she said. “What do they know about duty?”
“They’ll never last,” Dad agreed.
Our only stop before Kansas was my father’s childhood home in Ohio, where Donald and I slept in the stifling, slope-roofed attic room that had once belonged to Dad and his younger brother, Pete. The room was still full of fascinating relics: arrowheads and stamp collections, books on insects and BB guns, and the detritus of a boyhood spent dreaming of a world where every question has an answer.
T HE oldest of three children, my father was born to Donald and Rebecca Robinson on April 21, 1928, in Montgomery, Ohio, a place that Dad always said had more churches than stores “because there’s nothing to do there but plant your crops and pray.”
According to my grandmother Robinson’s diary, which I read many years after she died, “little Don-Don too often cuts up high jinks.” By age two, my dad had reached the point where he “jabbers all day, says ‘no’ to everything,” and “isalways asking ‘What’s that?’” He “pulled the butterfly table over on him” one day “burned his fingers on the oil stove” the next, and managed to pry the cover off an electrical outlet, earning an electric shock for his curiosity.
While noting that “Don-Don has learned to spit—also lots of other things,” Grandmother Robinson revealed her survival strategy, which turned out to be the same one I use now with my youngest son Aidan: “I try to keep Don-Don outside as much as I can.”
What sort of twisted path would lead such a child into gerbil farming instead of into other, possibly more logical career options, such as dynamiting bridges?
Here’s where the nurture part of the nature-versus-nurture debate comes in: children absorb every experience that comes their way, but only some stick. You can’t tell until years later which childhood experiences will become permanent features of their interior landscapes as adults.
In my dad’s case, he experienced early on that raising animals at home could be profitable. One of his childhood neighbors in Ohio, Frank Maxfield, was a chemist employed by Procter and Gamble who raised mice, rats, hamsters, rabbits, and guinea pigs in a blue barn behind his peak-roofed farmhouse. Maxfield sold the animals to research scientists at various institutions. My father played with Maxfield’s children and envied their extra spending money. He longed to live more like they did. Or, even better, like the Fleischmann family, whose palatial Yeast Estate was just down the road.
Dad’s own family lived in a modest white box of a house next to the railroad tracks. Once a week, the steam engine ran behind the Robinson home from Montgomery to Blue Ash,making it a natural stop for ragmen and train tramps who begged for food at the kitchen door. Before World War II, Dad’s father ran a gas station, where he was once stabbed with an ice pick and another time kidnapped and taken out to a field, where the robbers poured whiskey down his throat and took his money.
Once the war started, Grandfather Robinson worked on an assembly line at the Wright Aircraft Factory. As a boy, my dad used to lie in bed at night and listen to the steady
zoom-zoom
sound of aircraft engines being tested, a sound that steadily fed his fantasies about joining the military.
By the time Dad hit high school, he was earning his own way by delivering newspapers and working in the local drugstore. The pharmacist trained my father to compound prescriptions, and by age sixteen Dad could fill them on his own. He used down time between customers to mix up his own gunpowder, wrap it in aluminum foil, and lay these delicious little dynamite capsules under the streetcar tracks at regular intervals, so that it sounded like a machine gun firing when the trolley went by.
Dad had his own pets—he was especially fond of white mice—but he longed to be a world-famous explorer like Martin Johnson and bring back new species “from darkest
“They’ll never last,” Dad agreed.
Our only stop before Kansas was my father’s childhood home in Ohio, where Donald and I slept in the stifling, slope-roofed attic room that had once belonged to Dad and his younger brother, Pete. The room was still full of fascinating relics: arrowheads and stamp collections, books on insects and BB guns, and the detritus of a boyhood spent dreaming of a world where every question has an answer.
T HE oldest of three children, my father was born to Donald and Rebecca Robinson on April 21, 1928, in Montgomery, Ohio, a place that Dad always said had more churches than stores “because there’s nothing to do there but plant your crops and pray.”
According to my grandmother Robinson’s diary, which I read many years after she died, “little Don-Don too often cuts up high jinks.” By age two, my dad had reached the point where he “jabbers all day, says ‘no’ to everything,” and “isalways asking ‘What’s that?’” He “pulled the butterfly table over on him” one day “burned his fingers on the oil stove” the next, and managed to pry the cover off an electrical outlet, earning an electric shock for his curiosity.
While noting that “Don-Don has learned to spit—also lots of other things,” Grandmother Robinson revealed her survival strategy, which turned out to be the same one I use now with my youngest son Aidan: “I try to keep Don-Don outside as much as I can.”
What sort of twisted path would lead such a child into gerbil farming instead of into other, possibly more logical career options, such as dynamiting bridges?
Here’s where the nurture part of the nature-versus-nurture debate comes in: children absorb every experience that comes their way, but only some stick. You can’t tell until years later which childhood experiences will become permanent features of their interior landscapes as adults.
In my dad’s case, he experienced early on that raising animals at home could be profitable. One of his childhood neighbors in Ohio, Frank Maxfield, was a chemist employed by Procter and Gamble who raised mice, rats, hamsters, rabbits, and guinea pigs in a blue barn behind his peak-roofed farmhouse. Maxfield sold the animals to research scientists at various institutions. My father played with Maxfield’s children and envied their extra spending money. He longed to live more like they did. Or, even better, like the Fleischmann family, whose palatial Yeast Estate was just down the road.
Dad’s own family lived in a modest white box of a house next to the railroad tracks. Once a week, the steam engine ran behind the Robinson home from Montgomery to Blue Ash,making it a natural stop for ragmen and train tramps who begged for food at the kitchen door. Before World War II, Dad’s father ran a gas station, where he was once stabbed with an ice pick and another time kidnapped and taken out to a field, where the robbers poured whiskey down his throat and took his money.
Once the war started, Grandfather Robinson worked on an assembly line at the Wright Aircraft Factory. As a boy, my dad used to lie in bed at night and listen to the steady
zoom-zoom
sound of aircraft engines being tested, a sound that steadily fed his fantasies about joining the military.
By the time Dad hit high school, he was earning his own way by delivering newspapers and working in the local drugstore. The pharmacist trained my father to compound prescriptions, and by age sixteen Dad could fill them on his own. He used down time between customers to mix up his own gunpowder, wrap it in aluminum foil, and lay these delicious little dynamite capsules under the streetcar tracks at regular intervals, so that it sounded like a machine gun firing when the trolley went by.
Dad had his own pets—he was especially fond of white mice—but he longed to be a world-famous explorer like Martin Johnson and bring back new species “from darkest
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