Straight Life (4 page)

(Thelma Winters Noble Pepper) Arthur Senior, "Daddy," was born in Galena, Kansas, and then I think they went to this Missouri mining town. Grandma's [Art's grandmother's] first husband worked in the lead mines. And it was a real sad thing there because her husband, I think his name was Sam Pepper, was a periodic drunkard. Every weekend when he got paid, he'd go to the saloon to cash his check, and then usually there was nothing left. So this one time, they were visiting Sam's sister's family, and this sister's husband and Sam, they both got drunk, and the sister called the police, who took 'em both to jail, and I think they must of give 'em a thirty-day sentence. And while he was in jail, the place where Grandma lived-they evicted her. She had four or five children at that time (one had just died), and there wasn't no place for her to go, so they sent her to the poor farm, she and the children. And she was expecting then. She was carrying her twins. They told her, "You know that you can't keep your children here. They'll have to be put up for adoption." She said no way was she going to let her children be put up for adoption, so she went back to where they had been living. She knew an old man that had a rundown, old chicken house. She asked him if she could move in there, and he told her that if she thought she could make that livable, she could have it, and she did. When Sam come out of jail he didn't look for her. He just stayed away. He just decided to beat it. So that ended that, and that was two months before her twins was born. This all gives you an idea of why Grandma was like she was.

The twins was only three weeks old when she went to work. She and her sister-in-law took in washing together. And the boys-the sister had a boy about Daddy's age-they'd deliver and pick up. I guess this was in 1895. Daddy would have been about nine years old.

When the twins was fifteen months old they got-at that time they called it membranous croup, but now we know that it was diphtheria. So one of 'em died, and they took him away to be buried, and then the second one got so sick it couldn't breathe, so she'd walk it, day and night. Fifteen days apart they died. And this last one, Grandma was so wore out with taking care of them for so long, the neighbors induced her to lay down and take a nap. She washed the dead baby and dressed him and put him on a pillow on her sewing machine. While she was asleep, the authorities came in and took the baby, didn't even wake her up. And that affected her tremendously. When she was here with me and Daddy, dying, she lived that again. One day I heard her crying and I went in there. She was crying just fit to break her heart, and she said, "Oh, why didn't they wake me? Why did they take him away without waking me?" She didn't even get to attend the funeral of that second baby.

After that I think she run a kind of boardinghouse for miners. At that time women couldn't get jobs like they can now. Joe Noble was one of the boarders. Then when Joe started a butcher shop, she helped him in the butcher shop. They decided to get married, and that's when Joe come out here to California. They were married in 1913.

Daddy didn't live with them. When he was growing up he spent most of his time on his uncle's ranch back in the middle west somewhere. Daddy never went to school beyond the fifth grade. Then he went to work. I think he was seventeen when he joined the merchant marine. I don't know when it was that he lost his eye. Every once in a while he got tired of being at sea, and he'd take a stateside job. He was working on a bean huller, and he got a bean hull in his eye. That put it out. You couldn't tell it on him. He was the handsomest man I ever saw. I knew him for years before I knew that eye was no good.

Well, Daddy's stepfather just tolerated him. They didn't have no open quarrels that I know of. When Daddy'd come to port, San Pedro, he'd go to see them, but he never stayed overnight. His home port was San Francisco, so he'd come down here to see his mother and say hello and goodbye. He loved his mother very devotedly, but she didn't care too much for him because she hated anybody that drank to excess and Daddy always drank to excess. Dick was her favorite. He didn't drink at all, and when her other children died, he was the baby. But, anyhow, Dick was a very affectionate, loving person, see, and Daddy wasn't. Daddy was kinda standoffish, like her. Well, Daddy thought when he supported her and took care of her, that showed his love. He didn't do a lot of talkin.' That was the way it was. And I know when she died-Oh, my-he'd sit in that chair there and cry like a baby. He says, "Why couldn't she tell me she loved me? Just once. Why couldn't she tell me she loved me?" All three of 'em: there was Grandma, and Daddy, and Junior; they didn't communicate with each other.

