Chapter Eleven

I decided this morning to take the next two Chapters and turn them into only one. So, Chapter Eleven of Lost and Found is a little longer than some of the others so far.

This past weekend was great. Halloween — spending time with Sue’s granddaughters — enjoying a great dinner party with good friends who actually live right in downtown Dayton. Fascinating to see how some of those old commercial buildings are now gorgeous apartments and condominiums. An interesting lifestyle. Met some wonderful people and shared in some lively conversations and great food and wine.

Please invite your friends to share in this blog. And, do make good use of the “New Chapter” notice form on the right sidebar. That will get you a short email notice whenever I post another chapter.

Be well — be in peace,

Ron Rink
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There is no doubt in my mind, that the summer of 1942 was a major turning point in my life. Even at the age of eight I was beginning to learn some lessons about how to survive. I made one more attempt to run away later that summer, but was caught again after only five days. That time, just like the first time, I was caught while riding my bike on one of the main streets after dark. My immature brain made the connection that either I needed to quit using my bike for transportation, or I had to start using side streets, or both. I also needed to be figuring out some way to get from one place to another at times of day when I wouldn’t be so conspicuous.

At no time did I ever give up on my thoughts and plans to run away again.

My father continued to stay very quiet and never said a word to me about running away. When he came home from work at night he would immediately go to his chair in the living room with the newspaper. To see him sitting there in our small living room, with the newspaper in front of his face so you couldn’t see his expression, just the cigarette smoke curling out from behind the paper, was nerve wracking, to say the least. It wasn’t like he was a big talker anyway, but his silence during this time was deafening.

My father was a tall, slim man. He stood about six feet three inches tall. He had reddish-blond hair that was rapidly thinning. His upper body was slim and strong, plus he had very large hands. He was in good shape because his work kept him that way. He was a salesman for the National Biscuit Company. (It’s now known as Nabisco—but in 1942 it was still called the National Biscuit Company—or NBC, as he called it.) His job was to go around to all the food markets in his territory and take orders for the crackers, cookies and cereals that NBC manufactured. Then he would go back to the markets after the NBC trucks had delivered his orders. He would pick up these huge cartons of product in the stock rooms at the back of the store, carry them out to the main part of the store and pull open the cartons. Then he’d put a price on each individual box of product in the cartons and arrange the boxes on the shelves.

“His Chair”, which was off-limits to anyone but him, was in our sparsely furnished living room. It was an upholstered chair with a fitted chair cover that had a small floral pattern on it. My mother was an extremely fussy housekeeper, so all the upholstered furniture had some sort of cover, all of which she made herself. The couch, or what we called the davenport, had the same patterned cover on it that was on his chair. The piano was an upright piano, and it was against the back wall of the room with a piano stool in front of it. There was another small straight chair next to his chair, two end tables, one next to his chair; the other on the other side of the room, and our Zenith radio. The radio was the kind that sits on the floor, rather than on top of a table. There were table lamps on the two tables and another floor lamp by the couch. The Bible sat on one of the two tables.

There were three windows in the room, one facing the front of the house, and the other two on the side facing the next-door neighbors house and driveway. The only other room on the front of the house was the dining room. There was a hallway from the living room that led to the bedrooms in the back of the house. The doorway to the attic was in that hallway to the right and the door to my parent’s bedroom was just beyond that. The door to the bathroom was on the left and my bedroom was just beyond the bathroom.

During those two weeks that I had to stay home, I was usually in the kitchen helping my mother with dinner chores when my father came home from work. The kitchen was next to the dining room on the side of the house where our driveway was located.

The only conversation that my mother and I had while we were busy getting dinner ready were her instructions to me.

“Roland, cut up these carrots and put them into the pot of water on the stove.” Or, “Roland, wash this pot and dry it so I can use it again.”

She never called me Rollie, or Rollo, which some of my friends did, only Roland. I never said a word to her, but just went about doing whatever she asked. The tension inside of me was always there. When he would drive up the driveway the tension would build even further. The car would go right under the kitchen window as he drove toward the garage in the back yard. My heart would turn to ice and I would have a sense of trying to become smaller and smaller—wanting to disappear.

Since I was home in the afternoons during this time, my mother would tell me to open the garage doors before he was expected home. Our garage, like most others in our neighborhood, had two doors that opened in the middle. I would push the right one back and hook it to the fence so it wouldn’t swing shut. The left hand door would go back so it anchored itself at the edge of the grass.

After the car went by the window toward the garage, there would be a short period of silence, and then the car door would slam. That was followed by the squeak and scrape of the garage doors closing. Then would come the sound of the back door opening and closing and hearing his feet thump, thump, thump up the three stairs to the kitchen door. The kitchen door would quickly open and he would let out a sound that was sort of like a grunt—“humphh!” as he stepped into the room. My mother would say, “Hello, Henry” in response to his “humphh”. I always made sure I was doing something so that my back was to him. He never said hello to me, nor I to him.

This would all be followed by more thump, thumps as he went through the kitchen into the dining room where he would pick up his newspaper from one of the dining room chairs and thump off into the living room.

Every day I expected to hear him say, “Roland, come here!” but he didn’t say a word to anyone.

When dinner was on the table in the dining room, he would take his seat to my right, my mother was to my left. He would say the before-dinner prayer, which was always long and drawn out, and which I would invariably tune out. (We must have looked a little like that famous Norman Rockwell painting of the family saying a prayer at dinner—you know, the one where the lady’s butt is sticking out the back of her chair.) Then we would eat in total silence.

After dinner, he would get his Bible from the table in the living room and slowly read a chapter from it, which I would also tune out. Then another long, similarly tuned-out prayer before he would go back to his paper while I helped my mother with the dishes. As soon as I was done with dishes, I would go straight to my room to either read or listen to the radio. The hard part was that I had to walk through the living room to get to my bedroom. My heart would beat wildly with every step I took, wondering if this would be the time he would stop me.

That was life in the Van Buren house—day after day after day.

I did go back to the bowling alley after my two weeks of restriction were up and the boss was glad to have me back.

It was a full month before my father gave me another beating.
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