A Summer in Iowa

Part 1 — The End of Childhood

Tuesday, December 24, 1968

I’ll never forget the day Dad died. It was on Christmas Eve, and I was as excited about the holiday as any twelve-year-old boy could be. The tree had been up and decorated since just after Thanksgiving. Our house was festooned with brilliantly-colored lights. Beautifully-wrapped gifts spread out around the base of the tree.

I’d been pestering my parents for a home planetarium I saw advertised in the Edmund Scientific catalog. It cost $30, which was a lot of money for a twelve-year-old kid in 1968. I told them I’d put on shows like the ones they had at the planetarium at Butler University, but even I knew how lame an idea that was. None of the boxes under the tree was big enough, but then the biggest presents always managed to appear by Christmas morning, brought by Santa himself, or so I was told.

I was an only child, living with my parents in a small three-bedroom ranch-style house on the North Side of Indianapolis. I was in the seventh grade and went to Northview Junior High. We weren’t rich but we weren’t poor by any means. We still had a black-and-white television whereas most of my friends had color, but we had everything else we could want. My clothes were a bit nerdy, but that was because I was a bit nerdy. I much preferred button-up shirts and dressy slacks to the t-shirts and jeans that most of the kids wore. I was in all of the accelerated classes, or X-classes as they were called. A lot of the boys in those classes dressed like I did.

Dad was a manufacturing engineer at the local Delco-Remy plant. Delco was a subsidiary of General Motors. They made all of the electronic components that went into GM cars and trucks. Although those components were designed by electrical engineers in Dayton and up in Detroit, it was up to the manufacturing engineers to figure out how to turn their designs into actual products. Manufacturing engineers like my dad had to figure out how to manufacture each and every part that went into making a car radio, a climate control system or an instrument panel, and exactly how they should be assembled.

In some cases, it was easier to farm the parts out, subcontracting with other companies that could make the parts more cheaply. I always thought it was funny to talk about farming electronic parts, as if transistors could grow on bean stalks or the like. Most parts, however, were made in house, as my dad put it. Again, I had visions of parts living in houses and being woken up by their mothers to get up out of bed in the morning.

Dad was the head of manufacturing engineering, so in addition to supervising all of the other manufacturing engineers, he had to figure out how to put everything together. That meant figuring out how to assemble each component on the assembly line, how to provide all of the parts required so that they arrived just as they were needed and how to space the workers along the assembly line so that they could complete each task efficiently without being idle for any amount of time. Each task had to be timed perfectly, so that workers had just enough time to complete each task before the next part arrived.

Because of the nature of the job, Dad spent more time out on the floor than he did in his office. He told me that someday, most of the work would be automated and controlled by computers, but for now, everything was done by hand. He did his own calculations, the same way they’d been doing them for centuries, using pencil, paper and a slide rule. There was a lot of guesswork involved, ’cause no two workers were alike, and problems frequently arose.

Electrical engineers never gave much thought to how their inventions would be manufactured or how they could be installed in the cars or trucks for which they were intended. Many designs arrived on my dad’s desk that simply couldn’t be built as intended. Sending a new product design back for redesign could delay a product launch by months. If it was part of a new car model, it could delay the launch of the entire model line by as much as a year. That could end up costing GM millions of dollars. It was Dad’s responsibility to make sure that never happened.

When problems arose on the assembly line, it was Dad’s responsibility to assess the cause of the problem and to come up with a solution that would allow production to resume as quickly as possible. Often, compromises had to be made, but safety was never something that could be sacrificed in the name of expediency. How ironic it was that his own safety almost never entered into the equation. I was never told how it happened, but apparently it was gruesome enough that we couldn’t have an open casket.