I was married to Shorty-that was Daddy's stepbrother-in 1920; Johnny was born in October of 1921; and it was March of the following year that I first saw Daddy. He'd just come by for a few minutes, said hello to Grandma, and was gone. And the next time he came in port, my second baby, Buddy, was about six months old, so that was two and a half years later. He come up to see Grandma again, but this time he brought Millie [Mildred Bartold, Art's mother] with him. That would be 1924, when they got married. Well, Millie fell in love with my Buddy. He was one of those pink and white babies, all soft and cuddly, you know. She wanted a baby. She didn't figure on junior [Art] being sickly and hard to take care of.

Millie said she was born back east in New Jersey or New York, and her uncle and his wife, the Bartolds, brought her to California when she was just a little girl. Her real name was Ida. She didn't know her last name. She'd got a lot of sisters and brothers somewhere. Well, they made a regular little doll of her. Her slightest wish-they got it for her, until they had kids of their own. Then her name was mud. Her aunt wasn't very good to her after she had children of her own. She'd accuse Millie of doing something, and if she said she didn't do it, she wasn't allowed nothing to eat until she admitted she did it. Millie said she went three days one time without anything to eat because she knew she hadn't done what she was accused of, but she finally told her aunt she did just to get out from under. Then she ran away from home. She ran away a lot of times, and that's why, I think, the Bartolds finally put her in a convent school. But she ran away from there, too. For a while she was put in a foster home; she was very happy there. But then she met this woman, Mildred Bayard. Millie must have been about fourteen then. This woman wanted Millie to go with her to one of the Harvey Houses out in the desert-I think it was Barstow-as a waitress. I don't know what kind of experience she had out there, but she run away from there, too, and she went down to [San] 'Pedro to be a waitress.

She was looking for the employment office, and she stopped Daddy on the street to ask him where it was, and he said he'd take her there. He did, but the next day he got her a job with somebody he knew that run a restaurant because he was very well known in 'Pedro. So, let's see. The first day she met Daddy. The second he got her a job. And then he asked her how old she was. When she told him she was fifteen, she said he got as white as a sheet. The next day they went up to Los Angeles and got married at some Bible college. She gave her name as Mildred Bayard on the marriage license. And then he brought her home to Grandma.

Daddy thought that if Millie could stay with Grandma while he was sailing-at that time he was sailing between 'Pedro and Seattle on a lumber boat ... But she didn't get along very good. She was a nice, friendly girl, you know; Italians usually are. And the family wasn't very nice to her, the Noble family. They were very clannish, and they didn't seem to take to her too good. She didn't know what to do with her time, and I think she did things she shouldn't have. Anyhow, after a couple of trips, Daddy decided that that wouldn't do. He'd have to come stateside. That's when he went to work in a machine shop. I was living in Watts then, and I kinda lost track of 'em until Junior was born.

Oh, my! Poor little thing! He had rickets and yellow jaundice when he was born, and he was so skinny that his hands and his feet looked like bird claws. When he was three or four months old! Couldn't get nothing to agree with him. I don't know if she couldn't or if she didn't want to, but junior was a bottle baby. I don't imagine she had any milk anyway. She didn't eat right. Junior couldn't assimilate cow's milk. They had him to half a dozen different doctors, and they all told 'em the same thing: "He can't live." They took him to Children's Hospital in L.A., and the doctors gave them a formula for barley gruel. It had to be cooked all day, and in that she put Karo syrup and so much dextro-maltose, and that agreed with him. But he was still awfully skinny and they couldn't bathe him in water-he was too weak. The doctor told them that if they bathed him in olive oil, that would nourish him, too. He looked like death warmed over.

Daddy and Millie had lots of fights about junior not being Daddy's. He was sailing when she got pregnant, and junior would have either had to be two weeks early or two to three weeks late. And so this Betty Ward, a friend of Millie's, smartaleck woman that she was, she was there when junior was born, and she said to the doctor, "Is he a full-term baby?" The doctor said, "Yes, he came right on time." So there was that question. But in time, Daddy realized that junior had to be his. There were too many features the same. You know them turned up toes that junior has? And Daddy's arms are shaped, were shaped, here just exactly like Junior's.

