse started biting my butt while I was leading him, I got scared and started walking faster, to put more distance between him and me. The faster I walked, the faster the horse went and meantime, he continued, so I thought, trying to bite me. Soon we were moving along at a pretty good clip, my sister was bouncing around high above me in the saddle, and my Dad was yelling at me to slow down. Instead, now crying, I started running, and so did the horse. Now my Dad is screaming at me "SLOW DOWN", and I started trying to figure out how I was ever going to get away from that damned horse. About this time my sister fell off, my Dad grabbed the reins, then continued to scream at me while he kicked my ass all the way to the house for being so careless of my little sister. I never did figure out why he didn't just lead the horse himself.
So, we sold that horse and bought a black pony, more my size, named 'Nipper', because he also would eat from your pocket, the difference being that he did not bite you in the process. I had a high old time riding him all over the pasture and tying him up to the pigpen, which I pretended was the local saloon, while I went inside to make sure the bad guys were taken care of and to see if there were any pretty girls that needed rescuing.
Later on we sold Nipper and bought a Shetland pony named 'Candy', because this one was addicted to those big pink wintergreen mints that you bought by the bagful. This pony was kind of ornery, and you could never catch it to ride it without bribing her with mints.
One day when I was six years old, I was playing in the barn and found, hidden under a pile of hay, a beautiful, brand-new kids pedal-type riding tractor. It was a replica of the big John Deere tractors that my Dad worked on. I knew right away that he had gotten it from the place where he worked, and that it must be my Christmas present!
For weeks I eagerly looked forward to Christmas, and I couldn't wait to ride that tractor. I never let on that I knew about it.
Finally the big day arrived. On Christmas morning, I woke up and sure enough, there was the tractor under the Christmas tree. The only problem was, it was not for me, it was for my brother Joe, who was only two years old and could barely walk. Believe me, I let my Dad know that I thought it was a dirty trick that Joe should get that tractor instead of me. I don't even remember what I got at all, but it sure wasn't anything like a tractor.
In August of 1958, John Jr. was born. We called him "Little John". That same month, just days after he was born, we suddenly sold everything we could, packed the rest into a 6 x 8 plywood trailer, and started west in our 1941 Plymouth sedan.
Our family now consisted of my parents, myself, Joan, Joyce, Joe, and baby John. We were driving a 1941 Plymouth, and pulling that big trailer, packed to the gills. That Plymouth only had a 3-speed transmission (no one had automatic transmissions in those days), and a small six-cylinder engine, probably about 60 horsepower.
My Dad did all the driving. On Mom's side there was one of those water-dripping type of air conditioners hanging on the window. It was god-awful hot. We also had a canvas bag of water that was hung outside the car from the hood ornament. That was supposed to keep the water "cooler", but of course it was always about 98 degrees and tasted awful.
We drove a lot at night, which I loved because the hum of the motor and the motion put me to sleep. When I wasn't sleeping, I was either stretched out under the back window, or across the hump on the floor in back. No front-wheel drive cars then, either.
It was a real adventure, even with the heat. Dad kept reminding us to "watch out for cowboys, and especially for indians". We didn't know any better, so we sucked this up with a straw. It keep us occupied for hours, watching for cowboys and indians.
I started to wonder at some point how there could be any cowboys and indians with all this modern highway, surrounded by barbed- wire fences. Everybody knew that coybowys roamed the open range, and no self-respecting indian would get caught dead near any modern highway, with all those noisy cars and stuff.
After about three days of looking, my Dad suddenly shouts out, "Look - there's a cowboy!". Six pairs of eyeballs glued to the window. All I saw was a guy on a horse. He wasn't herding any cows, and he didn't even have a gun! I began to realize that there was something fishy about this whole "wild west" thing. It was a real letdown for all of us kids.
Another couple of days and we were in Texas. God, was it hot! I have never been able to handle hot weather, and I was getting sick from the heat. We stopped at a restaurant for lunch one day, and even though I felt hungry, all I could do was drink water. That waitress must have refilled my glass ten times. After drinking that hot water from the canvas bag, this water tasted like heaven, and it was ice-cold. I don't know if it was the heat or overdoing it with the water, but I did get sick.
Another couple of days and we arrived in Phoenix, Arizona. It was still August, and the heat was so intense I thought we were all going to die. I knew I was, at least.
This, it turned out, was my Dad's intended destination. However, he apparently had not studied his geography very well, because when he saw Arizona, he became disgusted and declared that it was "just cactus country". Mom and Dad discussed whether to try to stay in Arizona or go further North. Unfortunately, by this time our funds were about gone.
