In the Beginning.
Jean is a good friend of mine. No, Jean is my best friend. That is an understatement. Jean is my hero! Or maybe the correct word is heroine, whatever…
More importantly, Jean is my sister. Not biologically but in every other sense of the word. I love her dearly. My name is Beatrice B. Goode.
The Goode family and the Buhne family along with half a dozen other or so families, lived on Mayer Lane in a southwestern Pennsylvania blue-collar Pittsburgh suburb. The area is known by Pittsburghers as “The North Hills.”
In our close-knit neighborhood, the men were men and the women were women. The men of the families were hard-working breadwinners and providers. There was a utility company worker, an auto mechanic, a painter, a bread truck driver, an egg man, and even a bar/nightclub owner who lived at the end of the road and owned three horses for some reason. I don’t know why he owned them. I never saw anyone ever ride them. Mr. Buhne was a carpenter, who actually hand-built their family home. The women were housewives who raised the children and took care of all of the cleaning, cooking, shopping, and all of their children’s other needs, including healthcare. And there were a lot of us kids. Most of the families had three, four, or five kids. Jean’s family had five. My family was the exception. I am an adopted only child. Most of us kids that lived there on the lane were born in the 1950s. Mayer Lane was a secluded dead-end road surrounded by lots of woods and fields that held us captive as if in a corral. Since it was a dead end, there was very little traffic on Mayer Lane. That allowed us to spend a lot of time playing outside, and often times, right on the street. The few cars that drove by as we were playing were usually neighbors that everyone knew. If an unfamiliar car drove by, we would all stare. We never felt like isolated corralled captives and really had no desire to go anywhere else, that is until we became teenagers in the 60s. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
I met Jean when we were just little kiddos. I was 7 and she was 6. We almost always played at the Buhne (pronounced Boon) house, because the Buhne family was the favorite coolest family on the street. Jeans’s parents just let us play. There was no constant mothering oversight like at my house. No constant “Don’t do that! Don’t do this! That is no way to behave! And on and on as was typical in my house. My parents were constantly critical of everything about me. The way I dressed, the way I fluffed up and teased my hair, even about what I ate, which they said was why I was overweight. Make-up was absolutely forbidden. I sometimes wondered if they regretted ever adopting me. I wondered what my real parents would have been like. At one point I became so frustrated and angry living there that I decided to run away from home. I had enough of my parent’s constant critical complaints, so late one night I snuck out of the house and ran away from home. I walked down the street and locked myself inside a neighbor’s Volkswagen Beetle overnight. Got cold and never thought about what happened when I needed to go to the bathroom or what to do when I got hungry. Stupid, stupid, stupid! I went back home very early in the morning while my parents were still asleep, and no one ever knew that I ran away. Although it was a baby step, that adventure turned out to be the first step of many many more steps into my ongoing never-ending rebellious years.
Things were much different at the Buhne house. I felt like I belonged there and was at home, a part of the family. All we were expected to do was just play, have fun, and stay out of trouble. And we did that, for years. What did we play? Game board games like Parchisi, checkers, and card games like war, crazy eights, and go-fish. When it was cold or rainy outside, we watched TV cartoons and shows like The Little Rascals, The Three Stooges, or even a boring show called Mr. Rogers which was created in Pittsburgh. In the summer time, Mrs. Buhne would tell us to get out of the house and go outside to play so that she could watch her stories in peace and quiet. We always listened to Mrs. Buhne. She wasn’t overly strict, but we always knew that she meant what she said. So outside we went. Playing hide and seek or kick the can or hopscotch or kickball. Jean had an advantage with that brace or cast on her leg. The added weight allowed her to kick the ball farther than anyone. And when she was on crutches, forget it, Jean never lost at hopscotch. If you know the rules of the game, you are not allowed to step on the lines. Well, because Jean was on crutches, that was never a problem for her. She would just laugh and play. We had so much fun. I loved that family.