Like many plant workers, Dad had to work until the last minute on Christmas Eve. On most holidays, the assembly line ran nonstop and was staffed by workers willing to work on a holiday for overtime pay. Christmas was one of the few times during the year when the entire assembly line was shut down. As such Dad needed to stay until every last assembly worker had clocked out, to be certain that every piece of equipment had been powered down properly. As such, we didn’t expect Dad to be home until at least 7:00. Mom didn’t even show any concern until it was 8:30 and he still wasn’t home. He hadn’t even called, however, which was particularly worrisome. He always called when he realized he’d be late getting home. Always.

Mom tried calling his office phone, but it rang off the hook. That was nothing unusual, ’cause he’d have been out on the floor and nowhere near his phone to hear it ringing. She tried calling the main number for the plant, but that rang off the hook as well. That was very strange, as the phone should’ve rung in Security. Someone should’ve answered.

Mom called Methodist Hospital, and Marion County General, but they had no record of Dad being admitted to either one. She called the Indianapolis Police Department, the Fire Department and even the Sheriff’s Office, none of whom had any knowledge of a problem at the Delco plant. She didn’t realize that GM had its own mechanisms for handling accidents involving personal injuries — mechanisms that didn’t always prioritize the concerns of their workers or their families.

Mom and I were beside ourselves with worry. Of course, no child wants to imagine that one of their parents could die. It was obvious to me that Mom was worried, but I assumed rather naïvely that Dad would be okay. Maybe he’d had a heart attack or something. Maybe the hospital didn’t know his name. Maybe that’s why the hospitals didn’t have a record of him.

Not only was it Christmas Eve, but it was an historic night, and Dad was missing it! Apollo 8 was circling the moon! They said that close to a billion people were watching — one quarter of the entire population of the earth. At just after 9:30 PM, Eastern Standard Time, Bill Anders, Jim Lovell and Frank Borman read the first ten verses of Genesis from the King James Bible. I was mesmerized as I got my first view of the earth from space. It didn’t look anything like what they showed in sci-fi movies and on TV. It didn’t look like a globe at all. It was a half-lit sphere with brilliant, swirling clouds. You couldn’t even see the continents underneath.

It was too bad we only had a black and white TV, but then the broadcast wasn’t even in color to begin with. I realized that a color TV camera was probably too bulky and heavy to carry onboard a spaceflight. Perhaps someday, they’d invent a more compact version. As I watched, I couldn’t help but wonder if Dad had a TV where he was, and if maybe he was watching the broadcast too. It ended at 9:50 and Walter Cronkite went on and on about what we’d just seen and heard, but still, there was no sign of Dad.

Finally, at just after ten o’clock, there was the sound of a car door slamming in the driveway. Mom had the front door open before anyone even had a chance to ring the doorbell. She stepped aside to allow a distinguished man in a suit to enter. I didn’t know who it was and only later found out that it was the plant manager, taking time from his own family on Christmas Eve.

I couldn’t hear what the man told mom, but then she screamed and burst into tears. I didn’t know what was happening, but I was twelve. Slowly, it began to dawn on me that the only way to make sense of what was going on was if Dad was dead. That was the only thing that made sense, but even still, I was having trouble processing it. I didn’t cry. I couldn’t cry. I was in shock.

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That first Christmas was horrible. I got the planetarium I’d wanted, but it sat in the original packaging, unopened and unused. I lost all interest in anything having to do with space. I stopped going to the planetarium shows at Butler University. Hell, I didn’t even watch the Apollo missions, other than when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon. I was as excited by the first moon landing as any kid, but it didn’t seem to matter to me anymore. It was as if I’d died along with my dad.

I did a hell of a lot of growing up after that. Reality has a way of forging maturity, if it doesn’t break you first. My life was fundamentally changed by the death of my father. As with most kids, I’d never given much thought to money matters — nothing beyond my weekly allowance. Like most families at the time, Mom stayed home and took care of the household while Dad worked, bringing in a weekly paycheck. We lived in a nice house in a decent neighborhood, and there was always food on the table.