We rented a house in Phoenix, and went on the dole while my Dad looked for work. He could not find any work, and between the heat and being broke, we were all feeling pretty lousy. It was so hot that I felt sick much of the time, and several of us kids were having nightmares because it was so hot, even at night.
We did go out to a drive-in movie one night and saw a double- feature of scary movies. One was about a guy who had his head cut off and buried separately from his body, and the other about a vampire, who when killed turned into a pile of dust at the end.
One day we all went to the local city swimming pool to escape the heat. Joe swallowed some water, which as it turned out was not at all clean, and he became severely ill and was rushed to the hospital in an ambulance. We kids learned later that the doctors said that Joe (then age 3) would probably not live out the day, but he did survive somehow. I doubt that either the hospital or the doctors were ever paid a cent for their services, unless the county took care of the bills.
About this time we went to the grocery store. Mom had about $30 left, and that was the last of our money. My Dad would not go along, as he considered shopping (among many other chores) to be "woman's work".
We got a bag of groceries and put them in the car. Then Mom went back into the store to get something she had forgotten. While she was in the store, someone came along and stole our bag of groceries. Now we had no money, no food, no gas, and a big hospital bill on top of everything else.
I don't know where or how Dad came up with any more money, but he must have because after that we continued travelling, this time going North to Montana. I think Dad did some odd jobs along the way to keep us in gas and food money. We mostly just drove and slept in the car.
In early September of 1958, we arrived in Missoula, Montana, coming in from the east on Highway 10, through Hellgate Canyon.
We stopped at the first motel we saw, the "Palm Olive Motel", on Highway 10 at the eastern end of the city. The motel was located just at the end of the Van Buren Street bridge, and just a few yards to the west of it. Just behind the motel was the Clarks Fork River that runs through Missoula. We all lived here, in a room with a kitchenette, for two or three months.
The motel was torn down back in the mid-1960s, and today there is a liquor store and a Pizza-Hut where it used to be.
The owner of the motel had a couple of kids. One was a boy who was a little older than I was. While we were playing in the big rocks down by the river, this kid came along and tried to pick a fight with me. I kept telling him I did not want to fight, when in fact I was afraid of him, but he would not let up. He kept pushing me around until finally we were going at it hammer and tong. Once I got started, my fears vanished as I realized that while he was taller and heavier than i was, he was also slow and stupid. It did not take me too long to get him into a headlock that he could not get out of, so he finally said "I give". I was not afraid to go down to the river after that.
The Van Buren Street bridge was built, I think, around 1910 or so. It was a steel suspension bridge with wood plank decking, just wide enough for one car and a few pedestrians at one time. There was very little car traffic on it back then. In about the mid- 1960s it was closed to vehicle traffic and today is only used for pedestrian traffic. In 1958 we would fish from the bridge, being careful to stay to the side if a car came along.
That fall, I started in third grade at Central School, which was four or five blocks up the highway towards downtown. We would pass a gas station each day that had a candy counter, so whenever I was lucky enough to have a penny I'd go in there on the way home and get myself a piece of bubble gum. It was a rare treat.
I was only at Central School a couple of months before we moved to Lolo, Montana, a very small town of about 200 people that was eleven miles south of Missoula. There we rented a house owned by a man named "Plummer", on the only street in Lolo, which was perpendicular to highway 93, around which the town was built.
My Dad had gotten a job as a heavy-equipment mechanic at Treasure State Equipment Company, which was the local dealer for the International Harvester Company. He was mostly working on logging equipment and construction equipment that was being used to build a new highway 93 down near Darby and Sula, going into Idaho. Most of the work, though, was on logging equipment. I continued to go to work with him, only now instead of visiting farms we were going to logging camps and highway construction sites. I found these to be much more interesting.
We were often driving to work at 5:00 am and getting back late in the evening. Occasionally, we got to stay overnight someplace, if the distance was far and the job would take more than a day. This was a big treat for me, as we would get to eat in restaurants, which I really loved, and everything was paid by the company. I always had a craving for cheeseburgers, french fries, and apple pie with real milk. At home we always had powdered milk, which was cheaper than real milk but tasted like chalk.
I started in the third grade in Lolo in about November, 1958. Lolo had a 3-room schoolhouse, plus the older building that was adjoining was now used as a library and lunch room. This older building had been their one-room school until 1958.
Another student was assigned to "show me the ropes" until I got acquainted. I could not believe my luck: this student was a really beautiful and nice girl named Jeri Rock. Unfortunately, Billy Jones considered her to be his girlfriend, and he had a reputation as a real tough guy.
