School, real school-not kindergarten!

Third grade from the looks of them. Safford elementary, Tucson.


In those days, the school system had no program for children that for whatever reason couldn’t keep up so a classroom was provided at Miles Elementary School on East Broadway and in January 1939 when I turned six, my mother and I went together to school, I to learn, she to teach. She arranged it for me to attend classes at the same school so she could ride herd on me, no easy task.
Always the precocious child, I was able to maintain good grades without much effort. I always suspected collusion between my first grade teacher, Miss Saunders and my mother in trying to get me to use my right hand when writing. They may have been on to something, but I successfully resisted. Mother had her own fish to fry with a collection of variously handicapped kids, most of whom had cerebral palsy. She was pioneering in this field, at least locally and the class was not really a showplace in the eyes of the PTA at this relatively affluent school.

Our day began with Mom rushing around, getting the oatmeal underway in a pot stuck in the top of the kettle, while she got dressed. In the kitchen, there were two chairs, one an old wooden high-chair minus the tray and an odd side chair which we pulled up to a pull-out counter. (Older kitchens always had these pull-out features.) We had an aluminum newspaper stand on the counter where we could prop the paper so we could both read the funnies. Everyone in the family was devoted to the funnies and followed the adventures of Alley Oop, Mary Worth, Popeye, and Gasoline Alley. We needed to get out of the house no later than 8:00 AM to catch the University bus downtown and transfer to the Broadway out to Miles School. It was always a rush once we were out the door. It was a block to the bus stop, but at best, Mom could only manage a brisk canter. She caught her toe on lifted section of sidewalk one morning and fell like a sack of flour. Fortunately she was holding on to her purse to her front and didn’t get a hand out, so she wasn’t hurt badly. I turned back to see what I could do but she said “I can get up! Go hold the bus!” She did and I did and we got to school on time. Most days weren’t so dramatic.


My first report card, Miles Elementary School, Tucson. Mom’s handwriting was easy to read.


The next year the classroom was moved to Safford Elementary in an older, largely Chicano part of town. I followed. This was an old school, consisting of the elementary and junior high buildings. Everything was old. The desks were on runners with cast iron frames, the double hung windows had roller shades with cords to run up or down. When it was hot, it was hot in the rooms and when it was cold, it was drafty. Safford was a bit of a shock after Miles, a school whose paint was barely dry, but it was to be Mom’s home for the next ten years.

At first, when school was out, I’d hang out in my mother’s classroom doing busy work while she did her paper work, but as I got older, the lure of my classmates’ nearby homes gave me optional places to hang out. If I waited for her to get finished, we’d take the bus home or perhaps detour over to the Euclid Ave. Cafeteria, the Mecca for all brown food and our regular supper rendezvous for several years. The six blocks we walked home helped settle the stomach. Mom never seemed to mind walking even though it was with a pronounced limp. There was always a stoicism and courage which in retrospect we came to appreciate, but I doubt we realized the battles she fought and prevailed in when it came to her professional side. Probably Gerry did, as a teacher with more to offer than her superiors would allow her to do. Mother’s strength was grounded in the belief she was doing for these cast aside students what had never been available before. The Tucson Public School System kept her program alive until 1950 when the Cerebral Palsy Foundation of Southern Arizona was created and all the students transferred to their new facility.

Safford was my school through the first half of the 4th grade. By that time, independence was my middle name, manifested by the daily adventure of walking home. The route took me downtown, through the noisy penny arcade, out the back door and over to the train station. If there was a train in the station, I would stand as close as possible to the engine which made unpredictable noises and blew steam out of various pipes and outlets. The engineer would keep a wary eye on me, occasionally proffer a conspiratorial nod or a wave which would prove that we were brothers. Sometimes these delays in transit would take an hour or more if I had to wait for a train to arrive. The rails were the country’s arteries in the early 40s.


Standing as close to the tracks as I dared as the likes of these massive engines thundered by, blazing fireboxes, billowing black smoke and steam, was addictive to me.

War production, freight, produce---the trains rumbled through Tucson’s rail yards heading east and heading west,
darkening the sky with plumes of black oil smoke. their fireboxes flashing. Freight trains, some as long as a mile 100 cars pulled and pushed by as many as three engines, chuffed and billowed black smoke Passenger trains were filled with travelers and soldiers, while on the far side of the yard, , moved in relentless regularity. The attraction was irresistible for me. It was here that I first thrilled at the sight of the first “Daylight” streamliner with its distinctive orange and red colors. Now the tracks have been removed and Amtrak shows up twice a day with little or no announcement because frequently the trains run late. Though never getting my fill of these living, steaming, powerful engines, I’d reluctantly head for the 6th Avenue subway and walk the long six remaining blocks home.


