Personal History

by Clifford J. Goodman, Jr.

Chapter 2

Version 09.08

With the war over, our little family, which now consisted of Mom, Dad, Pam and me, was finally able to return to the District of Columbia. Dad completed his undergraduate degree requirements and got his B.S. in Zoology at the Columbia College of the George Washington University in the spring of 1947. He then embarked, that fall, on his studies at the GWU School of Medicine.

While Dad was a medical student, he worked in the early mornings (starting at 0200) at the Senate Post Office. Our Senator, Ernest W. McFarland, D-Arizona, was a very good friend of Grandfather George N. Goodman. Senator McFarland was, no doubt, quite instrumental in getting Dad the job. The fact that Dad could find good work in Washington obviously played a predominant role in Mom and Dad’s choice of George Washington as a place to study. That means, painful as it might seem to me in 1995, that political patronage from a Democrat played a big role in choosing the stage for a major part of my life. There was also the fact that GWU Med had a regional admissions policy, so Dad hoped to be part of Arizona’s quota.

On very special occasions, they permitted me to get up early and go down with Dad to the Senate Post Office. This was an incredible treat, which I always looked forward to with delight. Watching Dad and his co-workers feverishly sort and deliver the mail was fun. They also played the occasional card game, so maybe they were rushing so hard so that they could get finished and play. I think that they were mainly law and medical students, so maybe that was the only recreation that they got. They sometimes even permitted me to help stack the mail in the oversized, bin-like canvas carts used to lug it to the various offices. When the stacking was over, they officially authorized me to ride around on the stack of mail in the cart. There were also many rubber stamps (with red, blue and black ink pads), the old hand-cranked adding machines with their marvelous ability to produce long snakes of tape, huge, noisy black typewriters, and fascinatingly powerful hole punches. The latter had little metal boxes on their undersides, which one could pry off to obtain thousands of little white paper disks. Multitudinous white hole reinforcers that looked like flat little doughnuts, rulers of many sizes, bottles and jars of mucilage and glue were among the other marvelous things to play with. Even better, the little paper disks fit perfectly inside the reinforcers! I even got to ride, almost every time I helped, in the Senate subway. That was a huge, much begged-for treat.

Dad spent countless hours studying at his desk in their upstairs bedroom. When I wanted to talk to him, I had to interrupt him there. On rare occasions, he would be grouchy, impatient, distracted and tight-lipped. Most of the time, however, he would spend many hours, happy ones for me, at least, answering my questions, showing me things in his books and letting me play with the medical student’s half skeleton, which was kept in a wooden box under his desk. I was, of course, as completely and particularly delighted with that skeleton, in spite of (or perhaps because of) its strange, musty smell, as any small child would be. I remember thinking a lot about who the skeleton had been in life. One must suppose that most skeletons of that era came from India, as they did at the time I studied medicine.

Once while he was studying, I asked him how Mom got pregnant (I suppose it was while she was carrying George in 1948). He got out a textbook, I presume an OB/GYN one, and had me read the section about conception and pregnancy. At age five, I read and understood quite well the part about the sperm uniting with the egg and the chapters on the developing embryo and fetus. However, it did not occur to me to wonder how the sperm got to the egg, and I did not even puzzle about it until I was in the fifth grade in Chandler! Strange, how the child’s mind works: another piece of evidence that children are not just little adults

I attended Kindergarten and the first and second grades at Stoddart School in Washington, D.C. We lived in a large government housing project on Tunlaw Road, N.W. The school was down and then up the hill from where we lived. One could cut across a small wood (probably just a vacant lot, but it seemed like a forest to me) to take a shortcut on the way to school. There was a well-worn path, lots of squirrels, and, in the fall, lots of acorns.

The school was built of red brick, with white columns in a pseudo-colonial facade. I think that it was two-story, although I do not remember the stairs, possibly because the lower grades were on the ground floor. There was a long central hall, with all of the classrooms opening onto that hall. The rooms had high ceilings, and transoms above the doors. The floors were highly polished hardwood, and creaked a lot. There was a basement, but we were not allowed to go down there. The Kindergarten room, at least, had a large cloakroom for the millions of snowsuits and other paraphernalia that the kids brought on snowy days.

The playground was mostly blacktop and concrete, but there were large sand areas, not only under the swings, etc., but also in an extensive sandbox. I can remember playing in the sandbox, but can also remember lectures from my dad about how cats use sandboxes as litter boxes. There were picnic and eating areas, where we ate from bag or box lunches on the nicer days. I can clearly recall the fabled exchanging of things such as entrees and desserts. Since time immemorial, other people’s parents have packed more interesting lunches than one’s own.