But Millie was unfaithful. Might as well say it. I remember when me and Shorty lived in the big house, and she and Daddy lived in the back. Daddy worked swing shift, and she'd go out, and she asked me to listen for junior in case he woke up. She got home one night just by the skin of her teeth, just soon enough to get her clothes off and jump in bed before Daddy got home. Scared her to death.

This Betty Ward had several children and they were all mean as could be to junior. They were all older than he, and they would tease him just to hear him holler 'cause he'd make a real big commotion when he was upset about anything. They're the ones that got him afraid of food touching on a plate. Millie and Betty would go tomcattin' somewhere and leave him with these kids. There'd be plenty of food for the kids, but when it come time to eat, they wouldn't let junior have any. And when they'd finally decide to give him something to eat, they'd put it on his plate so that the food would touch each other and then they'd tell him, better not eat it, that it'd poison him. First time I realized that was one time when Millie and Daddy were separated. He came by with Junior just at mealtime, and I set junior a place not knowing how he was. I just fixed his plate like I did for my kids, and he set up such a yowl. He says, "You hate me! You want me to die!" And I couldn't figure out what was the matter with him, and he says, "Well the food is touching! That'll poison me! I'll die!" And he wouldn't eat nothing either.

Daddy's nickname for Millie was "Peaches" because her complexion was so perfect. She never had to wear makeup. She was a very pretty girl, but she got heavy as soon as she got married. Millie never cared too much for women, but she loved me. We were closer than most sisters. When we were neighbors, Millie'd bring junior over to me every day. She'd get all her housework done up, her house nice and clean, and then she'd bring junior over to me and go out tomcattin' and come over and get him just before time to go for Daddy. One time junior told me-I guess he'd been having a hard time one way or another-"I sure wish you was my mother." That sure made me proud, I'll tell you.

Later on Daddy got a job on the tuna fishing boats. One time they were reported lost at sea, and they were gone for forty days. They had got becalmed on the ocean, out there somewhere. Usually they'd be gone for two weeks, come back for a few days, and go out again. And Millie would leave Junior out in the cold, no supervision, nothing to eat. Daddy come home and found that one time. The landlady lived in the front house, and they lived in the back. So, after that, he made arrangements with her that junior was to come to her house after school. But I don't think Daddy made many trips after that.

Daddy and Millie fought all the time. They'd have regular knockdown-drag-outs nearly every day. And junior would get underneath the sink and sit there and scream bloody murder. It's no wonder he grew up the way he did. He never did have a normal childhood. Only with Grandma, and she wasn't affectionate enough. And he was Italian, and so, you know, he needed more affection than other people.

Millie and Daddy separated half a dozen times. It was onagain, off-again. She'd leave every whipstitch. Then, when she found the going too rough, why, she'd come back. And Daddy always took her back because, he said, to his way of thinking a child needed its mother. That was a strong point with him, even though he got to the point where he actually disliked her intensely. Still he thought that she would be better for junior than somebody else.

There was one time when Daddy and Millie separated-I think junior was only about nine or ten months old. Oh, well, she left him before that. She left him when junior was only a few months old. She left the baby with Irma, Dick's wife, and she went home to her aunt (Mrs. Bartold), and the aunt promptly brought her home to Arthur the next day. That's when all this buisness came out that we had never heard of before. The aunt give Daddy a real dressing down. She told him, "When you married Ida," that's what she called her, "When you married Ida you assumed responsibility for her because she was a ward of the court before that. So no matter what she does, she is your responsibility until she's twenty-one years old." Daddy knew he was licked.

There was another time that they were separated for nine months, and Daddy and Junior lived with Grandpa Joe and Grandma in Watts. Grandma took care of him then, and that's when he made the most progress physically. Because he didn't have this upheaval all the time. He was just a little fellow then. He ate regular and had regular hours, and he was a pretty happy baby. Millie'd come to see him once in a while, but Daddy forbid her to take him anyplace. Then after nine months they got back together again. They finally broke up once and for all when junior was seven. And that's when he went to live with his grandmother permanently.