In one room was grades 1 and 2, another had 3-4-5, and the third held grades 6-7-8. Being in the third grade, naturally I could listen in on whatever the 4th and 5th graders were doing. Within a couple of months, I was mostly working with the 4th graders.
Soon I was at the top of my new "class" - the 4th grade. At the end of that year, my teacher, Mrs. Prestrude, called my parents in for a conference, and told them that she thought I should be officially skipped ahead into the 5th grade the following year. The decision was left up to me, and I decided to go into the 5th grade.
It seems odd now that I can remember being in the 2nd grade and can picture the schoolroom, and I also remember the 3rd, 4th, 6th and 8th grades. But of the 1st, 5th and 7th grades I can remember almost nothing, except that my 7th grade teacher was boring.
It was in early 1959 that Uncle Paul came to visit us for a few days. My mom did not get along very well with Uncle Paul (my Dad's younger brother), I think because she thought he was a flakey character. All of kids loved him, as he was always in high spirits and was very unconventional, without being outright crazy. Well, maybe just a little bit crazy...
Uncle Paul was much smaller than my Dad, probably 5 feet 8 inches tall and 145 pounds, but he always displayed a positive attitude and was full of confidence. As a baby, he had contracted polio (this was before the polio vaccine was available), and it was feared that he would not survive. He had lived in a hospital for six months at the age of two, and could not hold his head up straight until he was ten years old, but he battled polio and won.
One day Uncle Paul took us fishing in Lolo Creek. To get to the really good holes where the fish were, we all waded out into the stream. To us, it seemed very swift and scary. Where it was too deep for us, Paul would grab us by the arms to make sure we were not washed downstream while crossing. We came home all soaking wet but happy, and of course my Mom was furious with Uncle Paul for getting us all wet and "endangering our lives".
During his visit, there was a huge rainstorm with thunder and lightning. When Uncle Paul discovered that I was terrified of thunder and lightning, he persuaded me to go outside with him, just to prove that there was no point in being afraid of them. We sat out in the yard for probably an hour or so, and gradually my fears dissolved. That incident taught me a lot about being afraid of things in general, not just thunder and lightning. It was a good example of why I loved my Uncle Paul so much.
After one year in the rented house, we bought a 10 x 60 trailer house and parked it in the trailer park behind the church. There were now eight of us altogether, six kids and two parents. It was pretty crowded. Actually, it was _very_ crowded, but us kids didn't know any better.
In 1960 I went into the 6th grade. Our teacher for 6th, 7th and 8th grade was Mr. Duane Anderson. He was new in town and this was his first year teaching at our school.
Mr. Anderson was strict in some ways, but bent the rules some- times and we all liked him a lot. I still remember that during the 1960 World Series, Mr. Anderson brought a radio to school, and for seven days we all listened to the games between the Yankees and the Pirates, from the first pitch until the final out.
But as for talking in class the the like, Mr. Anderson ran a tight ship. On the first day of class, Mr. Anderson came in and hung a large wooden paddle on the wall over the blackboard. This was "Big Bertha". It had holes drilled in it to let the air pass through unimpeded, as Mr. Anderson carefully explained to all of us, in order to provide more wallop that a regular old paddle. Luckily, he only used it occasionally.
One day, after several warnings, I was caught talking to the girl who sat behind me. "Let's go", said Mr. Anderson. I was to be the first to demonstrate the efficiency of Big Bertha. I went to the back of the room, where I had to bend over a table and grab the opposite edge. This was so that one could not flinch or duck to advantage. Lucky for me, I only got one swat, but it was a good one. I heard behind me several of the kids suck in their breath audibly when it landed with a loud smack. It hurt like hell, and I did not want to be seen crying, but my eyes were watering. After that, I did not talk much in class and never had to face Big Bertha again. As I recall it, only two people ever got whacked by Big Bertha - me, and Johnny Owens.
At recess, we all went outside, even in Winter. Often we played a game of football, and in those days nobody ever heard of flag football, we played tackle football. Since no one had any pads or helmets, there was no spearing and the like, and it was rare that anyone got really hurt, beyond a few bruises or a sprain.
One game that I especially remember was played in a driving snowstorm. Mr. Anderson and I were on the same team. The other team had Michael McKinstry, Johnny Owens and Steve Jones, and they got ahead 14 to 0 pretty quickly. Nobody on our team thought that we could win. Since I was the youngest (just turned 10), and the smallest by far, everybody pretty much ignored me, even those on my team. On one play, this fact allowed me to sneak around the end of the line and in behind the other quarterback, Michael McKinstry, and I dropped down to my knees, stuck my head between his legs, grabbed onto his legs, and started pulling. Amazingly, he lost his balance and fell down on top of me, with me still hanging onto him for dear life. As it was 4th down, that gave us the ball. My teammates were now slapping me on the back (this was long before the days of the "high-five"). I wasn't used to being treated this way, and I became embarrassed, but tried not to let it show.
