Author: Abby Nardo

While Dad was in the hospital, his younger sister Anna (my aunt) wrote a letter to my mother and me about Dad’s childhood. She has asked me to share it with you here:

Dear Sharon and Abby,

I realized that you may not know much about Mickey’s life as a boy, an adolescent, or a college student before he went to medical school and met Sharon. So I want to share my memories of these early years. Of course, this version of Mickey’s story is filtered through the eyes of a younger sister; Mickey was five years and four months old when I was born. If his condition stabilizes, maybe you could read my memories to him and he could set the record straight.

Of course, I have to depend on family stories about his life before I became conscious of his presence. Back in the 40s new mothers were kept in the hospital for several days after giving birth. Thus Mom learned about Pearl Harbor in Erlanger Hospital when Mickey was only four days old. Dad, who at the time was coaching football for Baylor, a boys’ military academy, immediately set to work to keep himself off the front lines. His chemistry degree landed him a job making TNT at a munitions plant near Chattanooga. Nevertheless, he was away much of the time, and Mom had to take care of the new baby on her own. Both Mickey and Mom told me that, as a young child, he was often ill with respiratory problems. As a result, he spent much time in bed. Mickey once told me that he feared he would die, and that these early experiences made The Secret Garden an important book for him. It tells the story of a spoiled brat, who is transformed by sharing a secret garden with a sickly boy and helping him regain his health.

My first memories of Mickey are in a house on Duncan Ave., which was provided by McCallie School, another boys’ military academy where Dad coached football and ran a summer camp. It was a small house and we shared a room. I remember us waking up one Sunday morning, running to Mom and Dad’s room, jumping on their bed, and chanting “Rolling off the ship” as we pushed them from side to side until they surrendered, got up, and made us pancakes. Another weekend treat was white bread, liberally spread with butter, cut on the diagonal, garnished with a dollop of strawberry jelly, then broiled. The triangle shape made it special. One Christmas morning, I remember waking up first and finding that Santa had set up a train around the Christmas tree for Mickey. He loved the train, but even more vividly I remember his fascination with Lincoln Logs–an early sign of his life-long predilection for tinkering. I also have one vivid memory that suggests Mickey’s early scientific bent. Dad used to go fishing on the weekends, and when he came home sunburned and hot, he would grab a water bottle kept in the refrigerator. One day, however, he grabbed a bottle that Mickey had filled with soapy water to see if it would freeze. Dad spit out the cold soapy water, cursing like a sailor and mistaking Mickey’s science experiment for a practical joke.
One summer, when Dad was running a boys’ camp at McCallie, he brought home a movie and a projector borrowed from the camp. He draped a sheet over the back of the house to serve as a screen. On that summer evening, all the neighborhood kids, including Mickey’s next-door friend Chalmers McIlwain, sat on the ground in the back yard to watch Hop-a-long Cassidy. Another summer, we took a car trip to the Smokey Mountains. Mickey and I battled over an imaginary line that demarcated our separate back-seat space. I have a vivid memory of stopping at a scenic overlook where Mom saw two bear cubs. She had packed some graham cracker cookies; the scalloped edges and pink icing are engraved on my memory. In a moment of insanity, she enticed the cubs with the cookies. Needless to say, a very annoyed Mama bear showed up, and Mickey, Mom, and I had to jump in the car. Dad must have been fishing because he doesn’t appear in my memory of this unforgettable event.

After Dad left coaching to manage a woolen mill, when Mickey was about 10, we moved from Duncan Ave. to the house you remember on Mayfair Ave. Later, the city built a two-lane road over the Duncan Ave. site, so the house no longer exists. You also may remember that our new house was five houses down the street from the  Brainerd Baptist Church. Everybody we knew, except our family, were regular church-goers.

As a boy, Mickey roamed the neighborhood with his buddies. Developers had not yet built on all the woodland in the subdivision, and there was an inviting drainage ditch to play in. I remember one day Mickey came home wet and muddy carrying a jar with a fish he captured in the ditch. Punishment ensued. And he may or may not have once tied me to a chair with Dad’s neck ties so that I couldn’t change the TV channel to watch my beloved Zorro. On the 4th of July, a neighbor down the street, who had been in the military, gathered all the neighborhood boys, including Mickey and his older friend Phil Olstein, to shoot off fireworks and bottle rockets in his front yard. Our terrified terrier, Mutsky, hid under the bed. During these years, I remember Mickey as looking pretty scruffy most of the time, even more so when he caught ringworm and had to have his head shaved and wear a stocking cap to cover the smelly ointment smeared on his bald pate.