Mom bought me the clothes I wore and although they mostly came from the J.C. Penny and Sears catalogs, and from discount stores like Ayr-way, they were stylish. I fit in with my peers. Some of my friends lived in bigger houses and had color TVs. A lot of them wore nicer clothes from department stores like W.H. Block and L.S. Ayres, or from men’s stores like L. Strauss and Rodrick St. John’s. Nevertheless, a lot of my friends had even less than I did. I was a typical, middle class kid.

With Dad’s death, money became tight. I wondered if we might even have to sell the house and move into an apartment, perhaps in another school district. I didn’t have that many friends to begin with, but losing the ones I had would’ve been devastating. I began to wonder if I’d be able to afford a college education. Going to college had aways been a given, but after Dad died, I wasn’t so sure. I’d always wanted to go to a top school like Harvard or MIT, or maybe even Stanford, but that dream seemingly went out the window when Dad died. Hell, I’d have to work my ass off, just to afford the in-state tuition at Indiana University or Purdue.

Dad didn’t have much life insurance when he died. His whole side of the family was riddled with heart disease, which made it hard to get life insurance. His older brother died of a heart attack before I was even born, and his younger brother had a heart attack when he was only in his thirties. Although dad had a normal EKG, his cholesterol was high, even with the meds he took. Because of that, he had to settle for the insurance offered by his employer, which didn’t amount to much. At least it was enough to pay off the mortgage, but after paying Dad’s funeral expenses, there was hardly anything left.

If Delco had accepted responsibility for the accident, Mom would’ve gotten 80 percent of Dad’s full salary. On top of that, she could have probably gotten a wrongful-death settlement. Indeed, the man who came to the door on Christmas Eve, who told us Dad was dead, told us Dad had been injured by a malfunctioning piece of equipment. It should have been a slam-dunk. If only we’d made a recording of what he said!

Of course there was an investigation, but when it came to the official incident report, they said there was nothing wrong with the machinery. They said the accident was caused by operator error — in other words, it was my dad’s fault. In addition, there was an autopsy done that showed Dad had had a heart attack. However, there was no way to know if the heart attack was the cause of the accident or the result of his being mangled by the equipment.

Mom wanted to sue anyway, but our attorney advised against it. We had a strong case, but Dad’s survivor benefits might have been held in limbo for years as the lawsuit worked its way thought the courts. Delco and its parent company, General Motors, could afford to wait it out, filing motion after motion to delay the case rather than seeking a settlement. They had us over a barrel and they knew it.

Making matters worse, Dad was just a few months short of being fully vested in his pension. In the end, Mom only got 35 percent of Dad’s salary. Although it would be adjusted for inflation, it wasn’t nearly enough for us to live on. She had no choice but to go back to work, and even then, we barely got by.

The saving grace was that I got a survivor’s pension too, plus Social Security. So long as I was in school, I’d get both until the age of 22. The monthly checks didn’t amount to a whole lot, but they sure made a difference. Mom made me save all of the money toward my college education, even as she worked her ass off to pay the bills.

Ironically, the one thing I couldn't do was to get a job myself. Otherwise, I’d have gotten an after-school job as soon as I turned fourteen and could get a work permit. Thanks to the way the law was written, anything I earned had to be deducted from my Social Security check, dollar for dollar. Like a lot of kids, I mowed lawns for cash, but there were a lot of young teens in the neighborhood, and the competition for lawns was fierce. Even so, it was something.

Since I couldn’t get a job, I decided to go to summer school instead. I figured I might as well get as much advanced placement as I could. Why pay to take those courses in college when I could take them for free in high school? I figured out that I could even graduate high school a year early and with advanced placement, get my bachelor’s degree in three years, at the age of twenty. Maybe I could even get my master’s degree while I still got those monthly checks.

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Friday, December 24, 1971

I used to think that anniversaries were a time for celebration, but that was before my dad died. Now, I knew better. Making matters worse, Dad died on Christmas Eve. For the rest of my life, Christmas would be a time of sorrow. Never again could I celebrate the holiday without experiencing a tinge of sadness. For my mom and me, Christmas Eve represented the anniversary of my dad’s death.