As we were almost out of time, Mr. Anderson, our quarterback, told us all to "go long" and hope for the best. I knew he would not throw the ball to me, but I ran on down to the end-zone anyway and held up my hands. To my complete surprise, Mr. Anderson still had the ball, as everyone but me was covered. So, he threw it to me.
I will never forget how that ball looked sailing towards me at that moment. All I could think was, "why did he throw it to me, there is no way I'm going to catch it". Well, I decided to at least make it look like I tried to catch it, even though I was afraid it would knock me over if I did. I still don't know how I managed to catch that ball - I just stood there, and the ball came right into my chest and I grabbed onto it, and fell over, clutching the ball.
And, even more unbelievable, we pulled the same play again the next time we got the ball, and it worked exactly the same way! In the end, we did win the game, 21 to 14.
Our main activity in wintertime was sled riding. There were a series of hills all around the town, leading up to the Bitteroot range. The best sledding hill was right behind the schoolhouse. On any Saturday, most of the kids in town would show up there and spend the day sledding down and hiking back up. Roscoe Jones, who was the father of Steve and Billy, lived nearby and he would sometimes bring old logging truck tires up to the hill and pour gasoline on them, which made for a great bonfire to warm up by.
One day in early spring some men came to the school and took Mr. Anderson out of the classroom. We never saw him again. There was a rumor that he had been charged with child molestation or something like that in his previous job. Nobody could believe it, and nobody I knew had seen any sign of this kind of behavior.
Another boy, Bruce Day and I had been to Mr. Anderson's house, a small trailer that was parked on the banks of Lolo Creek. He had a wife that was very pregnant, plus a baby. Mr. Anderson collected butterflies, and Bruce and I would go out and bring in butterflies for his collection, for which he paid us one piece of bubble gum each. He had never bothered either of us.
In the summer of 1961, when I was 10 years old, we moved from Lolo back to Missoula. We bought the house at 1203 Cooper St. for $11,000 - which was a very large amount of money in those days.
Compared to our trailer house in Lolo, this house seemed like a mansion to us, although it was only a modest-sized 3-bedroom house with a shop and an ancient 1-car garage.
This house was located on the West Side of town, mostly made up of lower-middle class houses, but still more highly regarded than the North Side, where, as rumor had it, the really tough kids lived, sort of Missoula's version of the South Bronx.
Half a block from our house was the small "Ray & Mae" Grocery, run by Ray and Mae Wohlschlager since 1945, at 819 Hawthorne St. It was a true old-fashioned "Mom-and-Pop" store, with a glass counter full of penny candies, and a pop cooler where you just reached into the cold water and grabbed out a bottle of pop, sort of like a huge, electric ice chest. Hershey bars were a nickel, and a bottle of pop was a dime. The grocery was sold around 1965 to the Hirnings and went out of business about 1970.
One block to the east was the West Side Barber Shop, which also had been in business since 1945, and was run by George Bays. The address was 819 Scott St. Old George ran the barber shop until 1969, when he retired. Neither the Wohlschlagers nor the Bays had any children still living with them, and both lived upstairs from their respective businesses.
One block north was Lowell School, where I attended the 7th and 8th grades, and which was adjacent to West Side Park. Here we spent our summer days in the wading pool or playing baseball.
There were two West Side teams, the Wonders and the Wizards. We played a kind of pre-Little League ball run by the city Parks Department, known as "Pee-Wee League", for 8 to 10 year olds.
Through baseball I met Tom Garland, who lived a couple of blocks away at 1322 Toole Ave. We became good friends as were both interested in baseball, model cars, and collecting books. Tom and I were both on the West Side Wonders team, which did not win many games, but we had a good time pretending to be Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris.
My best friend in those days was Randy Solle, who lived a block to the east of the park, at 1016 Phillips St. He also had a younger brother, David, who was the same age as my brother Joe, and the two of them were best friends as well.
Randy was crazy about horses and playing the guitar, which he was trying to learn. He wanted to be the next Elvis, and he already had the slicked-back hair with the flip in front, and had mastered most of Elvis' moves. He was a beautiful person, with not a mean bone in his body. He was always cheerful and upbeat. Since Randy was not a sports type at all, we mostly just played at Cowboys and Indians or some such, I don't really remember exactly, but we did spend a lot of time together and were the best of friends.