When he hit adolescence, his appearance changed dramatically. He grew tall, noticeably taller than Dad and the other males in the Italian branch of the family. On one summer trip to Bellaire, Ohio where Dad’s family lived, I remember our great Uncle Mike making jokes in broken English, which he thought were hilarious, about Mom’s feeding Mickey the stuff you put on tomatoes. According to Dad, Uncle Mike had been a bootlegger during prohibition. But now He was limited to one glass of wine only when he had guests. These orders were strictly enforced by his tiny wife, Tia Angelina, who spoke no English at all and whose black dress and white lace collar I have since seen in many movies. I remember that we kids were sent to call on Uncle Mike and Tia Angelina, and the minute we entered the house, Uncle Mike handed Mickey a glass of wine.

In adolescence, Mickey’s attitude toward clothes also changed dramatically. This was the era of ducktail hair, skin-tight jeans, black tee shirts, and hidden cigarettes. I remember him looking very cool as he combed his “do” in the morning, sullenly ignoring Dad’s mockery of his pink pants. I never knew all the details, but Mickey got into a number of scrapes during these years. On one occasion, he and his buddy Robert Profit took Robert’s parents’ car out for a joy ride and had a fender bender. Again, punishment ensued. I also remember Dad’s insistence that Mickey mow the lawn and pull crab grass out of the juniper bushes in front of the house, and I remember Mickey’s resistance. In fact, grass became a theme in their relationship. Dad got him a summer job wielding a scythe on the property owned by the mill where Dad worked. I remember Mickey’s sunburns. Not infrequently, conflicts erupted in paternal rants followed by maternal mediation. And not infrequently, the commotion woke me up at night; it was scary. But the big drama of these years centered on McCallie School. Dad’s story was that Mickey asked to go there because he discovered that Robert Profit was learning higher-level math than he was. I find it hard to believe that Mickey ever willingly entered a military academy. Even if he did choose to transfer from  Brainerd Junior High to McCallie, his attitude must have changed almost immediately. I remember daily battles over his uniform, sleeping too late, and after-school detentions.

Once Dad relented and let him transfer to City High School, Mickey’s life improved considerably. Soon, he became a big man on campus: named “Best Dressed,” the president of the High Y Club, the escort for the winner of the Miss CHS pageant, and a member of DeMolay. (This is a quasi-Masonic club for adolescent boys named after the last Grand Master of the Knight Templars!). Not just part of the “popular” crowd, Mickey was recognized as one of the class intellectuals. He played the narrator in a production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. He belonged to the select literary circle that gathered around Miss Johnson, an eccentric English teacher with a high-pitched giggle, a fancy up-do, and a theatrical flare. When his peers chose him as “Class Poet,” he wrote a sonnet that began, “Bartering education, how great the cost . . . . ” (You can tell that I memorized his high school yearbook.) Still, his closest friends always seemed to be interesting misfits, like Macky Kirkpatrick, rather than other “popular” kids.

During his college years at the University of Tennessee, Mickey’s world focused on fraternity life. Whenever he came home, he had strange tales to tell of the wider world–tales about a “dog” party where the “brothers” competed for who could bring the ugliest date (I don’t think he participated), about making up a new Kappa Sigma initiation ritual that included putting pledges in a coffin then “resurrecting” them, and about a student chapter of the militantly ant-communist John Birch Society. Twice, he brought home stray kittens that had showed up at the Kappa Sigma house where he lived. He named them Melvin Glick and Sybil Glutz. Even more wonderful than the kittens, he brought home records of Dave Brubeck, Ahmad Jamal, George Shearing, Dakota Staton, Joan Baez, the Kingston Trio, and Peter, Paul, and Mary. I don’t think I could have survived my own adolescence without this great gift of music.