Now, another Christmas season was upon us and with it, a reminder of what we’d lost. Not that we were religious or anything, but Christmas was a family time — a time of joy. All around us, people were singing Christmas carols and buying gifts. Houses were decorated with brilliant colored lights and the stores had elaborate Christmas displays. Everywhere, people were happy.

Although people were entitled to the joy of the season, it seemed to make a mockery of my father’s death. I knew that was an irrational outlook, but I couldn’t help the way I felt. Although a Christmas tree adorned our living room and colored lights twinkled around the windows of our house, my heart wasn’t in it. Every year, Mom made me help put up the tree and the lights, but what was the point?

“Sweetie?” Mom began, startling me out of my reverie. I hadn’t even realized she’d entered my room. “Honey, I know this is a sad time for us, but perhaps it’s time for the two of us to start remembering this day for the happy times we spent together with Dad, rather than for the day he died.”

“But how, Mom?” I asked. “How can I ever forget what happened to him?”

“I don’t expect you’ll ever forget that, nor should you,” Mom replied. “All I’m saying is that you need to remember the good times we had before then, too. When you remember the good times as well as the bad, the pain won’t be so strong anymore.

“I’ve put together a photo album with just the Christmas photos from our past. Come look at it with me.”

I followed Mom into the family room and we sat at the dining room table, where she’d placed a large leather-bound photo album. Embossed on the cover in gold letters was the title, ‘Christmastime in Our Home’. Opening the album, there was a typed sheet that was glued in place. It simply read, ‘CELEBRATIONS OF CHRISTMAS IN THE LINDSEY HOME: 1953 – 1968’.

I turned the page and on the left side was another sheet that read, ‘1953: OUR FIRST CHRISTMAS’. On the right was a page of black and white photographs that I couldn’t recall ever seeing before. My parents kept a ton of old photos in shoeboxes on the closet shelf in their bedroom, so I guessed Mom must have organized some of them. They were married in October of 1953, so that was their first Christmas together. They looked so young!

On the following few pages, there were pictures of my parents as a young couple, decorating their Christmas tree and of Mom preparing Christmas dinner. There were also pictures of them with Uncle Phil and Aunt Lisa, but the setting was unfamiliar to me. I asked my mom about it and she replied, “That was in our first apartment after we married, up in Hammond. As you know, I grew up there, but you might not know that I met your father when he visited with his college roommate and best friend, your Uncle Phil.

“Dad grew up here in Indianapolis and he’d never been to Lake Michigan before, so we all went to the beach. The Chicago skyline was spread out across the horizon to the left, but your father didn’t even look at that. He kept exclaiming, “You can’t see the other side!” He’d never been to the Great Lakes and his only experience with a lake of sorts was the Eagle Creek reservoir. He didn’t realize that the ‘other side’ of Lake Michigan was well beyond the horizon.

“Anyway, your father and Uncle Phil spent their summer with my best friend, your Aunt Lisa, and me. Your dad and I fell head over heels in love with each other, and Aunt Lisa and Uncle Phil did as well. That’s why we were always so close; we fell in love with each other’s best friend. We even considered having a double wedding, but then we realized people might not spend as much on presents if they had to buy them for two couples at the same time,” Mom added with a laugh.

“Wow, I had no idea,” I related. I’d never heard the story before, but then I realized Dad died when I was just entering adolescence. It was at a time in my life when boys are just starting to think of their parents as people, let alone that they had lives before we were born. Only now could I relate to Mom and Dad as having once been kids themselves.

“So after they graduated from Purdue,” Mom continued, “Dad got a job with GM up in Gary, and Uncle Phil got a job with U.S. Steel. We lived in a couple of tiny apartments in Hammond. That was the first and last Christmas we were all together. Shortly after that, Uncle Phil got a job offer with Bell Labs in New Jersey, and he and Aunt Lisa moved away.

“And then you moved to Rochester?” I asked.