Tom had a paper route, delivering the Daily Missoulian every afternoon. In the summertime, I would ususally go with him on the route. On weekends, we delivered in the early mornings. We would usually sleep outside, and get up at dawn, around 4:00 or 5:00 am, walk a mile or so to the Missoulian offices on North Higgins Avenue, then the mile back and start the route.
We also sold papers on the streets downtown, and in every bar and restaurant in the area. Most bartenders tolerated us if we walked through quickly and left, but a few would run us off whenever we showed up. One night at the Oxford Cafe, a 24-hour cafe and bar that catered to the down-and-out types, we found a guy at the end of the bar, near the door, who was so drunk he could hardly manage to stay on his barstool. When he saw us, he declared loudly that he would buy all our papers, if we would promise to get "those two little guys" (my brother Joe and Tom's brother Bobby, both 8 years old, were with us) straight home to bed. It was, after all, about 2:30 or 3:00 in the morning. We promised we would, and sold him almost a hundred papers for a ten-dollar bill. The bartender was now giving us the evil eye. We asked the drunk man where we should put the papers, and he said that he didn't care - he could not read all of them! So we offered to take them out the back door and leave them on the sidewalk by the garbage cans, and he said "fine". Of course, what we did was to carry them out the back door and keep on going, eventually selling those papers another time to the other night owls around town. We had made a handsome profit that night.
Newspapers were ten cents, of which we got to keep four cents.
It seems unbelievable in this day and age to think of kids our age frequenting bars in the middle of the night. Certainly our parents did not know what we were up to, even then. In all the years we sold newspapers, we were never afraid and were never bothered by anyone, except one time when a drunk driver tried to deliberately run us down while we were walking home. We all dove into the ditch just in time, as the car swerved through the gravel strip at the side of the street. It was a close call for sure, but we figured that guy must be crazy as well as drunk to try something like that. Probably the only reason no one was hit was that we heard him round the corner behind us, then speed up as he approached - we knew immediately that something was not right, and Tom and I yelled "JUMP" and dove into the ditch. Luckily, Joe and Bobby knew we weren't kidding and did likewise.
While Tom's forte was newspapers, mine was mowing lawns. Again, we usually went together. The going rate for a "medium-sized" lawn was 50 cents, which we split. On a hot day, after paying for the gas, we just had enough left over for a bottle of pop and a Hershey bar each, so we never got to keep much of that money. On a good day, we would do two or three lawns, and have enough money left over to buy a comic book or save towards a model car.
Although I was the same age as Tom and just a little older than Randy, Tom was two years behind me in school and Randy was three years behind, because I had started early and skipped a grade. That meant that during the school year we did not see as much of each other, particularly after I started high school in the fall of 1963, at the age of 12.
Like most kids my age, I was afraid of what I would find at high school. There were always rumors circulating about hazings and beatings and so on. I had already decided that I would not be going to the bathroom at school for the next four years, just to reduce the chances of getting beat up.
I assumed that I would be going to Hellgate High, the public high school for our side of town, but my parents surprised me by going to the local Catholic high school, Loyola. This was a Jesuit-run college preparatory school, and was much smaller than Hellgate, only 141 students, all boys, compared to 1400 or so at Hellgate. It was aligned with a girls high school, Sacred Heart Academy, just across the street.
My mother took me down to Loyola to meet the principal, Father Bernard Harris. Apparently, she was determined that I should get the best education possible under the circumstances. Although we could not afford the $200 per year tuition, she arranged that I would work for my tuition. So, I was enrolled at Loyola, even though nobody in our family was a practising Catholic - least of all, me; I don't think I had ever even been to church back then.
In the fall of 1963, I started as a freshman at Loyola High School, at the age of 12. Naturally, on the first day of school, in spite of avoiding the bathroom all day, I was cornered in the hallway by a crowd of older boys and subjected to the customary "welcoming rumble", which meant that I was encircled and shoved back and forth around the circle while my books and supplies went flying in every direction. Since it was useless to resist, I let them shove me around for a few minutes until they grew bored with me and left me alone.
I thought that perhaps, after that, I would be left alone, but as the smallest kid in school, I was easy prey for everybody. One day, it was go to the bathroom or pee my pants, so I braved it and went in. Big mistake. I should have run down to the train station, went pee, and come back, it would have been safer.
Two seniors came in right behind me, and decided that I needed to be hassled. They discussed de-pantsing me and throwing me out in the street in front of the girls' school. Oh, God, no, I thought, anything but THAT! Nothing could be worse than that - except, of course, to get a "swirlie", which was to be held by the ankles above the toilet and be lowered into it while it was being flushed. Fiendishly, they gave me the choice. I was trying to decide which was worse, when Harry Kenck walked in.