We walked back and forth to school. I went down a hill, then up another and through the woods to get to school, and, of course, we walked by ourselves every day. On the way to school one morning we found that a night-time storm had left a large tree ripped apart by lightning. That was all we talked about at school for days. The tree became quite a landmark that, we all thought, was marked to be hit by lightning again. Much to our disappointment, a crew eventually came and took the hulk out just before, we thought, lightning had a chance to strike twice. Watching the crew work partially compensated for that disappointment.

The other street (the one that was not Tunlaw Road, a rather major street) of our corner dropped past our house, which was on the corner, and straight down the hill. It seemed to me at the time to be an enormously long, fantastically steep street, but I have been back as an adult, and it is, of course, neither. In the winter, when there was enough snow, the D. can. Police would barricade both ends of the street and it would become a playground for kids with sleds. Somebody (I somehow always assumed also the police or the street department) would set up big steel drums with fires in them, where one could warm one’s hands between the mad dashes down and desperate efforts to struggle back up the hill. Sometimes the drums were even burning at night, along with those smoky little black, spherical lanterns so common in those days at construction sites, and the whole neighborhood would turn out to sled and make a lot of happy noise. That was the 1940’s version of the block party. I suppose that they blocked the street because it was steep and slippery, and therefore, dangerous when covered with snow, but we convinced ourselves that the people from the city did it just for us.

There was also a lot of sledding on the grassy (it was grassy in the summer) hill just behind our house. It seemed like a huge mountain to me then, although, when visited as an adult, it did not look like much at all. However, I’m not sure how much they changed or diminished it when they took out the government apartments and built the apartment high-rise that was there when I was in medical school. There were many more of the government houses at the bottom of the hill. Once Pamela, at the time not older than three or four, went down the hill on a sled, quite out of control, ran through the asbestos shingle siding that skirted one building, and vanished into the crawl space under the house. Dad dragged her out rather quickly, but that really made an impression on the five-year-old who had pushed his protesting, screaming sister off the top of the hill. I am not really sure that it changed his behavior very much, though.

My brother George was born when I was in Kindergarten at Stoddart. He came into the world in the old Gallagher Hospital, which had been absorbed into the Washington Hospital Center long before I returned to Washington to study medicine. This was, of course, long before they allowed kids to visit in hospitals, and we had to content ourselves with standing in the parking lot of the hospital and taking Dad’s word that the woman waving to us from a high window was Mom.

I do not have an awfully lot of memories from Kindergarten, but I do remember that we had Graham crackers and milk daily (for which one had to bring a nickel, or maybe it was a penny, every week), always followed by a nap (Kindergarten was all day then) on little straw mats on the cold wooden floor. Every day at the end of the nap, everyone had to keep his or her eyes closed while the teacher cleaned up after a couple of mat-wetters. We were not supposed to know about the mat-wetters, but I am sure that I am not the only one who peeked. The teacher would have had to know we peeked, too, as everyone knows how most five year olds scrunch their lids together when they are pretending to be asleep.

There were also giant blocks, which they somehow notched and grooved so we could link them together, to play with, lots of clay and crayons, and hours of being read to. I had a pencil that would write in many different colors, depending on how you turned it. I remember all of the planning and saving and cajoling of my parents that I had to do to get that wonderful pencil. I also had one of those little metal boats that putts through the water when one put a lit candle in a little holder in the back of the boat. It was small enough to circle in a washbasin, the space it occupied when I brought it to school.

I can also vividly recall the cloakroom and the great time and effort that the teacher expended getting the kids into and out of their snowsuits. I cannot, of course, remember the teacher’s name or her face. I can, however, recall as clearly as if it were yesterday her telling us on the first day of school the meaning of the word Kindergarten and about how she was going to water and nourish her tiny garden. I hope that she was, in fact, the sweet woman that I remember.

The teacher in one of those grades was a Mrs. or Miss Gray, who really seemed to me to be just that, although anyone more than twenty probably seems gray and hopelessly ancient to a five or six-year-old. She was a person who talked all of the time about being kind, and about trying to think about the feelings of others. She was a true lady.

One day (Mom says it was in the first grade) the principal, also a lady, called me in to tell me quite solemnly that I was the one and only first grader she had ever known who could read on a twelfth-grade level, and explained what a great responsibility I had, because of that, to help other people. I am sure I did not comprehend then at all what she was talking about, but she was, of course, right.

