The Toolmaker's Other Son


A Memoir by Galen Green

Copyright 2005, All Rights Reserved

Rough Draft; Installment #2 of 99
December 5, 2005

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(Continued from Prologue with Jigsaw Puzzle; q.v.)

"But it's so depressing. It's so negative," you interject. "I mean, where's
the hope? Where's the redemptive love?"

The hope, as you put it, is in the acceptance of reality. And the redemptive love is there as well. But let's not get bogged down in semantics. I promise you that we can revisit these issues later on, if you're still in the mood for it. Let's go back, instead, to your original question, which was, if I recall correctly: "Where in the world did a song like that come from?"

The short answer is that it came from my life, from my experiences and observations. As the cartoonist Gahan Wilson so famously put it: "I paint what I see." But rather than let ourselves get even further sidetracked (That's an old railroading term which must be uniquely American, since I found it necessary to explain its origin to one of my very brightest non-American friends a few years ago.) By distracting debate as to the efficacy of my eyesight, please allow me to take you with me back to the beginnings of my experiencings and observings.

I'm willing to venture a wild guess that your getting to know a little bit about the bumpy, winding road that's brought me to these moments here with you will shed some valuable light on the puzzle pieces I've brought along with me to share with you in the pages of this scrapbook.


Chapter One: The Willows (1830 — 1949)

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"At the closing and razing of the Willows in 1969, records of its 64 years of
operation were piled in the back yard and burned. It was the end of an era."

— prairiebaby@hotmail.com

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" . . . and our ancestors probably / were among those plentiful subjects / it
cost less money to murder."

— W. H. Auden, from "The Cave of Making," July 1964



i.

I was born in what was then referred to as a "hospital for unwed mothers" called the Willows, on the morning of April 30, 1949. At least, that's what they've led me to believe. The Willows, at 2929 Main Street, was a sort of rambling ranch- style brick mansion which sat atop Union Hill in Kansas City, Missouri, overlooking the historic Union Hill Cemetery, as well as Union Station and the passenger rail yards, with the downtown KCMO skyline glittering in the background. The World War I Veterans Memorial stood just across Mail Street, as did Saint Mary's Hospital, which later became part of Trinity Lutheran Hospital, where I worked as an armed Security Officer in the late 1990's.

Neither Hallmark nor Crown Center nor the Hyatt Regency to the north nor the thousand-foot broadcasting antenna looming up to the south, however, was as yet anywhere to be seen, back in 1949. Kansas City was still in its transitional phase of emergence out of what it had been in the wild and wooly era of the Pendergast machine, whose one positive bi-product, Harry S. Truman, had just been sworn in for what amounted to his second term as President of the United States. And as had been case on every April 30th for as long as anyone could remember, the lilacs were in bloom.

According to a web site I stumbled across on the Internet recently, the Willows (1905 — 1969) advertised itself in its brochure as being "a seclusion maternity sanitarium operated exclusively for the care and protection of the better class of unfortunate young women." A set of rough notes typed up by a social worker who'd evidently just finished interviewing my 25-year-old biological mother a few months prior to my birth tell us that I'd been conceived in or around my biological parents' small hometown (unnamed in the social worker's typed report) somewhere in north-central Indiana.

Since this set of notes was kept from me until I was nearly 50 years old, however, they played absolutely no role whatsoever in the formation of my identity. That is to say that, because the fact that, for example, the man and woman of whose genetic information I am the synthesis both served in the United States military during the Second World War was unknown to me until very recently, it served no meaningful function in shaping my understand of or self-definition of who I was, throughout my formative years.
The same holds true for any of the other facts typed into the social worker's rough notes, such as my bio-dad's being an Indiana farm boy of German-Irish extraction (and evidently the same size and shape that I myself was at his age) or my bio-mom's being a small-town beautician, also of German-Irish extraction, who said that she owned her own "beauty shop" (as they were called in those days), but whose stern Prussian father (whose stern mustachioed Prussian face I've often caught staring back at me from the mirror in recent years) would have (to put it in modern parlance) gone ballistic, had the shocking reality of my unsanctified advent in their little cosmos come to his attention.

Hence did my bio-mom concoct whatever plausible pretext she concocted, there in their little hometown somewhere in north-central Indiana, and took the train to Union Station in Kansas City and thence to a place called the Willows, perched there on that placid promontory, where she patiently awaited my tearful entrance onto this world's stage.



ii.

Meanwhile, a somewhat different drama was being played out in the childless home of the poor but honest toolmaker and his schoolmarm wife of seven years, 200 miles or so to the south in a city called Wichita, Kansas. Harry Green (1908 — 1982) and Margaret McCall Green (1912 — 1990) had grown up together and had known each other nearly all their lives, right up until that pleasant June day in 1941 when they'd been joined in holy matrimony (as some folks insisted on calling it), in her parents' tidy but somewhat cramped parlor in that little wood- framed house in the peaceful village of Richmond, Kansas, which would someday serve as the setting in dozens of my mid-life dream scenarios.

As my loving adoptive father, Harry, the toolmaker in the title of our story, explained it to me years later, he himself had been left "plumb sterile" as a result of his having somehow contracted, as a young, a case of "the mumps," and being unaware of the vulnerable position this had put him in, of his routinely jumping down off of a threshing machine during wheat harvest, thus causing these "mumps" to bring about in his organs of increase an irreversible inability to manufacture a sufficient quantity of healthy sperm to fertilize a female egg.

Besides his having been left "plumb sterile" by this unfortunate combination of circumstances (i.e. the adult case of "the mumps" and the extreme jarring of what we might delicately call his "male eggs," the incident carried with it, he told me, the instantaneous consequence of nearly murdering poor young Harry with an indescribably excruciating pain, ironically akin to the pangs of childbirth, as described by the women I've know who've survived to tell about it.

Or so Harry the toolmaker related the matter to me, his eldest son, years later, when I was perhaps 13 or 14 years old, and we were sitting alone together one evening on that dusty old broken couch, down in the musty unfinished basement of that little house on north Lorraine, having what both uncomfortable parents and uncomfortable adolescent children used to call "the talk," meaning that pre- revolutionary ritual of initiation into adult membership in the tribe of sexually repressed humankind in which the parent of (most often) the same gender as the adolescent child ritually, nervously and often inaccurately attempts to impart at least the rudimentary date concerning the intimate details of human reproduction.
I could tell that it was important to my adoptive father to share this revelation with me, so I tried to let me body language convey my gratitude for his openness. Much to my disappointment, however, this turned out to be the totality of what I was ever to know of why Harry & Margaret Green were unable to bring forth offspring from their own loins. I've often suspected that there may have been more to it than what was contained in my adoptive father's chivalrous official version; but now I'm old man, and those who could have shed any light on the matter have gone the way of all flesh.

Suffice it to say that the poor but honest toolmaker and his plain but virtuous wife loved one another with an admirable love and that each longed to have a child of their own flesh and blood who would be an integral part of their lives. Six months after they were married and had settled into their quaint but comfortable apartment on Waco Street near downtown Wichita, the Japanese military attacked the United States Naval Base at Pearl Harbor, so that Boeing Aircraft Company, where the toolmaker first earned his reputation as "The Toolmaker," was suddenly transformed into a booming industry, and Wichita began to flourish as never before — or since.

But as the toolmaker found his services increasingly in demand as a part of the war effort, his schoolmarm wife found herself increasingly alone at night, while the glowing stithy of aircraft assembly hummed night and day in the furious race to respond to the very real threat from foreign fascism which was hellbent to undo the noble democratic project known as the United States of America. And even