An ad for the Southern Pacific from 1942


One of my friends from Safford was Norman McCracken whose father was some high ranking Southern Pacific manager. Norman’s grandfather was the first of the McCrackens to work for the Southern Pacific. He was responsible for the idea to paint the engines silver on the front to make them more visible. They had been transferred to Tucson from Eugene, Oregon and they lived in a company house near the roundhouse. It was great! I had access to the railroad yards from his back gate where I could see the steam engines being overhauled in the shops. Norman was my ticket to going all over otherwise forbidden territory. Of course, I over played my cards one Saturday and Mother got a call from Mr. DeHart, the freightyard superintendent, advising her that I was getting in the way of the locomotives. Mom was resigned to such advisories.


The once proud Tucson SP station-my second stop on my daily route home. Soaking up the smells and heat of the great steaming engines was intoxicating.


Roskruge Elementary was my next school and the one I would have been attending under normal circumstances. I was now a latch key child and exploited my freedom without caution. That I didn’t burn down the house with my mischief is probably the dumbest kind of luck. Maybe not, because a certain concern for self-preservation had begun to emerge. When things got out of control, I tended to abandon the project. But it was now that a new responsibility entered my life: homework. My performance in school entered a gradual decline correlating to the amount of time I spent on my homework-a character flaw that stayed with me into high school. There were social skills to hone, or in my case, discover. Being the son of a respected teacher was thrown up to me as a reason I should excel not only scholastically but outside of the classroom as well. I responded to these expectations with typical indifference. It wasn’t that I didn’t seek approval, I just didn’t see the point of killing myself to gain it. School seemed to becoming a challenge and it caused Mom to consider a course correction.


Graduating 9th graders from Roskruge Jr. High. Miss Townsend, principal. I lost touch with most of them when I transferred out of Tucson High as a sophomore

Slovenly Peter and other Cautionary Reading.

Grandma and Grandpa didn’t have a lot of children’s books or toys, but there were plenty of forbidden attractions like Grandpa’s knife and sword collection. Although he kept the dangerous items under lock and key, other curios were on display throughout the house—and this house had a basement!

I discovered a collection of books, put away for safe keeping, that used to be read by other members of the family when they were young. There was a complete set of “The
Bookhouse Books” a collection of graded short stories edited to encourage the young person to read for enjoyment. The pages were enhanced with drawings depicting the stories and their characters unrealistically floating in space, such was the vignette style of the time. This suspension of reality mesmerized me and in my imagination, the characters inhabited worlds of my own making. This was particularly true with the book, “Slovenly Peter”, a collection of cautionary tales of misbehaving



Here is the book's namesake himself, Slovenly Peter. When a little girl, Romping Polly played with the boys, she took a fall and broke her leg--off! Naturally, blood spewed out of the limb. Tom Bogus, otherwise known as "The Sweet Tooth" had a thing about sugar to the point of driving his father to have his teeth pulled out. While Tom struggled on a stool, his hands held back, a foreign looking character with a giant set of tongs pulled out the teeth one by one.


children and the horrible consequences of their behavior. Part of the book had easily read stories framed in organic illustrations featuring the bad child doing something awful, followed by a succession pictures of his or her gruesome fate, such as what happens to the little girl who played with matches and eventually ended up a small pile of ashes.

There was a fascination these stories held for kids and for me particularly, in the total lack of restraint exhibited by the author/illustrator. Part of the book was translated from the original German and part was supplemented by what looks to be mid-nineteenth century American illustrations and stories which are equally dreadful and much more literal. As an example, there is the story of “The Sweet-Tooth” which tells the tale of a little boy who was addicted to sweets, eating everything in sight that was sugary. Eventually, his fate was to have his rotting teeth yanked out by a man with a giant set of tongs, while another man held his hands back of him. The last picture showed him astraddle a barrel of syrup sucking on a straw. These were the children’s stories of real kids.


A band of Brownies, written and illustrated by Palmer Cox

Another favorite were the Goop books and the Brownies. These were books that my Aunt Betty and Uncle Edward must have
had before WWI when they were little since the illustrations had a distinct Edwardian look to them. Palmer Cox’s Brownies were supposed to be like fairies or elves, little people that came out when the household was asleep. They got into mischief but always ended up doing good deeds. I liked them but the book was falling apart and eventually got thrown out.

Exodus from the mining camp

Although the Company probably wouldn’t have put us out of the house, a mining camp didn’t seem a good place for a widow to raise a family of soon to be five once again. Grandpa convinced Mother to relocate to Tucson, 110 miles south where she could start over with the support of her family. After I was born, incidentally, the last to be born in the Miami-Inspiration company hospital prior to its and the mine’s shut down, we stayed on in the company house until June, when she moved the family to Tucson. She, my sister Alice and I moved in with Grandma and Grandpa on Campbell Avenue while a house hunt ensued. The boys were sent to Colorado to spend the summer at our Uncle John’s ranch but by October, we had moved into our new home at 245 E. 4th Street at the corner of 5th Ave.