“GM transferred Dad to their plant in Rochester while I was pregnant with you, and we lived there until you were five. I loved it there, but your father never got used to the cold and the snow in Upstate New York. Dad really missed his hometown, so when there was an opening at the Delco plant in Indianapolis, he jumped on it. It was a significant promotion, too, paying enough for us to build this house.”

I flipped through page after page of photos, chronicling our Christmases together. My first Christmas appearance was in 1956; I was just a baby. When I got to the photos from 1959, when I was not quite three, I could actually recognize some of the furniture we used to have in our house in Rochester.

There was a picture of me building a tower made of melamine teacups. I remembered those teacups! We had a whole set of plastic dishes when I was a toddler. I guess it was so I couldn’t break them. In the photo, I somehow figured out how to stack the teacups by alternating them, turning half of them upside down. Then there was a picture of me clapping at my finished tower, which was nearly as tall as I was. Even at three, I was a budding engineer.

The photos from 1961 were the first photos taken in our new house in Indianapolis. They were also the first photos taken in color. Suddenly, I remembered Dad’s old camera and wondered if we still had it. It was a Kodak Duaflex, with two lenses in front and a huge viewfinder on top that you had to look down into. The flash was a huge silver thing the size of a cereal bowl, and it used flashbulbs that hurt my eyes. The film came on large rolls that had to be loaded by hand.

A few years later, we got a Kodak Instamatic camera that took drop-in cartridges, but Dad still preferred using the old Duaflex, and it was no wonder; it took much better pictures. By default, the Instamatic became my camera, as I developed an interest in photography. I was going to have to go look for that old Duaflex camera. It was an incredibly cool camera, even though the 620 roll film it used had become harder to find than mothballs.

I continued flipping through page after page of Christmas photographs, watching myself grow from a cute little kid with huge ears that stuck out from my head, to a gangly teen who still had ears that stuck out too much.

I cried when I got to the end of the photo album, and then I noticed that Mom had tears in her eyes too. Although I still missed Dad terribly, they were tears of joy. They were happy tears from remembering happier times. I really did feel better as I closed that album and handed it back to Mom.

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Mom and I went to midnight mass at the new church on 86^th Street. It was the first time I’d ever gone to midnight mass for Christmas. My parents had thought I was too young to stay up that late before I was twelve. We were supposed to go the night my dad died, and Mom and I hadn’t set foot in a church since his funeral.

I wasn’t at all religious and wasn’t sure I even believed in God anymore, but the service was nice and I really enjoyed the music. For the first time in a long time, I slept soundly and awoke on Christmas morning feeling refreshed.

As usual, Mom and I exchanged presents after we ate a simple Christmas brunch of French toast, fried eggs and bacon. We retrieved our gifts from under the Christmas tree. I gave Mom a new clock radio I picked up at the Radio Shack on 86^th Street. It had one of those new red LED digital displays, and it was completely silent. Her old clock radio still used vacuum tubes!

I was floored when I opened her gift to me, which was an Olympus 35SP camera. I didn’t even know she knew I wanted one. It was the top-rated camera in Consumer Reports. Although it only had a fixed 40mm lens that wasn’t interchangeable, it was a sharp lens with an ideal focal length for general use. It had a rangefinder for easy focusing and an exposure meter, right in the viewfinder. It used center-weighted metering, which was unheard of in its price range, and spot metering at the push of a button.

There was a hot shoe on top for mounting one of those new electronic flash units. Now, I just had to go buy one! Never again was I going to need to keep buying flash cubes. There was focus-linked aperture in flash mode, which automatically compensated for distance. That was so cool. Best of all, it used 35mm film. From now on, I’d use Kodachrome, but first I was going to have to buy a slide projector.

I couldn’t believe Mom spent so much money on my Christmas present, especially since I’d be getting Dad’s old car for my birthday in April. Then again, she was talking about maybe taking a real summer vacation next year — our first since Dad died. A decent camera would be a good thing to have on a trip like that.

