My Mother the 'Maniac'
(entry for 7/10/2024)
One summer day in 1952, my mother drove our ten-year-old DeSoto Custom four-door sedan from Montrose to Gunnison in fifty-seven minutes. The distance is sixty-five miles. US Highway 50 along that stretch is still mostly two-lane, but is today nice and wide, with numerous places to pass other cars. Back then, not so much. It wasn’t wide. In fact, sometimes it was downright narrow. In places it was extremely steep, sometimes up, sometimes down, sometimes both in rapid succession. It had many tight curves. Except for the first and last mile, the speed limit was 60. The first mile had a speed limit of 35. For the last mile it was 40.
Now this doesn’t necessarily sound very alarming, until you stop and do some math. To go sixty-five miles in fifty-seven minutes, you have to average sixty-eight miles per hour. Average.
To put it another way, to maintain that speed you have to traverse a distance equal to a football field in length every three seconds. Including the End Zones!
There were curves along the way where you couldn’t possibly go more than 45. There were hills where no reasonable driver would attempt to go more than 50. I did say ‘reasonable’ though, didn’t I. When my mother got in one of these moods, which thankfully was not very often, she was very far from reasonable.
I no longer remember why she had to be in such a rush. It must have been fairly urgent. I know she said that some office or other closed at 5:00 and that she wasn’t able to leave our house till 4:01. She made it with two minutes to spare. When she bragged to my dad about this fact, his only comment was, “You must have driven like a maniac.” He didn’t laugh when he said it. He didn't even smile.
She made the trip alone. She endangered no one but herself. As she put it later, “If Len or Rita had been with me, I would never have tried it.” It went without saying that if her husband had been with her, he would have been driving. And wouldn’t have made it in time, either. (She wasn’t allowed to drive any car if he was in it.)
The car, large and heavy, got sixteen miles per gallon, according to Chrysler Company advertising. I doubt it got anywhere near that on that trip. Of course gasoline in those days was priced at eleven cents a gallon for regular and seventeen for premium. Even if she got only10mpg that day, it wouldn’t have been the end of the world financially. Which was a good thing, because we were very poor.
Which was another issue. From 1941 to 1946, my dad had averaged eight hundred dollars a month in take home pay from his traveling job as a wholesale auto parts salesman. We could have anything we wanted, and did. (He paid cash for our first purchased home, in 1941. It was only three thousand dollars, but was still quite an accomplishment for that era.
He lost that job (through his own stubbornness and rebellious attitude) in 1947, and by the time we moved to Montrose in 1949, he was making exactly two thousand one hundred fifty per year. (Gross! I have no idea what the take-home was.) That’s $179.16 a month, down from $800. A bit of a shock, to put it mildly. I know my sister and I had gotten spoiled during the heyday. I think my mom must have gotten slightly spoiled as well. At Christmas time 1949, she spent $53 dollars on me for a Lionel Train set (the engine alone is now worth $400), and $50 on my sister for what had to be the world’s most expensive doll. She certainly didn’t get the money to do this from my dad, and to this day it’s somewhat of a mystery as to where it came from. She always claimed merely that she had ‘earned it,’ presumably by doing some housekeeping for neighbors and friends. I know she was often gone for hours at a time, leaving my nine-year-old self and five-year-old sister alone.
She was our church treasurer that year, and my dad’s boss’s wife formally accused her of stealing it from the tithes and offerings. But it doesn’t take hours a day to steal money, from the church or anywhere else. I don’t know what she was doing, and perhaps it’s better that I don’t, but I know one thing for sure: She didn’t steal it. I used to think she wasn’t capable of doing something like that, and lately I have come to the belated realization that she certainly was capable. But I’ll never believe she actually did it. (She was soon cleared of the charge.)
But the mania started even earlier than that. Strangely enough I know exactly when it started. I was just about to turn four.
Our extended family up to that moment had been almost entirely my dad’s relatives. First was my Aunt Mabel, his oldest sister. She came and lived in our basement for several months in 1939, a year before my birth. Then Reba arrived, after Mable left, and she stayed for a while in 1941. In 1943, my dad’s widowed mom, who had moved from Arkansas to North Dakota with an angry man she was not married to, and who sexually abused at least two of her kids, and likely more, called for help. We drove up to a small town just eight miles below the Canadian border, and we rescued her, along with her three youngest. My dad, who had just bought a former chicken farm in Brighton, which was now raising strawberries, gave her the converted chicken-coop we had been living in, and we moved back to Denver, along with the three rescued kids, while she lived alone in the coop. The three kids lived with us for a whole school year, so that they could attend (and walk to) an SDA school which was only three blocks away, though up a steep hill. (And for which my dad paid the tuition.)
It was at this point that my mom got fed up and went on a quiet rampage, not quite full-throttle, but close. She announced (wordlessly) that from then on, the extended family would be her people, not his, and my Grandma and Aunt Eda (my mom’s sister) came to live with us instead of my dad’s siblings, who went to live with their mom, who by this time had rented a tiny house in south Denver to replace the Chicken Coop. My mom also decided unilaterally that it was time to have a second kid. She didn’t trick him: no pretending to use birth control and not doing so, none of that. She just told him it was time, and, voila, it was.
My dad's mom, who up till then had been just plain Grandma, as opposed to my mom's mom, who was known as Grandma Schultz, now suddenly became Grandma Bassham, while my mom's mom, Emma, became just plain Grandma. Nor was this change gradual. It happened literally overnight. And it happened because my mom decreed it to be so. My dad took one look at her face and didn't argue.
If you look at the picture of her that is at the head of this post, you can see hints of what’s to come not too much later, even though I’m only three in the photo. At first glance, she’s smiling. But if you look a bit closer, you can see that it isn’t a smile at all. It’s a sort of slightly-positive grimace, as though to say, “This kid is getting heavier by the second.” Or maybe (more likely) it’s saying, “I am compliant now, but not much longer.”
The 1943 hint of a half-smile quickly turned into a grim set of the jaw in 1944 and after. I have no pictures to prove it, because she stopped being willing to be photographed. In fact, from about 1950 on for the next ten years, she absolutely refused, with only one exception. When she gave in and sat for a formal portrait with my dad in honor of my 12th grade graduation in 1957, I was shocked when they handed me the enlargement. I had been living in a boarding school, and I had forgotten what she looked like. I was even more shocked that she had been willing to pose.
She was trying to smile in the photo, but it wasn’t working. That grim determination to have things her way now was visibly there. Probably the same grim determination that you could see on her face (if you had been there) when she was careening down the asphalt at an average of 68 miles per hour.
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