There were several nicer homes a little southeast of us. I made friends with a couple of kids that lived there, in a big, luxurious single house with lots of French doors in back, a large garden and lawn, and a greenhouse. They also had a pond with goldfish in it, and lots of fruit trees. I remember going over there before Christmas, and helping them decorate their tree. They made long chains of popcorn, others of cranberries. We had made chains of red and green poster board links at school, and they, of course, had them on their tree, as did we. They generally impressed me by the way they lived.

Among other powerful impressions from those years is a clear recollection of the frequent air raid drills and many civil defense films that we had in school. These were, at least partially, the product of the hysteria that followed the dreadful news that the Soviets also had nuclear weapons. We children took them seriously, but did not worry overmuch. (At least our nation was trying to make something of civil defense in those days, more than we are doing in the 1980’s).

It was really kind of fun to be herded en masse into an interior hall in the school building and made to get down on the floor in a kind of knee-chest position with our hands over the backs of our necks. We were then left to wonder if the Russians were finally coming this time and to whisper about whether you would even have time to see the bright flash before you died. Our deliberations were all academic and theoretical, and I cannot recall ever being even the least bit worried, let alone even a little panicked or terrorized, by those thoughts.

We rode the streetcars a lot, although Mom and Dad did have an old black car. It was very old and broke down a lot. Once, Mom and Dad repainted it with one of those old hand-pumped bug sprayers. I think that Dad took the old car to school and to the hospital with him, because there were lots of walks with Mom, as well as streetcar and bus rides. They did get a new Chevrolet, a 1951 model, I think, about a year before driving it the final trip to Arizona. I clearly recall the trip to the car dealership to get it, and remember being introduced to the concept of obsolescence: my dad held forth for a while on the concept, including the observation that a car that looked new and modern to me in 1951 would look hopelessly old-fashioned, even if kept in shiny, mint condition, when I am grown. 

I do not remember much about clothing, except the dreaded snowsuits, mittens, etc. I know that we wore a lot of the horizontally striped T-shirts, but also many shirts with collars, mainly plaid shirts. Shoes were mostly the two-toned Oxfords, and we got to wear the old high-topped black and white basketball shoes only for play.

Our house, as mentioned, was on the corner. It was attached to several others, had the asbestos siding, was two-storied. There was a kitchen/dining room, living room and, I think, a bedroom, downstairs, and two bedrooms and a bath upstairs. The stairs seemed very steep. Mom had a washing machine but, of course, no dryer. 

There was a large wood (I thought at the time that it was a great forest, and it actually is not small:  Dina and I trekked through it one warm summer day when I was a medical student, and it was quite a walk.) just to the north of our house, part of the park system that surrounds Washington’s Rock Creek Park. There were garden plots that one could rent (in the early 1970’s they were still there) on the project side of the wood. We usually had a garden there, which we worked on a lot, since it was right across the street from where we lived.

We found a nest of mice when we cleaned up the garden one spring. It really impressed me that they had hoarded a lot of small, shiny objects, as well as fibers, rotting leaves, grass and balls of hair, in their chambers. We grew watermelons in that garden, as well as corn, tomatoes, chilies and string beans. Mom says that they canned huge amounts of string beans, which were very good, and a big hit when given away. My parents delighted in making homemade salsa, which Mom always called chili sauce, although I think that most of the ingredients came from the grocer’s and not from the garden (Mom tells me, on reviewing this, that they did come from the garden).

In the summers (that is, when we stayed in Washington, which wasn’t often) they had day programs for kids at a clearing in the wood. We got to press leaves in waxed paper, learn about all the funny little plants (the Jack-in-the-pulpits, the shelves of fungus growing on dead tree trunks, and the skunk cabbages really impressed me) that grew close to the ground and about the animals that crawled through and under things. We went on other nature walks and made things with clay and finger paints.

Most summers during those years we traveled to Mesa as soon as school was out (Mom says that we only went back two of the medical school summers) and rushed back in the fall to Washington. Dad spent the time working in his dad’s Apache Drug, where I also hung out a lot.

It was exciting to go with Grandpa down to the store at 0400, sit on the floor behind the cigar counter, read comic books (at the time five to ten cents) and drink milk shakes which I made myself on real professional mixers. There is probably no place on earth that seems closer to heaven to a precocious six-year-old than a small, secret spot stocked with comic books and milk shakes. One day a week we would go down especially early, I think about 0230, to let in a black fellow who stripped and waxed the floors. He had to roll up the long, black, chain-like mat behind the counter to clean and wax the floor there. On that morning Grandpa would take me over to a restaurant to have a ham and eggs breakfast.