Harry Kenck, although only a sophomore, was generally considered to be the toughest guy in the whole school. Although not tall, his arms were bigger around than my legs. He walked with an arrogant confidence which, in his case, was entirely justified. For some reason, he seemed to like me, I don't know why.
"What's going on here?", he asked the two seniors.
One of them answered, "We're giving this freshman a swirlie".
Harry calmly replied, "Let him go".
That was all it took. All they said was "Yes, H.R., sure", and they both left.
The word spread immediately that H.R. Kenck was my friend, and no one at Loyola High School ever bothered me again. By God, it felt good to have friends in high places!
For the next four years, I stayed after school every day and cleaned all the blackboards in the school, to pay my tuition. This kept me out of after-school activities and sports, but that was fine with me as I was never much of a joiner anyway.
I got to know the school janitor, Don Dosch, quite well. He was a rather small man, with a huge ring of keys hung on his belt. This was not his only job; he worked days, I think at one of the lumber mills, then came in from 3:30 to about 6:30 or so five days a week, and I never knew him to miss a day's work.
Early on in my freshman year I became good friends with Steve Robertson. Like me, he was not exactly a member of the "in-crowd", and we were not as rowdy as some of our classmates, so it was a sort of natural alliance. We remained good friends throughout high school and also later on at the University of Montana. Starting in his freshman year of high school, Steve also had to work every day to pay his way through school, but he had a job making pallets, later a job cleaning up in a bakery.
The Jesuit priests who taught at Loyola had a rustic log cabin located at the end of Grant Creek Road, probably 15 miles or so outside of town. It was standard practice for them to invite various of us boys to the cabin for the weekend, where we chopped wood and did other chores for the priests, in exchange for which we got to spend a weekend in the wild and had the run of the woods.
It soon became apparent that certain of the priests had more than chores in mind when they invited us to the cabin. I was witness to one boy being molested, and in fact one priest tried to molest me as well. Luckily for me, I was not raised as a Catholic, and so did not accept without question that the priests were anything less than holy. This, I think, is the only thing that kept me on the defensive and prevented me from being molested by the priests.
That young Catholic boys were being molested by priests was, as it turned out, a poorly kept secret, although I never heard of a case in which any priest was arrested, excommunicated, banished, or in any way punished for this behavior. It became a standing joke among us that certain priests were known to be "fairies" and that you did not go to the cabin alone with them.
Aside from the molestation issue, which as I said never happened to me personally, life at Loyola was surprisingly more interesting than I had imagined it would be. Given that Loyola was a boys only school, I thought it would be very boring indeed. In fact, it turned out to be just the opposite.
With all the girls safely housed across the street from us, we were free of the constant need to show off or feel inferior, as I think we would have (most of us, anyway) had there been girls present at all times like in a public high school.
By today's standards, things were pretty tame, in spite of all the hell-raising that went on. We never knew anything of drugs or violence like kids today have to deal with. The worst things that happened while I was in high school were when Bill Miller and Art Solon glued all the desks to the floor over at the girls' school, where we had Chemistry class, and the time that Art Solon took a bottle of pop off Mrs. Holdens' desk, emptied it, pissed in it, replaced the cap, and put it back on her desk. When she took a sip of that one, the shit hit the fan, for sure. Yet, while he may have been suspended, he was never expelled.
So I spent the next four years studying, trying to make good grades, working for my Dad, and sometimes still going on the paper route with Tom.
During this time, my Dad took up stock-car racing at the Missoula race track, located about five miles up Miller Creek Road. There is a housing development there now, but at that time it was pretty far out in the country, and was just a dust bowl with a dirt race track carved out.
Dad had bought a 1954 Mercury with a flathead V-8, which produced maybe 80 horsepower. I spent many hours tearing that thing apart, ripping out the seats, upholstery, floorboards, everything. It was a lot harder than it sounds, especially the glass. Eventually I got it down to just the frame and body, and Dad welded a set of roll bars in there that would have stopped a Mack truck. Everybody said that John Sherman may not have the fastest car on the track, but he sure as hell had the safest car around. He used two-inch sewer pipe for his roll cage, and to hell with the weight. He even had those bars run through the doors, just in case.
Money was tight, and sponsorship money was hard to come by. The other racers helped out, because it was a struggling group, and they needed more competitors. One old boy, named Bernie, who only had one arm, said he would help Dad get sponsors. One day, Bernie went around town to all the bars where he was known, which was apparently quite a few, and came back with six sponsors, at five dollars each. So, for thirty dollars cash, we painted all six names on our car, using red house paint. It wasn't pretty.
