The idea for this short treatise followed closely on an experience with a fellow passenger on a bus. Meg and I were attending an elderhostel at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. The classes were at one end of the campus, the dining room at the other. I forget where the end of the day would find us, perhaps somewhere else. Bussing us around was the only way to get anything accomplished. Even so, we spent an unconscionable amount of time loading, unloading, being counted, and, when the count came up short, waiting for stragglers.
Usually, Meg and I would sit together, but this was not always the quickest and simplest thing to do. On one such occasion, as we came near the end of one our migrations, the lady next to me asked, "Those scars you have, are they from cancer?"
I wasted a little time wondering what scars she was thinking about. One cancer scar I have is on the back of my ear, not very noticeable compared to my other scars, and I was quite positive that she hadn't seen the other one. "Some are and some aren't.", would have been the logical answer, but while I was fumbling around for something less curt, we arrived at the end of the trip, Meg joined us, and I promptly forgot who I had been talking with.
I know it wasn't the same lady who asked Meg, "Don't your husband's scars bother you?", but it was certainly one of her spiritual descendants. Later, I told Meg about the question. At four score years, all sorts of subjects come up for conversations. In this one, it occurred to me that a complete account of someone's scars would make a revealing brief biography. Several years have passed, but here is that not-too-revealing-if-I-can-help-it scar-centered biography.
As autobiographies often do, and I am not sure why, I will start with the earliest. Sometime, during the single digit years, I was approached with a jar of Antiphlogistine, (a chest rub), that was too hot. I carried the scar for about ten years, when it was removed by the wet end of a bath towel.
This could happen when Detroit Lions and Wayne University swimmers tried to occupy the same space at the same time. An enterprising member of one of these teams found the locker room furnished for the Webster Hall Hotel swimming pool a bit too small for comfort, and tried to create space around himself by nipping me in the shins with his wet towel. He nipped the wrong man. I had too long enjoyed the racket one can make, walking down a line of sheet metal lockers, flicking lockers with a wet towel. An interchange of flicks resulted. I took a little piece of skin out of his calf. He cursed. A ring of spectators formed, and the skirmish resulted in the instantaneous removal of the antiphlogistine scar. Landing anywhere above mid-thigh in a towel fight was beyond the pale, and the scuffle was stopped by the spectators.
It should not have been surprising that the towel scar took off the Antiphlogistine mark. The real estate market in unscarred skin had, by that time, been reduced by about forty-five percent by a burn, the next item on this grisly list.
For about three or four years, I pursued a fascination with heights, explosives, and high voltages without a great deal of harm to my hide.
In 1927 we settled into Detroit, MI from St. Thomas, ONT at 1663 Elmhurst, not far from Twelfth Street and the Central High-Durfee Intermediate-Roosevelt Elementary campus, but alas, a little closer to Longfellow School, at Twelfth and Buena Vista (Byunuh Vistuh) Mostly it was good climbing country for a ten year old. We were in one of a row of look-alike four family houses, in an upper east apartment. The front upstairs porch had once boasted of an awning, and the metal pipes that were left made a wonderful gym. Going east down the street, a lover of climbing would find three billboards in a row, braced by climbable angle iron, capped by two-by-sixes, separated from each other by three foot gaps. A stimulating stroll. A short leap from one to another. Police cars that came from nowhere. We suspected a neighborhood spoilsport. The police felt they had done their duty when they ordered us down and lectured us, but good naturedly even when it turned out to be the same little boys.
Two houses west finished the row of four-family buildings. The rest of the block was a large, sandy, vacant lot. Here tunnels were dug, mock battles fought. In one battle, where most of the missiles were large corrugated boxes, a brickbat connected with my forehead. After seventy years, although almost invisible, a little knot is still sensitive to the touch. The street was our meeting place. In the year or so that we lived there, I can't recall a single invitation to a playmate's house, or a single time when I invited someone in.
On school days, a billboard with a pear tree and an ailanthus growing up through the support steel furnished the climbing, and a nice quiet place to lunch on two or three Wonder Bread and banana or tomato sandwiches. The days at Longfellow School were not memorable.
It was not to last. We moved to the house where I was to grow up. In 1928, at 3005 Burlingame, it was a whole new world. Elmhurst Ave. children were strictly street people, but Burlingame inhabitants near my age did things in their homes, organized games they played in the street and around the houses, sometimes until dusk, and parents you could talk with on front porches. The street was zoned for single dwellings, and most houses were occupied by just one family. One of the rare exceptions was 3005, which complied with the zoning by having a single front door and a tiny foyer.
