George J. Noakes, part 3 (The Ballad of Bill Davidson)

Here is my dad again in his senior year at Milwaukee High School, circa 1946, He's wearing his Letterman's sweater. I wish I had more pictures of his childhood to show you, since this segment was much earlier in his life.         

There is only one story that my father shared directly with me from his writings, the first time when I was about ten, roughly the same age he was when a fellow named Bill Davidson came to live with his family.   He wrote at least four different variations on this story--he called him his most unforgettable character.  I don't know if he ever sent this to "The Reader's Digest" magazine, since they advertised a series on personal accounts of "unforgettable characters".  If he did send it in, they certainly didn't print the story.  "Reader's Digest" always struck me as wanting folksy Americana in their amateur submissions. There's nothing folksy here. The setting is about 1937, when my dad was nearly ten years old.

 

 MOST UNFORGETTABLE CHARACTER by George Noakes

"We had word that Sunday Afternoon that a man was asking for my father.  We jumped into our automobile and drove about two miles.  Sure enough, there he was.  His car (a beat-up Model A Ford) had broken down on a steep hill.

"My father had known Bill Davidson as a childhood friend back in North Dakota. It had been over thirty years and the two had not seen or communicated with each other in anyway. How he knew my dad's whereabouts I'll never know. 

"The country was still in the Great Depression and and Bill came to live with us.  He was a Scot originally, and his talk and manner left no doubt as to his nationality. His wife, who he loved deeply, had passed away and he was very sad.  I remember him crying at the mention of Annie Laurie.

"Our house was small. My brother was away in the C.C.C. and so Bill moved in with me.  He was neat and helped around the house, including cooking." 

My Note: It had been several years since Nona Noakes, my grandmother, had come down with something akin to a permanent nervous condition, brought on, my dad thought, partly  by her menopause experience.  This explains why someone was needed to help out with housework.   My father relates of his mother at that time that, "(She) went through a change of life trauma, She had terrible headaches, and did very little housekeeping. When I was in grade school I was teased unmercifully about stinking and wearing dirty clothes. Of course for a child in the first or second grade couldn't do much about that. My father was no help around the house because he worked long hours and would come home dead tired. He wore the same clothes, only changing them on weekends, and did not seem to care how he looked.  

"My mother  was very nurturing and was a good mother in some ways.  But she became almost childlike, and couldn't seem to help it.  Today, with prescription drugs, she could have been helped (if my dad had the money and/or health insurance ).  When I reached the age of nine or ten I began doing things for myself--washing my own clothes, getting haircuts and plain doing the necessary things to live properly. I also began to cook and clean house. About the fourth grade things got better for me at school and I stopped being teased except by a few kids who had gone to school with me earlier." 

And back to the Bill Davidson interlude, my father again narrating:

"Bill had a charming manner and everyone seemed to like him.  He even took over my dog Tubs--who would follow Bill wherever he went.  The one thing that we didn't know about him until later was that he was a wino.  Not only that--he got a job in a grape orchard near where we lived!  His favorite was blackberry wine.  When he was sober he was okay, but when he came home stinking drunk I would have to take care of him.   (Remember I was only ten years old at the time.)  My father threatened to kick him out if he kept this behavior up, but my mother felt sorry for him.  I tried to get him to quit but to no avail. I went through hell on earth.  I couldn't sleep at night when he was on one of those binges. He also smoked while drinking and I was afraid he would come into my room, fall asleep with a lit cigarette, and burn the house down.      

"He used to have wine bottles stashed all over the house.  It got so bad I would have to find the hiding places of his wine bottles and break them, but he would just get more. Bill would be gone for three days to a week, sleeping in the woods or whatever. I used to hate it when he returned, stumbling about and stone drunk again.  Even at my age I felt bad about breaking those wine bottles because it was such a waste. He didn't earn much and paid good money for that wine. 

"Eventually my father had to tell him to get another place.   Bill  wound up living in a shack a little ways from our house.  One night a little after he left us he did cause a fire where he was holed up. He burned up. 

"The only good thing that came out of all this was that I learned about alcoholics and how drinking could suck the life out of you and make a good man a bum." 

  ************************

Growing up when my dad did, in those circumstances, I can understand why he was very guarded about his emotions at times.  He was not a man to look back at the past very often, especially as he got older.   And most of the stories he did tell me about his boyhood when I was a child were of a humorous nature, kids doing goofy things at play and gettting into minor scrapes and annoying very annoyable neighbors and such.   I remember this story jarred me as a kid when my dad read it out loud to me one evening. 

  There is a sort-of sequel to this story, one that happened when I was about my father's age back then.  It was 1969 or 70 (not sure which) and we were living in a nice tract house in the suburbs of west San Jose, California.  My parents decided to throw a New Year's Eve Party for some of our neighbors.  Most of the families who lived around the three of us had moved into the neighborhood around five years earlier, when the subdivision came in so these neighborhood get-togethers were not unusual.

Some time after the New Year had been brought in by the revelers in my parents living room, my father (who only had a beer or two after work at night, and was strictly a social drinker when it came to hard alcohol) decided he was tired and a bit looped and just wanted everybody to go home so he could  go to bed.  I believe my mother had already turned in as well.  But some of the neighbors wanted to stay up and continue the partying.  Being a gracious host, he told them to keep it up if they wished, but be sure and lock the door when they got ready to leave.  And so my dad bid all a Happy New Year again and headed for the main bedroom. (I was already asleep across the hall from my folks.)

The next morning my father was the first of us to get up.  I was up soon after.  I remember my dad just standing in the kitchen, looking at what should have been a mess of bottles and glasses and other after-party dishes and stemware all over the place.  But the kitchen was in complete order.  Even the dishes had been done and left to dry on the plastic rack next to the sink.  He was smiling, happy that someone or some couple had cleaned up everything before they left.  Both he and my mom got a kick out of not having to clean up after their party for a change.   

I wonder now if he looked over the cleaned-up kitchen and thought to himself about how different this was for him than so many bad experiences thirty-odd years earlier, starting when his father's old friend, Bill Davidson, had come into his unprepared youth, courtesy of a nearly broken-down Model A Ford.