For the next three years or so, I spent most Sundays during the summer down in the pits, working on that car between races. It was pretty interesting, seeing racing from the inside. It was common practice back then to have beer in the pits before, during, and of course after the races. I think it would have seemed blasphemous to suggest that beer should not be allowed. The standard compensation given to each driver who rolled his car during a race was a free case of beer. "Getcha case of beer for that one", was the usual refrain as some unlucky driver watched his car coming back into the pits "on the hook".
One driver in particular, Bud Love, was usually so drunk by race time that he could barely walk, let alone drive, but he was also too drunk to go very fast most of the time, so he was considered harmless enough and was allowed to continue driving, as long as he did not pass out. The same could be said for Benny Martin, who, though roaring drunk, somehow managed to win a lot of races.
In those days the flagman stood out on the track and waved his flags as the cars came out of the last turn and into the front- stretch, then scooted behind a barricade of railroad ties for safety. It always seemed to me like a pretty hairy situation, and one that would never be allowed these days.
In November of 1966, I turned 16 and went in to take my driver's license test, where it was discovered that I was badly in need of glasses. "You've got to be kidding me", I believe, were the eye examiner's exact words. I had no idea that anyone could see any better than I could. So I got glasses, which of course I never wore except, sometimes, to drive. Talk about a revelation - the first time I tried on my new glasses, in the optical shop, I was horrified to discover that the windows were streaked with grime, and the the world was, not to put too fine a point on it, truly a gross and disgusting place. I had never before noticd all the garbage in the gutter, nor how glaringly ugly everything looked, when one could see properly. I still haven't gotten over it. In May of 1967, I graduated from Loyola High School. Finishing 6th in my class of 31, I was the highest-ranking student who was interested in attending the University of Montana, so I received a one-year, full-tuition scholarship to UM, which was renewable, provided that I maintained a 'B' average in college. Alas, it was not to be. During my high school years, my grades, which had started out as all A's and B's, had slipped noticeably during the later years, especially my senior year. Part of the problem, of course, was that I could not see the blackboard, a real drawback in classes like Analytical Geometry and Calculus, where everything was written up on the board to be copied. But there was more to it than that. I did not understand it at the time, but many years later I realized I was what is now called "ADHD". Which is a fancy way of saying that I was distractable, and not at all interested in most of what was being taught in high school, and even less so in college. I lasted about two years. I remember one day in particular; it was mid-winter, 1968, and I had been trying to get enthusiastic enough about one of my courses to finish a paper which was coming due, and would account for a large part of my grade. I'd been trying to produce something for a few weeks, with no results yet. Finally, I chose one evening, on which I vowed to crank out the work or die trying. I was truly determined to finish this paper. I tried studying at home, and quickly decided that there were too many distractions there, and not enough of a "scholarly atmosphere". So I loaded up my books and drove over to the "Commons", which was what we called the Student Union building. I ordered a pot of tea and sat down to work. I forced myself to ignore the pretty girls and other minor distractions around me and concentrate only on the reading material in front of me. I continued doing this for about two hours, after which time I realized that I had read maybe two pages, and in any case could not remember any of what I had read. It finally dawned on me that I was just not cut out to be a student. I felt like a total failure, a real loser. I'd always been told how smart I was, and how far I could go in academia. My Dad had me figured for a doctor or a lawyer. But now I realized that it was never going to happen that way. I knew that there was no way I was going to sit there and produce those papers and finish college. It was a pretty scary feeling. I did not know what to do next, nor what would happen to me. I had to re-think my whole strategy, which was really hard because I'd never really had a strategy to begin with. I had never done anything except go to school (I knew that working at a burger bar did not qualify as a strategy). I hung on in college until that spring, mainly by taking the most interesting and easiest courses I could find. I was especially worried about my future because I knew that if I dropped out of college, I would immediately be drafted and sent to Vietnam, which I had heard was a Very Bad Place. Then, my apparent salvation came from out of the blue. One of the guys who raced stock cars with my Dad was a buy named Bill McGuire. He was also the "Top Sergeant" of the local Army Reserve unit out at Fort Missoula. He told me to come out and see him, which I did. I had heard that all National Guard and Reserve units in the country were full and had long waiting lists, but somehow I got right in. It was not until years later that I figured out that my Dad must have gotten Bill McGuire to pull some strings for me. So it was that in November 1970 I was sent to Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, for my Basic Combat Training and Advanced Individual Training, which together lasted five months. I turned twenty years old that month. Amazingly, we were given two weeks off for Christmas before our Basic Training was