As was typical with kids at the time, most of us caught the measles, the mumps, and the chicken pox. They were all short-term diseases that resolved on their own with time. But Jean was different from everyone else. In addition to those typical childhood diseases, at just six months old, she contracted the polio virus. Polio was a dreaded contagious disease that did not get better or heal over time. There was no cure for it. And since there also was no prevention for it there were contagious polio epidemics back in the 1940s and 1950s. The terrible disease could cause paralysis and many people died from it. Jean lived, but the muscles and bones in her leg were affected. At the time, there were so many cases of polio that there was even an institution in Pittsburgh called The Home for Crippled Children. The word crippled was used before the more politically correct term “disabled” replaced it. That Crippled Children’s Home was one of the places where Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine discovery was tested in clinical trials in 1954. A few years later, I remember all of our families going to the school where they had clinics set up to distribute the vaccine. They put a few drops of the vaccine on sugar cubes, knowing that we kids would never refuse a sugar cube. We were among the first families to receive the vaccine since it was discovered/invented close to home in Pittsburgh. Unfortunately, it came a few years too late for Jean. I’m pretty sure that Jean was temporarily placed in and out of that home for physical therapy and rehab following her many leg surgeries. But she was never committed permanently, and we certainly never thought of her as crippled. Poor Jean had to go through uncountable medical treatments and surgeries over the years. I think she had at least one surgery every summer for several years in a row. Jean told me that she had so many surgeries that she was able to predict how long the pain would last and when she would start to feel better. She said that while she was in the hospital, she saw the really sick kids and felt bad for them, which helped prevent her feeling sorry for herself. She even had to have surgeries on her good leg to stunt its growth, so that it would be more in-line with the hampered growth of her polio leg. I guess all of that medical treatment worked to some degree because Jean survived and grew up normal, or at least as normal as the rest of us if any of us are normal. However, to this day, Jean still walks with a limp. To her credit though, she never let that slow her down or alter her lifestyle. What an amazing person she is! My hero! I know, at times, she suffered from a lot of pain, but she didn’t let on when I visited her, she always perked up. We played as if there was nothing wrong with her leg. You can’t even believe how fast she could race down the hall on crutches.
Jean’s parents, three brothers, and one sister didn’t treat her any differently. She was just one of the kids. Except, I sometimes did notice that her dad seemed to favor her. But then there were the mean kids at school who called her Chester or Hop-along. I hated that and would punch the mean kids when I heard them say stuff like that. I know that bothered and hurt Jean inside, but she developed a toughness when she needed it and just shrugged off the insensitive cruel insults. I empathized with her, telling her that I was sorry for what she had to go through. She once replied that it was okay. “If the dorks can’t accept me for the way I am then I don’t need them. I just stay away from them and loaf with the good girls and good friends like you.” Jean just got a bad deal all around. I don’t know how she handled it all, but somehow, she did. As I said before and will say many times again, “Jean is my hero!”
As we grew up, Jean walked to school every morning just like the rest of us did. Limping down to the end of the road, past the barn and the horse pasture, down over that steep hill through the woods to the Little Creek Road. We called it the “Crick” Road. We then walked another half mile up the Crick Road to the school. And then back again every afternoon. Rain, snow, or shine. Wearing dresses! Yes, the schools had a dress code. Us girls had to wear dresses, and leggings in the winter. The boys had to wear dress trousers and button-up shirts with collars. We all had to wear leather dress shoes as well. No Keds sneakers were allowed. Except for the ones we carried in our gym bags, along with our gym uniforms and a shower towel. Pull-over rubber galoshes or buckle boots were okay if the snow was too deep. But no one wanted to look like a dork wearing them, so often times, we just kind of skied down the hill in our slippery leather shoes and then sat in school with wet feet. Stupid!
As I said, we were inseparable sisters, at least until I became a teenager one year before Jean did and discovered that I liked boys. Especially Jean’s older brother Kob who was one year older than me. Of course, we all walked to school together. I liked to walk beside Kob, but he never really paid much attention to me. So, I usually walked beside Jean and her sister Linnie. Her other two younger brothers Lee and Merrit were always lagging behind and goofing off.