Grandpa was a professor at the University of Arizona, lecturing in mining administration. It was a kind of retirement job, one to keep his mind occupied and the routine expenses at bay. The University was very lucky to have someone of his professional stature on the faculty. It was while he worked for the Anaconda Copper Co. as general manager of their Butte, Montana reduction works that Mother and Daddy met. Later he moved to Staten Island, N.Y. and had a consulting office on Broadway in New York City for several years. He had closed his consulting office after business began to taper off. Upon returning from a trip to Japan where he was hired to consult on metallurgical methods, he decided that the university had something to offer and moved to Tucson. They had a comfortable home a few blocks east of the U. and within walking distance of the Mines and Engineering building. Grandpa never was much of a driver and I don’t think he even had a car at that time, but he was convinced that Mother needed a better car to get around, since her new home was about as far west of the campus as his home was east and he didn’t want to miss seeing his new grandson. Grandpa bought us a new 1934 Chevrolet- spoke wheels and nice front fenders you could slide down.


Our 1934 Chevy outside Grandpa and Grandma's house at Campbell Ave. and Helen St. taken about 1938

It was about the first clear memory I have-not when we got it, but when the man came to the door to take it away. Mom had decided a few years later that we really didn’t have that much use for the car as the boys did quite well on their bikes and the expense of operating it exceeded its value to her. (Nobody asked me!)

During my young age, that is, prior to entering school, Mother was attending classes at the University, preparing to become a teacher of crippled children. The boys and Alice were in high school and Mother was at the University leaving me in the care of Grandma and Grandpa and I came to think of 1203 Campbell Ave. home away from home. A boy a few months older than I, Arthur Brinkmeyer, lived next door. We became fast friends up until we reached school age.


That's Arthur on the right. The alley was one of our main routes to adventure.

Arthur’s mom was a teacher and his father was bedridden with tuberculosis as I recall. I didn’t go into their house across the alley very often because his father wanted the peace and quiet. They had an air conditioner, which at that time was quite rare. It sat on a pad in the back of the house. One thing that I remember about Arthur was envy. I envied the fact that his parents gave him neater toys than anybody gave me. His electric train had to be a Lionel while mine was a Marx. Jeez! Come to think of it, that was about all. We roamed the neighborhood, sneaking into the University’s polo practice pen, where we would climb up on the wooden horse in the middle and play cowboys. There was a little store down the street with candy in big glass jars that led us into temptation. Free candy! Just don’t let them see you!

Arthur won Mom’s undying gratitude when he gave me a pair of white rats when we were around 10. I thought a couple of white rats were a pretty neat deal until one of them started popping out funny little skinless pods with feet and tails inside. Before I knew it I was the proud though uncertain owner of eleven white rats. The cage that came with the adults was not really big enough for the entire family and Mom was pretty sure there was going to be a demonstration of the Malthusian theory in our house if something wasn’t done quickly. Jack happened to be down for a visit that weekend and knew how to contain the population explosion with the use of our toilet. Even though I thought the little ones were cute, the older ones were becoming a little unpredictable and one nipped me in the ear. Blood running down my neck, I told Jack it was all right with me if he rid me of the whole batch. Jack obliged.

The father I never knew

My father enjoying his favorite sport, fly-fishing on a stream in western Colorado. Mother took this picture on their honeymoon trip.

A little background on my father is in order. Edward Vestal Graybeal was born in Jefferson, Ashe County, NC in the spring of 1892 to Cicero and Jennie Belle Graybeal. Cicero was a Methodist preacher and principal of the Graybeal Academy, as it was known. The school was an adjunct to the Methodist church in Lansing, near to Jefferson. Cicero died later the same year of causes I have not been successful in learning and Jennie Belle who by this time had two small kids, Elizabeth and Eddie, was left a young widow.


Lizzy and Eddie

Prospects were not bright in that part of NC for her and she elected to move to Colorado to live with her brother John Wilcoxson, who had a ranch in the western part of the state. Another Ashe county expatriate had settled in Pueblo named Granville Graybeal, a cousin to Cicero. Jennie and Granville married and had a daughter, Helen, but a few years later Jennie died in childbirth. Eddie and Lizzy went on to higher education, he at the Colorado School of Mines and she at Colorado College. Eddie pursued a career as a mining engineer and was well positioned to achieve management level at Miami Copper when he was killed.