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A few days later, I decided to have a go at looking for Dad’s old camera, but I had no idea where to start. I asked Mom if she knew where it was, but she said she hadn’t seen it since Dad died. I wracked my brain, trying to think of where I’d last seen it, but that was in Dad’s hands.

I looked in Mom’s bedroom closet and although there was a lot of old stuff that obviously hadn’t been touched since Dad died, there was no camera. While I was looking, Mom decided it was time to clean out the closet, so she went through everything as I pulled it off the shelves. Ultimately, she decided to give most of Dad’s things away, including his clothes, which I was way too tall and skinny to wear. A lot of his things weren’t even worth giving away, so we threw them out.

I went out into the garage and looked in Dad’s workbench, which was a mess. I’d clean that out in the spring, when it would be warmer in the garage. I started to look through all the storage shelves behind the workbench, but I only found garden tools and soon realized that Dad would’ve never kept his camera out there.

Returning inside, I remembered that there was a high shelf in the coat closet that we almost never used, so I got up on a kitchen chair and rummaged around. Sure enough, I found his old camera, hidden behind a hat box. Noticing the number eleven showing through the small window in the back of the camera, I realized there was still film inside!

Unlike with a 35mm camera, where the film has to be rewound back into the cartridge after use, the Duaflex used roll film with a paper backing. During use, it was unwound from the source spool onto a take-up spool, which was removed for processing. The source spool was then swapped for the take-up spool and a new roll of film was loaded in its place. That meant I couldn’t remove the roll from the camera without first shooting the remaining two frames.

Holding the camera up and pointing at nothing in particular, I pressed the shutter release and heard the camera click, but when I tried to advance the film, there was a snapping sound. After that, the film advance knob turned freely, but the film remained in place and didn’t budge. I tried pressing the shutter release again, but nothing happened. Perhaps the spring that released the shutter had broken, but that wasn’t something I could fix on my own. I was going to have to take the camera to a camera repair shop, which meant making a trip downtown.

Riding my bike downtown was a non-starter; it involved riding through some really seedy neighborhoods. As a white boy, I’d be well out of my element. Because I still had a learner’s permit and couldn’t drive without an adult in the car, I was going to have to wait for Mom to go with me. Mom hated going downtown, so it probably would have to wait until one of us had another reason to make the trip, such as an appointment for my allergy shots.

However, since the film had a paper backing, perhaps I could still remove it without ruining the photos already shot. If I opened the camera back in daylight, however, the last photos Dad shot would probably be ruined. Instead, I took the camera into Mom’s bedroom closet and shut the door. I could still see some light seeping in under the door, so I grabbed a towel from the linen closet and used it to block the remaining light.

Once inside, I allowed my eyes to adjust and verified that there was no light seeping in. Gingerly, I slid the release on the bottom of the camera and swung the back of the camera open. Carefully, I removed both spools from the camera and manually wound the remaining film onto the take-up spool. Only then did I dare to turn on the closet light. I used a small piece of transparent tape to fix the end of the roll, to keep it from unraveling, and then I slipped it into my pocket.

I returned Dad’s old camera to its spot on the closet shelf. Finding someone who could fix it would be a challenge and besides which, my new 35mm camera had a much better lens and exposure system. It probably wasn’t even worth fixing. The Duaflex camera might be valuable to a collector, but of course I’d never be willing to sell it. I’d probably always keep it as a remembrance of Dad.

Grabbing my winter coat, I got on my bike and rode it the short distance to the Greenbriar Shopping Center, on 86^th Street. There was a 24-hour drive-up photo hut across the street, but I wasn’t about to trust them to develop something so precious. I wondered if they even would take a roll of 620 film. Instead, I locked up my bike and entered Hook Drug, which had on-site one-hour photo processing. As I expected, their equipment wasn’t set up to process and print 620 roll film, so they’d have to send it out, but I’d always trusted them with my film.

The pictures wouldn’t be ready for another week, which meant I’d have to stop by to pick them up after school. I was really curious about what was on that roll of film and looking forward to finding out.