invisible, beneath the radar of adult supervision. The consequence of so much unsupervised freedom was that I became precociously independent. I don’t mean that my parents didn’t love me, or were negligent in any way, but only that in the 1940s in this part of the country there was not much awareness of danger. It wasn’t uncommon that adolescent boys and girls hitchhiked on roads around the region. I was allowed to see movies alone at the Prince Theater, which was one of those ornate, elegantly decorated dream-palaces first built in the 1920s. In the shadowy opulence of the Prince, as in an unpredictably unfolding dream, I fell under the spell of movies as I had fallen under the spell of books earlier. These serials could be attended for ten cents, but you had to come back the next Saturday to find out what happened.
Even on weekends the roads were relatively free of motorists, and one day in 1947, when I was twelve, and skipping stones while walking in the middle of a street, a beautiful flat stone I was skipping took a high hop and went right through the first-floor window of Mr. Thomas’s home.
My heart froze, and everything inside me screamed: “Run!”
But I didn’t. I just stood there, not knowing what to do. Then I went up to Mr. Thomas’s front door and knocked. A man’s voice hollered: “Hold on!” I could hear somebody coming down the stairs. Then, after what seemed like an eternity, the door opened, and there stood Mr. Thomas.
Mr. Thomas was an elderly man, small and slender, and he raised chickens in his backyard, and had a reputation of not being too friendly. He looked at me and said: “What do you want?”
Now at this moment, I felt I’d made a mistake and I wished I’d run when I had a chance. But it was too late now. So I blurted out: “I was skipping stones, and by accident one hopped across the street and through your window, Mr. Thomas.” By the time I told him everything, I’d nearly fainted from not breathing. Mr. Thomas leaned out around the door and looked at the window.
“You got any money to pay for it?”
I told him I didn’t, and asked how much he thought it would cost.
“It’d run about $1.50 for the glass,” he said, “and then, of course, I’ll have to fix the window. What’s your name, boy?”
“I’m Gerald Foos.”
“Well, ask your mother if you can carry water for my chickens after school. If she says yes, I’ll pay you a dollar a week, and you come here every day after school and Saturday mornings. After you pay for the window, you’ll make some money for yourself. How’s that sound?”
“Sounds fine, Mr. Thomas. I’ll be here, right after school.”
That was the beginning of one of my best memories. When I left Mr. Thomas, I felt super. I had done the right thing, and it turned out fine. Best of all, I felt I had learned the art of being brave and honest. It just wasn’t talking to friends about being brave—no, this was the real thing, how I wanted to run but didn’t.
When I told my mother I was making a dollar a week, she said, “As soon as you pay for that window, you can begin giving fifty cents a week for the house, and keep fifty cents for yourself, and no more skipping stones down the street.”
So every day after school, and on Saturday mornings, I would lug water for the chickens. He had about two hundred. There were eight watering stations scattered throughout the chicken yard, and I had to carry eighteen buckets of water from the house, about 200 feet away, to get the job completed. The whole thing took me about an hour and a half, and I figured that six days times ninety minutes at one dollar a week came out to about eleven cents an hour, which is about what people earned at that time.
Mr. Thomas was my first adult friend, and he told me chickens are pretty stupid birds. He said, “You can go into the same chicken coup a hundred times, and those birds won’t so much as ruffle a feather, but walk in there wearing a new pair of shoes, or a different hat, and they’ll panic and fly all over the place.”
I kept quiet, but I didn’t think chickens were all that stupid. It’s just that they don’t like surprises. They feel safe with things they know. That’s really not all that different from a lot of people I know, even if they are peculiar and funny looking.
FIFTEEN
TO READ from Gerald Foos’s journal is to learn that his first love in high school was the one lasting love of his lifetime, and to realize that, as a middle-aged man in the attic, he was nostalgic for when people used to watch him and cheered from the grandstands after he had hit a home run or scored a touchdown—and then, after the game, he would wait on the field for the arrival of his sweetheart, the star cheerleader, who would leap high in the air with her legs spread wide before landing lightly in his lap, her legs wrapped around him, and her arms embracing him in a way he would never forget.
This was in 1953, his senior year, and the local paper regularly printed his picture and described his achievements: “. . . Foos made a beautiful run, escaping a couple of potential tacklers at the line of scrimmage and plowing on after being hit again at the 10 . . .” He scored several touchdowns that year, and soon after Barbara White would be flying into his arms.