finished. The break would not have come at a better time, but going back for more was gut-wrenching. I was truly astonished at the Army's ability to send some 3000 men home and back within a two-week time span. All the travel costs were paid by the government. When we walked out into the bitter cold pre-dawn on the morning of Dec. 21, I could not believe my eyes - the parade ground was lined with hundreds of greyhound buses, each with a big numbered sign in the window. We had all been given envelopes filled with travel vouchers and instructions, beginning with which bus to board. My route was to St. Louis, where I changed to a bus bound for Denver, then Salt Lake City, then Butte Montana, and finally to Missoula. I had to travel farther than just about anybody on the base, as most of the recruits were from the East Coast and the South. I arrived in Missoula after about fifty-two straight hours on buses, but I was very happy to get home. Because the Army Reserve unit in Missoula was a Combat Engineer unit, I had an M.O.S. (Military Occupational Specialty), or "job", as we would say in civilian life, that was assigned to me by the unit I had joined: I was pronounced a "Carpenter, Field, Combat", or some such. After learning how to march and shoot and kill people by various other means, they tried to teach me how to build bridges across jungle swamps, while carrying a rifle over my left shoulder, and also how to build that most important piece of military field apparatus, the latrine, or temporary "out-house". Along about March 1971, they sent me back to Missoula to attend monthly weekend drills, plus the annual two-week training camp, which if I could last six years would have fulfilled my military service obligation. Alas, it was not to be. I did last a year or so doing the monthly regimen, and attended a two-week stint at the Presidio, located in San Francisco. My job there was to drive troops back and forth over the Golden Gate Bridge every day, between the Presidio and Forts Cronkite and Baker on the other side of the bay, where our guys were doing real work. The reason I got this easy job was that I had acquired a military driver's license that year. It seems the Army will not let just ANY fool drive their trucks around, you have to be a properly licensed fool for that. Someone had told me that acquiring a military driver's license could get me out of a lot of boring work...and that turned out to be very true. After spending so much time and brainpower trying to figure out how to avoid doing active military service, I discovered that the one thing that seemed even worse than dying was to spend six years attending those boring drills and meetings. So I quit attending. I was warned about the obvious consequences - that I would soon be "activated" (about the same as being drafted in the first place), and, of course, sent straight to Vietnam. Everyone knew that. The Army gave me about three months to change my mind and resume the drills, but I stayed away. In January 1972 I sold or gave away everything that would not fit into my little Triumph TR4 sports car, and I started driving south to Texas, where I planned to work for my Uncle Paul in his steel fabrication and building business until I was called up for duty. I left Missoula in a driving blizzard, with the temperature about 10 degrees above zero. I had no chains or snow tires, but that car did amazingly well in the snow, as it did not weigh anything, and I was sitting almost directly above the rear wheels. I just kept plowing along through Montana and Idaho, and into Utah, where it started to warm up and the roads were dry. I made it to Texas without mishap and worked for Paul for three months. It was a physically hard job, grinding off baked-on crude oil from the big pipes that were used in oil drilling rigs. Paul would buy these used pipes, clean them up and use them to build the framework for drive-in move screens, which would stand up to 140 feet high. Paul's was one of only three, and later only two, companies in the U.S. that was doing this kind of work. My Dad was also in Texas working "with" Paul, who was my Dad's younger brother, but they had a falling out after some time and split up. In March 1972, I got orders to report to Fort Ord, California, to be processed back into the Army for active duty. I knew that the next stop would be Vietnam. I packed my suitcase and headed back to Montana, with plans to sell my car there and say my good-byes to my friends and family, before hitch-hiking down to Fort Ord.
I left Texas on a beautiful Friday evening in March, driving west through the rolling hills of West Texas just as the sun was going down. I planned to just drive until I was sleepy, then pull over and sleep. I did not have a lot of money saved up, only about $200 or so, so I did not feel like I could waste money on motels, as I would need it all for gas and food.
I drove all that night and the next day, going across Texas and New Mexico and into Arizona. I picked up Interstate 10 in El Paso, after driving across Texas on several different two-lane highways.
I got to Phoenix just after dark, about 8:00 PM, and as I still was not sleepy I blew on through Phoenix and headed for Las Vegas. By now I had been up for more than thirty hours straight, but the only things I was stopping for was gas and the occasional sandwich.
I stopped in Las Vegas to take advantage of the very good and very cheap meals available there (they practically give away steak dinners, in the hopes that you will tarry to gamble). Then I left Las Vegas and headed north towards Salt Lake City. By the second afternoon, I was moving north through Utah. It was a beautiful, sunny day, and I had the top down. Finally, I was getting really sleepy, although I was not aware that I was drifting off. Here you can digress and read the account of my close call with death on the highways. Apparently, I lived to tell about it, however.