High school was a culture shock! Before then, we were typical goodie-goodie-two shoes in grade school. But then we were funneled into and mixed in with a large group of 1960s-era rowdy high schoolers who were rapidly becoming hippie-ish. I couldn’t believe how they talked. The language! And how they acted, so disrespectful of the teachers and any authority really. I would have never believed that I would become one of them. But in the 60s and then into the 70s, the culture and environment changed all of us. What a wild decade(s).
After we turned 16 and learned how to drive, our world expanded even further. At 16 years old, we were also allowed to get part-time jobs after school to earn some spending cash. Life was groovy. Our pastime activities became nothing more than just driving around and talking and laughing and having fun in the cool cars. Today, you can see a lot of those types of classic cars at car cruises all over the country. Most of the guys had an 8-track stereo tape player installed in their cars so that we could listen to the great music of the times. The music of our generation fed peace, love, and rebellion into our consciousness. And I loved it. Music became and remained an incredibly inspirational and transitional part of my life.
After a night of riding around, we would stop by and hang out at a restaurant named “Eat-n-Park.” Even though we were in one of our parent’s cars, Jean and I would still always try to get a parking spot in the back row where the cool kids with the cool cars hung out. After we parked the car, we would then turn on our headlights so that the carhops knew that we wanted to order something. They would come outside to the car and take our order, which was usually a burger and fries. Then, when the order was ready, the carhops carried it out to our car and placed it on a tray type of shelf that hung on the side door window. We would sit there in the car for hours, just hanging out, talking, listening to the radio, and joking around.
Even though I don’t think he ever realized it, I grew closer to Kob. Sometimes he would even let me ride around with him. He said that a guy should always have a chick sitting in the front seat of the car with him when his buddies weren’t around. He always said that it wasn’t cool to ride around alone. I guess you could say I had a crush on Kob and dreamed of someday spending time with him in the back seat. But I’m sure he thought of me as nothing more than a neighborhood friend, so I knew that was never going to happen. He only let me ride around with him when there was no one else available. In general, I thought he was a jerk because of the way he treated me.
Now that I’ve said that, I would never say anything bad about the Buhne family, especially about my dear sister Jean. But I can say this: boys and later on men have never been nice to me. Therefore, I have no qualms at all about denigrating the male species, including Kob. And let me just get this point out of the way right now; I am not fat! And I hate the stupid word plump. And that’s all I have to say on that subject, other than to say that I thought Jean and Linnie were too skinny.
Even though gas was only 35 cents a gallon, there were plenty of times we didn’t have enough gas money to ride around. So, just like in our younger years, we hung around Jean’s house. Like I said, the Buhne’s were the coolest family on the street. They had a pool table in their basement that we all loved to play when Mr. Buhne wasn’t home. But when he was at home, Kob and he would take over the table for the rest of the night. Mr. Buhne was a hardworking construction worker, a union carpenter by trade, and he was a hard player after work too. He smoked cigars and drank Iron City beer all evening while he and Kob had one pool tournament after another. We girls would watch for a while until we got sick of the cigar smoke and then went upstairs to the living room where Mrs. Buhne was smoking cigarettes and watching black and white TV. During the day she loved watching afternoon TV. She called the shows “her stories.” I guess that was before they called them soap operas. What a fun-loving family! TV watching was a central part of everyone’s living room and life. Unfortunately, during the evenings we had to watch what the men and boys wanted to watch; shows like Gunsmoke, Raw Hide, Have Gun Will Travel, and Combat. Those violent cowboy and war shows portrayed the men as gun shooting, drinking, smoking, strong tough guys, displaying all of their nasty habits. Sometimes the women portrayed in those shows weren’t much better either. Miss Kitty and her saloon girls were almost as bad. Those were our role models of the day until Leave it to Beaver and Ozzie and Harriet came along. Looking back, I’m surprised that a show with beaver in its title made it past the censors. Oh yeah, boozing, smoking, and shooting people were just fine, but even a hint of sexual content was censored. I always dreamed of having what Ozzie and Harriet had. A perfect marriage with two boys (though I would have girls) and a perfect happy home with everyone dressed nicely. The best part of that show was Ricky Nelson. Wow, what a catch he would be. He was a guitar-playing rock star! I loved his song “Be Bop Baby.”
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