We lived on the ground floor and rented out the second story to a succession of tenants, including a Kroger store manager, a salesman for a construction machinery company, a mother of two small children who was pleasant and understanding on a couple of occasions when my white rats escaped and showed up at the head of her back stairway, and Mrs. Finkle, who raised two sons there. Mrs. F. would stand at the door, consulting her keys at length to pick out the one that would open our mutual front door. It was during the depression of the thirties, and people who could tell daylight from dark didn't spend money on spectacles. One of her boys learned to play a saxophone while they lived above us, the other became a prominent sports reporter in Detroit.
Separated from 3005 by the width of two driveways, on the west, lived the Solomons. Mr. Solomon had a nice job at Kerns, one of Detroit's largest and best department stores. Mrs. Solomon was small, blond, and pretty. Solomons had a Finnish maid who was invariably cheerful, friendly, and busy, which meant that Mrs. Solomon, who was also friendly and cheerful, could spend a great deal of time on their concrete front porch. They also had a little dog, a wire-haired fox terrier named Duke Buss of Barrington. Duke always smelled of salami, but was also friendly and cheerful. The apple of their eight respective eyes was Howard, an enterprising boy about a year younger than myself.
Howard and I were good friends, and one of our mutual interests was pyrotechnics, noisy ones, smoky ones, colored fires, sensitive ones, none of which resulted in food for this account.
Interest in general chemistry almost closed it. A fire with paraffin resulted in burns over about forty-five percent of my body area, and loss of half a year of high school. An explosion in an apparatus made to convert red phosphorus to white was interesting enough to warrant an account elsewhere, and violent enough to produce a number of little white scars on my forearms.
Service on a destroyer during WWII resulted in scars, but not in a Purple Heart. We had run out of flour, vegetables, and fruit, no chance to refill our larders, and for several weeks, lived on sugar, tropicalized butter, coffee, and ice cream. Many of us broke out in very nasty-looking boils, much destruction of tissue, and some additions to my little white scars.
Joe, a fellow researcher, would walk into one of the rooms where I worked, a room where, at a certain place on the shelf, three bottles stood, with labels often turned so that they read, SOD CHL, IUM IDE, and IUM IDE. He would take out the center bottle and shake a few nice large crystals on a cracker and stand there and munch on it. The bottles contained, and since he lived for a long time afterward, they contained respectively, Sodium Chlorate, Sodium Chloride, and Sodium Cyanide.
This is to introduce Joe well enough for me to tell four scar stories that I have nearly forgotten. Joe came in one day with a bottle of a cobalt salt with a very corroded lid. "Bill, hold this jar while I put the pipe wrench on the cover". Cover and a half inch of ragged glass left the jar I was holding. The glass left a ragged but not serious groove in the web between right thumb and forefinger. It healed up just fine, except that, apparently some dark cobalt oxide is still there after fifty-two years.
Not over an inch away, some tiny tan clouds mark where, even earlier in my life, I had tried ferric chloride solution on a poison ivy rash. I found out later that patience is the best thing to apply to them.
At the third corner of a memorial triangle is the result of reaching for a very sharp lead pencil, handed to me point first.
I have never turned my hide over to a tattoo artist, but these little marks could be called tattoos. I did watch a very high priced artist moving circular dots of skin from my thigh to my upper arm. As he began, I asked him if he could do my initials on the thigh, and he obliged. He had removed two rows while he thought it over, and then he made me a nice "B" for Bill. It is still there, after sixty-five years.
Skiers can collect scars. Pulling together a separated shoulder with a metal screw got me one. The site of the installation was so puckered that I was prompted to chastise Dr. Devlin, who called back to see me the morning after. It must have been a common complaint. He was good natured enough to smile for a moment and explain to me that the lumpy thing he left would pull over the convex and bony shoulder and leave a nice, thin scar. Which it did. I had forgotten about it for a couple of years until I opened it to send off to Pete, the webmaster.
A subsequent twenty five years with Dow Chemical Company produced no more scars that I can recall at the moment. Quite a compliment to a very strict safety program. The program was so vigorously pursued that, when a five years passing without a lost time accident resulted in distribution of pocket knives inscribed with "Five Year Safety Award", I was afraid to use it. The thought of newspaper headlines, "Man cuts finger with safety award knife" caused me to always find something else to cut with, like torn metal or broken glass, just so it was not inscribed with the word, "safety". I wonder if Dow's emphasis on safety is responsible for the fact that there have been no more scars since I retired.