One Christmas when he came home, he dumped his dirty clothes on the floor of his room, then disappeared with his friends, returning home very late for several nights. After repeated reminders to wash his clothes, Mom, who had no intention of washing them for him, left the following poem on his bedroom door:

(Original version of “Good King Wenceslas”)

Good King Wenceslas looked out
On the Feast of Stephen
When the snow lay round-about
Deep and crisp and even.

Brightly shone the moon that night
Though the frost was cruel,
When a poor man came in sight
Gathering winter fuel.

[Verse added by Mom]

Bring me sticks and bring me logs,
Bring them by the barrel.
You and I shall blaze the Yule
With my son’s apparel.

Where nagging had failed, poetry worked, and Mickey took time off from gallivanting with his friends to wash his clothes.

When I think back on the summers when Mickey came home from UT, I can see two clear signs of the empathy and the ability to read people that made him a great therapist. He found a job that was much more to his liking than cutting grass with a swing blade: he sold suits, ties, and shirts at an exclusive men’s store called The Gentry Limited. The owner was a Jewish tailor with a German accent whose wife had escaped the Holocaust. There weren’t many Jews in Chattanooga, so the family was pretty isolated. Since the store was doing well, the German tailor decided to buy his wife a new house. But when moving day arrived, she completely freaked out. The tailor had no idea what to do, so Mickey simply took over, escorted her away from the chaotic scene where strange men were entering her house to haul off her belongings, and stayed with her until the move was completed. Although as yet untrained, Mickey recognized that the wife was experiencing a psychotic break; the confusion of moving had revived traumatic memories from the war years.

Although not at the time, I can now see a second sign of his future career choice in his efforts to teach me to waterski. We always had a boat for Dad’s fishing excursions, and on the weekends we often joined him for trips to Chickamauga Lake. All the cool kids could waterski, and I wanted to be one of them. The way the process is supposed to work is that you put on the skis, crouch with your knees pulled up to your chest and the points of the skis sticking up out of the water, hold onto a handle on a rope attached to the back of the boat, and when the boat starts, its force pulls you to a crouching position with the skis flat, running along the surface of the water. Then you stand up. But the process didn’t work for me. While Dad drove the boat, Mickey stood in the stern, watching me fall over every time Dad gunned the motor. I was mortified and in tears, then he yelled to me, “Stop trying!” I had been trying to pull myself up instead of letting the boat’s force pull me upright. His advice worked like a charm, and I experienced the exhilaration of zooming across Chickamauga Lake with the other cool kids. As a college student who had changed majors three or four times, Mickey intuited one of the major psychological cruxes of my life. When I get myself tied in knots, I try to remember that it once worked to “Stop trying!”

For a couple of years in college, Mickey dated a girl named Carol. I remember her in two contexts. First, I stayed with her in Knoxville, when Mickey took me to see a Peter, Paul, and Mary concert. I went with the two of them, Macky and his future wife Karen, and Macky’s younger sister and her blind date from the fraternity. Since I was a super fan and had memorized all the Peter, Paul, and Mary songs, it was a kind brotherly act to invite me–even though I felt like a pitiful tag-a-long with these three couples. The second memory I have of Carol and Mickey involves Oral Roberts, the televangelist. Mickey was fascinated by televangelism, and one Sunday morning he insisted that he and Carol, a pretty, conventional Tennessee girl, watch Roberts’s program. After his stem-winding sermon, Roberts put the palm of his hand up to the camera and invited all the sick and shut-in viewers to place their hands on their TV screens in order to experience the miraculous healing powers he could channel. At this point, Mickey grabbed the startled Carol and dragged her across the floor to place her hand on the screen. I could tell that she was not amused.

But Mickey’s antic sense of humor did find a kindred spirit in Macky. When Dad got a video camera for Christmas, Mickey and Macky decided to stage an impromptu silent film. Macky, in cape and mustache, tied poor shivering Karen, with only a scarf to protect her from the cold, to a railroad track because she could not pay the rent. But heroic Mickey rushed to the rescue and chased villainous Macky off with a cane. Carol didn’t appear in this production.

Maybe it was Carol’s humorlessness that ended the relationship when Mickey left UT–without a diploma because he had neglected to turn in his ROTC uniform. So off he went to UT medical school in Memphis, where he met Sharon and your part of Mickey’s story begins.

Feel free to share these memories with anyone that might be interested in the young Mickey.

Love,

Anna

(Written 2/6/17)