Mount Ord north of Miami, AZ

Jack, my older brother wrote a few pages when he was nearing 80 about the event. My father was employed as chief engineer at the Miami Copper Co. and loved hunting and fishing. Jack and my brother Jim.14 and 13 respectively, were out with our dad, his partner from the engineering office, a Mr. A. J. McDermid and some hunters from Phoenix during deer season. Game had been scarce and Daddy had decided to look for some quail with his new Browning automatic shotgun and was high on a ridge. Several shots could be heard, then several more shots, and again. At first it was thought that he had run into a flock of quail, but his friend said that it may have been a signal for help. My brothers and the friend scurried up through the brush and catsclaw, calling out for him. From the brush up ahead they heard him say, “Get help! I’ve shot myself!”

The new automatic had proved to be his undoing. Apparently, while chasing a quail into the brush, the gun got tangled up and went off hitting him in the lower leg. He had pulled off his belt to use as a tourniquet but felt the need for another. Jim pulled off his belt and stayed behind while Jack and the friend went to organize a rescue party and retrieve our first aid kit. The others went to the mine safety shack and retrieved a stretcher. It was late in the day when they finally got him off the hill and into our car. The other hunters took my brothers and followed behind in their car. After driving several miles toward the rendezvous point with an ambulance, the car carrying our dad stopped and the dome light went on. Then it went off and the car continued. Jack assumes that was when Daddy died. Ironically, all during the rescue attempt, Daddy remained conscious, managing his care and coordinating the effort.

By the time Jack and Jim got home, several concerned neighbors were looking after Mother, who was greatly pregnant with me. To make matters worse, “Daddy had been in the middle of converting the kitchen stove from wood-burning to a two-burner oil stove.” and had it in boxes all over the kitchen. The neighbors got together and completed his work during the following days. Although Mother could drive, in her “delicate condition” it didn’t seem like the best thing to do, so Jack elected himself chauffeur of our ’28 Chevrolet, the car Daddy bought to replace the one Mother totaled while attempting to rescue a dish for a potluck dinner she was headed for.

I should explain something about our mother. When my brother Jim was born, she got a blood clot and became partially paralyzed on her left side. After years of repair work and stints in hospitals with specialists, she was able to regain much of the use of her left side, although she still walked with a limp and her left hand didn’t have much going for it. Jim was the third boy. The first born, Ned, lived long enough to enjoy his first bicycle. In January1930, while coasting down the hill in front of our company house, he had a collision with a neighbor’s car, which landed him in the hospital. He died from his injuries the next day. You could say that life had been building Mother’s strength of character, but not to her face. Then, two and a half years later, she lost our dad, only to bring another life, me, onto the planet two months later.


The Graybeal Clan around 1927

Preface

2006*--It’s been a year of discontent in the world, five years after the attack on the World Trade Center. The President’s ratings have dropped steadily as the public became more and more aware of the misfortunes of war, disaster mismanagement, gas prices and moral issues.

Aside from all the foregoing, I want to clarify somewhat, how this effort has come together. Initially, it was to be a chronology of my life. As I recalled events and topics, I found myself following a particular thread far from its chronological beginnings. If music was the topic, it seemed easier to pursue that interest from the first memories to my present state of appreciation.

In other places in the narrative, my mind was recalling specific events and where they led. So in a sense, it has turned out to be an exercise in “stream of consciousness” writing. I trust the reader will not take me to task for the results. Sections of the work have been reviewed by friends in an effort to verify events. They have commented that some “warts and all” parts probably should be edited. Not an easy task and it begs the question, am I painting an undeservedly favorable portrait? Of course I am. Those who know me know what I'm omitting and nobody else should be concerned. After all, I'm not running for office. It always bothered me that other family members haven’t told their stories, (only Loren Jackson, to my knowledge) candidly so we and those who follow can get a better understanding of them as people, as parents, and as individuals.

*I started this memoir in 2006.

Required Reading: Random Recollections while I Still Remember Anything

Grandpa E. P. Mathewson and the author at a couple of weeks old. (Little did I know I’d end up with such a full head of hair!)

By Andy Graybeal

As a preface I would like to stress that this isn’t a chronology so much as a collection of anecdotal incidents and recollections. If there is a structure present, it has been built around topics, such as family, buddies, interests and events. In that way I hope to give you a look into the time in which I grew from a kid to the old guy at the keyboard of my Mac with time on his hands. Most people can’t remember much about their birth and I’m no exception. From what I’m told, I was a blessed event and “a darling”, the latter being the postscript on Grandpa’s biweekly family letter, all six carbons of it. It has been 73 years since 6:15 that Sunday morning, January 29th, 1933 and most my sins have been forgotten if not forgiven. So if it seems to bounce around a bit, blame it on the escaping brain cells endemic among people of my age, which happens to be about four years older than the man holding me in the snapshot above.

Mother was a widow when I was born. My father died of a gunshot wound suffered while on a hunting trip. At the time of his death the family lived in company housing at the Miami Copper Co. where he was employed. It was during the great depression and the mine was cutting back operations resulting in layoffs of most the hourly workers, leaving management to hold down things until the price of copper returned to profitability.