I did a lot to annoy store owners up and down Main Street, especially at my favorite store, the Sprouse-Rite store three doors east of the drug store (the owner there introduced me to the concept of elbow grease, as well as to left-handed monkey wrenches) and at the O. S. Stapley store a little west of the Apache Drug. It was not that I was mischievous or ill mannered by any means. It was just my way of incredibly incessantly posing questions: lots of reports got back to my grandfather, but were only passed on to me when I was a teenager and thus better able to take criticism.

Grandpa Goodman was quite prominent in Mesa City politics. He had a whole crowd of buddies, no doubt the revered city fathers, who gathered at his soda fountain from about 0500 on and drank coffee, most of them wearing felt cowboy hats. Dad always said that this was where the phrase “drugstore cowboy” came from, but I later learned that most of them really were ranchers and farmers. Grandpa and his cronies ate the breakfast Grandpa cooked, and talked, it seemed to me, without end. I was at the age when one cannot understand why anyone would want to sit around and talk, especially about such incredibly boring subjects. So I just explored the shelves in the store, or sat behind the cigar case and read the many comic books and magazines that the drugstore had on display.

Dad was one of those people who had to cross the country in four or five days: there were no freeways in the late forties and early fifties. Consequently, the trips, while exciting for a kid like me, were filled with days of being loaded, half asleep, at 0400 into the car and then, asleep again, being lugged into an inexpensive motel room at 2200. Mom says that most of the time we did not even stay in a motel, but slept in the car in the garage that was going to repair the car the next morning when it opened. I can remember Dad trying to wake up a gas station owner so we could travel through the night (many operators lived in apartments above the station), and finally giving up. We had to sleep in the empty lot of the station. Most of the stops were to relieve ourselves behind bushes at the side of the road and most of the meals were baloney or cheese sandwiches, always on white bread with mayonnaise, eaten with Kool-Aid while we were driving.

My favorite activity during those trips was leaning (from the back seat) against the front seat just to the right of my dad’s head, chattering my endless questions into his ear, monitoring the odometer, and watching oncoming trucks and cars with wide eyes while we whizzed past other cars on the narrow two-lane highways of the day. Remember, seat belts and other safety features did not exist then, at least not in aging passenger cars. So kids were free to move about the cabin, and often did. Ejection was the result of many care accidents, and loose kids did their share of ejecting.

There must have already been a fantastic amount of road construction going on then, as we quite often encountered detours and torn up roads. Getting lost on those detours was common:  Dad always said that they set them up so that you would lose your way and have to patronize some of the local stores, restaurants, motels and gas stations. He loved to sing, in his pleasant off-tune way, Detour, There’s a Muddy Road Ahead.

One year, probably the summer of 1948 or 1949, we stopped to see the Carlsbad Caverns, a place that really impressed me. At a service station in Texas or Oklahoma we had picked up a pamphlet, which I had enthusiastically read, about the caverns. I was quite confused when I read that the caverns had been found when a rancher or explorer had camped by a mountainside and seen countless bats coming out of the side of a mountain. When Mom finally explained that they were not talking about baseball bats, things were a lot easier to understand. The caverns were a treat that I thought about a lot for years. I still have a profound fascination with caves and other secret places. A Freudian would reasonably hypothesize that this fascination influenced my choice of careers. Of course, Freudians hypothesize lots of things.

I was baptized and confirmed a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in May of 1951 in the chapel in downtown Washington, which was, I think, the Capitol Ward. It was a day or two before or after my dad’s graduation from GWU Med. Dad took pains to explain to me that there were certain similarities between graduation and baptism. My dad performed the ordinance, in a little (it seemed huge to me then) yellow marble building that has some of the lines of the Salt Lake Temple. It is no longer used by the Church, and doubtless does not even belong to us anymore.

I can clearly remember being interviewed by the Bishop. He inscribed a list of undesirable and regrettable actions and thoughts on a little blackboard, which he then carefully washed clean with a wet cloth, all the while giving me a concise exposition on repentance and forgiveness. I do not remember all of the words he used, but the message really sank in. I do think that being even at that level of understanding helped me a lot over the years, but I doubt that I had a truly mature comprehension of repentance and forgiveness until at least ten years after my mission, when I read and studied Spencer W. Kimball’s Miracle of Forgiveness. The testimony and lesson of that book marked for me, as for so many others, a milestone in my life.

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